“Change is a word made redundant by the banality of politics. Still, there comes a moment in the life of nations when one man, with the breadth of his ideas and the depth of his conviction, breaks the dead certainties of time.” 

These lines have not been lifted from a dated Pravda editorial on Comrade Stalin. They have not been extracted from a forgotten tribute to Saddam Hussein from a groveling Ba’athist official, nor is it an excerpt from one of the many hagiographies of Jefferson, Cromwell or even Nehru. 

They are the opening lines from a “portrait” of Narendra Modi published in the 10th-anniversary issue of Open magazine, a weekly English-language magazine covering politics and culture. 

Modi’s profile is the first of 50 others “who were instrumental in nurturing the idea of India over the last decade”, including Arvind Kejriwal, Virat Kohli and Salman Rushdie. Modi, the flamboyant ascetic, 24×7 administrator, moderniser, relentless nationalist and one of the world’s most powerful rulers in a democracy—Open’s adjectives, not mine—is also the only figure to earn two page-length pictorial portraits in the same issue. One to go with the above-mentioned homage, and another to accompany a toadying MJ Akbar write-up on Modi’s “redeeming radicalism” titled Author of an Indian Century. The illustration shows a triumphant and towering Modi beside a miserable and miniature duo of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi.

Illustration for MJ Akbar’s piece in Open magazine (July 29, 2019, pg 10).

In 2019 alone, Prime Minister Narendra Modi featured on the covers of 10 out of 29 Open issues. They feature him standing in a wheat field, in front of Bharat Mata, riding an elephant, patrolling India Gate, meditating, and donning a camo Nehru jacket. In issues where only the ordinary make it to the cover, Modi can be found within. For instance, the cover story of the July 1 edition was dedicated to the “Doughty Dozen”: profiles of 12 bureaucrats who have been “entrusted with implementing vision Modi”. But the chief page-length illustration of the issue shows a shawl-sporting Prime Minister striding upon Delhi’s Rajpath.

It did not stop here. The same issue carried an eight-page-long essay titled Modi and the Other Idea of India by historian Sumantra Bose. It argues that even though Modi’s Hindutva has retained the spirit of the Savarkar-Golwalkar school, it has overcome the ideological hitch on matters of caste and “junked the traditional Sangh preoccupation with Swadeshi … in favour of full-blooded embrace of global capitalism”.  

Cover story illustration for Open’s July 1, 2019 issue (pg 22).

Compare the above statistics with those from 2017 and 2018: only four out of 51 editions in 2018 had Modi on the cover. In 2017, it stood at eight out of 51. Interestingly, former Congress President Rahul Gandhi also featured on four covers in 2018 and on only one in 2017. In 2019, he appeared on one cover, and so has sibling Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

In 2019, the weekly magazine India Today also brandished Modi 10 times on its covers, but five of these covers included other political figures as well. (All 10 Open covers have Modi and Modi only.) Another weekly magazine, Outlook, has had Modi on its cover just twice (including one with Amit Shah) this year.

The numbers point to the disproportionate attention the magazine’s editorial team has showered on the Prime Minister this year. In fact, the election and post-election phase witnessed a downpour: issue after issue had Modi looking up at the confused subscriber. One can mentally reconstruct the anatomy of the Prime Minister’s torso merely by referring to the poses he struck on the covers of Open magazine. 

Open magazine’s issues from February 18 and March 18, 2019.

This year, April started with an MJ Akbar cover story on the symbolism of “Chowkidar”, including other recycled arguments on “radical reform”. After intervening issues on Rahul Gandhi and Amit Shah, Modi returned to the cover in April-end for a long analysis on Pulwama’s electoral dividends and Modi’s  “clear comprehension of public anger” by managing editor PR Ramesh and editor-at-large Siddharth Singh.

Open magazine issue from April 1, 2019.

In the May 13 issue, deputy editor Rahul Pandita authored the cover story from Bihar, highlighting the resounding endorsement that Modi enjoyed on the ground. Two issues later, and a week before the declaration of results, editor-in-chief S Prasannarajan argued why Modi is still the one. He wrote: “…his individual integrity gave the politics of hope a greater sense of authenticity. In the age of fake salvation theologies, the young and the poor found in him an original.” In the issue’s cover story, PR Ramesh wrote with much delight about the dawn of Hindu politics and Modi’s idea of India. He concluded with a lament: “It is still a while before the Hindu is given the respect that has been reserved thus far only for the Abrahamic faiths.”

Open magazine’s issues from April 29 and May 13, 2019.

The next issue (June 3) had Modi’s face in full to commemorate his electoral sweep. The editor-in-chief’s column accorded Modi fulsome praise and there were once again mentions of cracking “dead certainties” and the popular need for the “authenticity of hope” to overpower “faux alarmism and dubious sociologies”.

“Modi, as man and idea, is a layered construct,” wrote Prasannarajan. “The many become one seamlessly. The fire-breathing avenger as the Hindu nationalist for whom nothing is more sacred than the motherland; the compassionate reformer who has redeemed socialism from socialists; the moderniser for whom a religious identity is not subversion but the humanisation of secularism; the ruler who has shown that absolute power only enhances the individual integrity of its wielder; and the outsider who remains a permanent campaigner—what could have been a contradiction in the case of a politician as usual becomes a confluence of ideas as diverse as India in the story of Modi.”

Like Arjuna in the Battle of Kurukshetra, wrote Ramesh and executive editor Ullekh NP in the issue’s cover story, Modi’s demeanour on May 23 was “composed yet confident”. His body language, they added, exuded the “ambition of a man who is out to serve his countrymen to ‘ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea’, a lofty target that Alexander the Great had set for himself.” 

Open magazine’s issues from May 27 and June 3, 2019.

Modi claimed a hattrick in the next issue. He equalled Lasith Malinga in the one after that. “When the base wanted him to play the action hero, he chose the slow progression of the epic hero,” Prasannarajan resumed admiration in the June 10 issue, noting the exceptions of demonetisation and surgical strikes as “monotony-breaking drama”. He added: “The style of Modi in power was not the flamboyance of a populist in a stage-managed democracy. His style was characterised by the patience and persistence of a man who was driven by a frightening sense of self-awareness.”

Ramesh topped this with a cherry, arguing that in the aftermath of Modi’s victory, “the ball is in the court of the minority community”. Modi, according to Ramesh, wants “united India”, and Muslims have little choice but to follow the bandwagon. “Nor does the minority community have much option but to reciprocate the sincere gesture of friendship and support extended to them by Modi. Continuing with hardline positions would mean taking the familiar road of partition of the mind.”

The cover story of the June 17 issue was dedicated to deciphering the “sociology” of Modi’s victory. Sociologist Dipankar Gupta authored a glowing paean to Modi, detailing the accuracy of his every single decision and how they won him the status war against Rahul Gandhi. Gupta claimed that the Prime Minister “is a better sociologist than most professionals in the business”. 

Modi, the “numero uno of Indian politics”, wrote Singh and deputy editor Amita Shah in a piece on the new Cabinet, is trying to send multiple “social, political, ideological” messages by including Odisha MP Pratap Chandra Sarangi in his Cabinet. Singh, the authors point out, was the state unit chief of Odisha’s Bajrang Dal when an Australian missionary and his two children were burnt alive by members of the Bajrang Dal in 1999. “He was convicted on charges of arson and damage to government property, when in 2002 a mob, led by VHP, Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini, attacked the Odisha Assembly building, demanding the disputed site in Ayodhya be handed over for construction of Ram temple.”

So what could be Modi’s “social, political, ideological” messages of inserting such a character into the Cabinet? The authors did not elaborate. But they did conclude thus a few pages later: “Aware of the writing on the wall, he [Modi] has made efforts to reach out to minorities to allay their fears of majoritarian rule.”

Open magazine’s issues from June 10 and June 17, 2019.

A few issues on the irrelevance of the Opposition, Modi’s “doughty dozen”, and international travel passed. An infatuated Prasannarajan returned to Modi in the July 15 edition and wrote that despite the “transgressive kitsch of the ‘liberated’ lumpen base of Hindutva”, the Indian Prime Minister has “perfected an individual aesthetic system in which merge the kinetic force of his self-belief, the dedication of an ascetic, the focus of a workaholic, and a sense of detachment even while at the height of power. Its market value remains undiminished, in spite of the unhinged Hindu fringe.”

The next edition on July 22 had Modi on the cover for the tenth time in 2019.

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In 2018, Cobrapost journalist Pushp Sharma had gone undercover as Acharya Atal and met officials in the advertising department of Open. The tapes of the conversation published on YouTube revealed that the officials had shown willingness to publish pro-Hindutva content in exchange for money in the run-up to the 2019 general election. 

At one point, Basab Ghosh, the magazine’s head of circulation (East), had told Sharma about the magazine’s pro-Modi tilt: “Acharyaji, perhaps you are a busy man and maybe you don’t read Open regularly. Let me tell you one thing. Nobody supports the sangathan [RSS] as much as Open. Spare some time. I have their old issue … take a look at the latest issue … you will see there we have a cover story on Modiji in this issue as well.”

Manu Joseph, the magazine’s editor-in-chief between 2009 and 2014, had tweeted that Open Magazine should have suspected Sharma for offering ₹3 crore to “plug Hindutva”. “You don’t have to offer Open any money anymore to plug Hindutva,” Joseph wrote. “In any case no one offers ₹3 crore to Open for anything.”

According to its website, Open “is the flagship brand of Open Media Network, the media venture of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group”. The group owns brands like SaReGaMa, Spencer’s and Au Bon Pain and has assets in excess of ₹31,000 crore and an employee strength of over 50,000. “The RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group has diverse business interests in industries like Power and Natural Resources, Carbon Black, Retail, Media, IT, Education and Entertainment and Infrastructure.”

In 2013, the magazine had terminated the contract of its political editor Hartosh Singh Bal. Bal had claimed in an interview that the decision was taken at proprietor Sanjiv Goenka’s behest. “Manu [Joseph] has verbally communicated to me … that Sanjiv Goenka told him that because of Hartosh, I am making a lot of enemies … political enemies.” Joseph had confirmed this and resigned from his position a few weeks later.

Bal had sued the magazine and received compensation in 2019 “on account of harassment meted out to him by the management in not following the due procedure of law”.

PR Ramesh, who joined Open after Bal’s exit, is known to be close to former Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. In 2017, Ramesh’s name had emerged in a conflict-of-interest controversy after a leaked message revealed how he and another senior journalist had allegedly lobbied on behalf of an unnamed income tax official in a meeting with Jaitley.

Editor-in-chief S Prasannarajan did not respond to calls and texts by this correspondent. This piece will be updated if he chooses to respond. 

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Earlier this year, Narendra Modi’s biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay had written how soon after discovering his PM ambitions: “Modi played the part of a victim of the media, especially the English language press, which was labelled ‘sickular press’ by his storm troopers.” 

“He was particularly offended by the consistency with which the national media … followed up on investigations of the 2002 riots and kept asking uncomfortable questions,” Mukhopadhyay added.

And yet, how far we’ve come. Within a decade, Modi has metamorphosed from being a public servant worthy of scrutiny to a mon amour for large sections of the media. Instead of questioning a figure who has tried increasingly to clip the wings of a free press, besotted publications like Open have weaved a garland of fawning adjectives and draped it around Modi’s neck. The cringeworthy bombast, the rare and caveated criticisms, the tired recyclings and the uncritical gaze is a lateral inversion of the “Hate-Modi industry” that one of the magazine’s editors once wrote about. 

But despite the problems with Open’s romance with Modi, there is one silver lining to all this: at least Sanjiv Goenka gets to keep his friends. So what if it took putting Modi on 10 covers and 10 Modis on a single cover in June 2015…