It is a book “written with critical sympathy”, says veteran journalist and now Rajya Sabha MP MJ Akbar, on the back cover of economist Rajiv Kumar’s new hardback Modi and his Challenges. Scan the first 50 pages and you understand that Akbar may have used that phrase as a euphemism for what at the outset seems like yet another hagiographic exercise on the prime minister’s life.
For anyone who’s followed Kumar through his weekly columns and TV appearances, it is amply clear that he is not the one to pull his punches. Yet, the first few pages that explore Modi’s ideals, ideologies, his early influences and the defining decade he spent in Gandhinagar as chief minister, seem to project a blatantly predisposed view of what is without doubt, the most controversial period in Narendra Modi’s political life.
Having disclaimed the availability of extensive, often polarised literature on the subject, Kumar at any rate spends considerable print recounting Modi’s early days as the tea vendor’s son-turned intrepid RSS pracharak. Developing a more balanced insight into Modi’s early influences is important, he insists, to understand the ‘impulses’ that drive the PM’s social, political and economic thinking.