Leadership Lessons from Narendra Modi

On March 24th, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the few heads of government who had announced a stringent nationwide lockdown, for 21 straight days. At a time when India was seething with anger at China for its aggression along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), Modi took the decision to direct Indian consulates in China to approach factories that produce RT-PCR kits and load them on aircraft specially dispatched from New Delhi. Over the next several weeks, the prime minister followed a punishing schedule of considered decision-making, determined to win the battle against the spread of Covid-19. It was past midnight sometime in August when he chanced upon a report that showed the rising incidence of influenza-like cases in a remote district of Tripura. Modi dialled Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb in Agartala, without any hesitation about the late hour, and directed him to collect information urgently, hold a meeting with his administration and get back to him (Modi) with a detailed action-planned report by the next afternoon. Modi was relieved when the report that reached him the next day noted that the incidence of flu in the specified area was not uncommon during that time of the year. Deb added that efforts were being made on a war-footing by the local administration to contain its spread. That is a hectic pace that Modi has kept up through the many weeks of lockdown and the unwavering battle against the spread of the coronavirus and its fatalities.

There’s an interesting public health study published by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) on ‘Lessons learned from the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota’ that resonates, at multiple levels, with the measures taken by the Modi Government in the wake of the Covid pandemic, the biggest in a century. The study outlines in detail the struggles faced by civilians with timely but controversial decisions on public lockdown and mandatory mask usage imposed by medical health experts in both towns to pummel the spread and fatalities. Of particular concern was the reluctance to report infections due to imposed isolation and the larger inclination to focus on positive news during the sensitive time of war. As with Covid infections, there were many unknowns that both the civil administration and the medical fraternity had to battle. With comparatively limited progress in science, there were many imponderables—they believed it was a bacterial outbreak, for starters—to deal with urgently. And city administrators rose heroically and firmly to the task. The Spanish Flu (February 1918 to April 1920) killed more than 50 million people worldwide.

A century later, in India on March 24th, when Modi announced the politically risky decision to impose a countrywide lockdown, not much was known about the nature of the spread of the virus. Governments of countries reacted with shock and awe initially but had to grudgingly accept later that this was a bold and imperative decision for a nation of over 1.3 billion people. In spite of a heads-up, many nations, including the UK, had not opted for a lockdown and had to pay a high price on public health consequently. Months down the line, India has just crossed the one crore mark in Covid infections, second only to the US in reported cases. But the recovery rate of infected patients is no longer in the red zone and in many states, many public amenities and private businesses have begun to reopen, signalling an upturn in the economy, albeit still with conditionalities and caution. There is a general consensus now—despite the campaign by Modi baiters—that the infections and fatalities could have been worse, many times over, had a stringent decision, however unpopular, not been taken by the head of the Government. This, on locking down public amenities, banning big gatherings and directing mandatory use of masks and physical distancing.

Tried and tested templates for leadership exist only in armchair leadership manuals and management textbooks. Real decisions are actually forged in the rough and tumble of life experiences, in the crucible of challenges, shaped by considered risk-taking, a big leap of faith, boldness and compassion. A case study only emerges as a final product after many improvisations, testing alternative approaches and after key decision-makers switch from one set of solutions to another, experimenting with tailored responses and drawing the most appropriate inferences from constantly unfolding events. The successful solutions eventually adopted are then identified with the decision-maker as his or her model.

In responding to the pandemic, Modi displayed a firm belief in optimising social capital and the power of the collective. No leader proved as acutely aware that when a nation is up against a dangerous enemy, strategising cannot be left to health workers or administrators alone

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In the past, whenever a large crisis hit the nation, the public tended to view the response of those in power and the policies unleashed with more than a little suspicion. Devoid of considered and informed policy initiatives, they either threw money at the problem in the hope that it would go away or drowned out critics and turned up the hallelujahs from acolytes. A noticeable trust deficit in the leadership persisted especially since the key decision-makers were regular shape shifters and breakers of promise. In September 2008, when the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy, the ripples hit several economies hard worldwide. This was a bigger crisis than that of Enron’s or WorldCom’s and its impact was felt in hundreds of development projects and rendered economies fragile. India’s GDP growth took a hit and plunged to 6.2 per cent in 2008-2009 compared to the earlier 9.32 per cent. ICICI was the bank most affected, thanks mostly to the exposure to Lehman Brothers by its UK arm. Investors and customers panicked in a big way here. Also affected were the State Bank of India (SBI) and the Punjab National Bank (PNB), although to a lesser extent. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor at the time, D Subba Rao, said they used both “conventional and unconventional methods” to minimise the negative impact. The Statutory Liquidity Ratio (SLR) and Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) were cut, foreign exchange liquidity was eased through liberal norms for External Commercial Borrowing (ECB) and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) inflows and interest rates were cut by an unprecedented 1 per cent. Also, lines of credit were extended to not just banks but mutual funds and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs). The package was that of a rattled, clueless Government throwing money in barrels at the problem in the hope that it would go away. A huge waste of public money ensued, ballooning delinquency on the part of borrowers, with no attendant benefits to the people that they were actually meant for. It is entirely another matter that the acolytes the Government nurtured drowned out criticism and intimidated detractors into
suspending all disbelief.

WITH HIS DECISIVE end-March nationwide lockdown that came despite widespread misgivings, Modi punctured the concerted attempts by his critics—they mainly pointed to the exodus of distressed migrant workers from cities back to their villages—to showcase him as a populist inclined to edicts, buoyed by a hegemonic political belief. Their mockery of his use of a widely practised religious-cultural gesture (banging thalis and clapping hands in honour of medical workers at the forefront of the fight against Covid) to gain wide support for the “self-imposed janata curfew” as a trial run on people’s support for the 21-day lockdown that would follow was a key case in point. In the immutable narrative of the so-called progressives, Modi was an authoritarian leader with strong impulses rooted in his upbringing in the Hindutva ideology of the Sangh Parivar. ‘Disdain drivers’ among Modi baiters had fuelled this narrative to argue that his decisions, whether on battling Covid or with demonetisation, were divorced from the considered public good and alienated from reasoned policy-making.

Modi’s leadership in the fight against the Wuhan-origin virus, however, highlighted how difficult it was to rigidly box the prime minister in the dogmatic constructs of his most strident critics, in both politics and civil society. Contrary to the contrived perception-engineering by his detractors that he heeded solely his own and often uninformed counsel, marginalising expert advice (Modi himself has publicly weighed in on the side of ‘hard work’ as opposed to Harvard), the prime minister widely consulted experts, public health policy-makers, virologists and medical personnel when the extent of the crisis first became clear, before deciding to ban flights to India. That ban came a whole week before even the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 officially a pandemic. Announcing a nationwide lockdown despite the risk of a tanking popularity rating staring him in the face could not have been easy. Not an easy task, by any means, given the size and demographic complexity of the subcontinent, multiplicity of opinions and a political class opposed to his every move. But Modi prevailed and went ahead with preparing the nation to face the problem despite the fact that a pandemic of this proportion had not been witnessed by the world or India in a century. And that the institutional experience of the country to tackle it was virtually nil. Resources were scarce, facilities were limited and everything, from hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, containment centres, ambulances, medical and paramedical personnel, hazmat suits, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits, sanitisers, Covid combat literacy, to even face masks, appeared to be in short supply. The logistical challenges alone seemed insurmountable. In opting for a decisive response, the prime minister was ostensibly setting himself up for a Himalayan failure, a political self-goal.

But Modi did not wait. Unlike his counterparts, US President Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (both of whom tested positive for Covid-19 later), he did not shun advice. India was among the first countries to ban international flights, with a 24X7 monitoring system firmly in place. In the initial phase of the battle, he realised it was necessary to slow the spread of infection and did not balk at using innovative and imaginative ways to prepare citizens to face the problem by encouraging a voluntary, people-driven ‘janata lockdown’.

The period was used to fortify logistics and urgently ramp up facilities, PPE kits, ventilators, etcetera. Synchronising the logistics across India in an effort of this proportion, with a virus strain about which information was still nebulous, would be exhausting. In the second phase of governmental action, Modi harnessed trains and flights to methodically and expeditiously address the issue of essential commodity supply for locked-in citizens, especially from the economically weaker sections. Trains transported grains to the entire country and while existing programmes on the Public Distribution System (PDS) were reinforced, newly tailored ones targeted them aggressively to the needy, even beyond the officially registered poor. Flights were pressed into service to evacuate Indian citizens stranded in other countries: students, business people, pilgrims and tourists. India was among the first to do this, even as desperate Pakistani citizens posted videos on the internet crying for urgent rescue from strict lockdowns in other countries. Further down the road, the Government would tailor programmes, such as the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, to help the poor tide over their hardship during the lockdown. Announced in March at a cost of Rs 1.7 lakh crore, it was later extended till November, into the Diwali-Chhat Puja period, at an additional cost of Rs 90,000 crore, to benefit over 80 crore of the poor, with the supply of five kilograms of rice or wheat and one kilogram of pulses for free per month, during the lockdown.

Trains transported grains to the entire country. Flights evacuated Indian citizens stranded in other countries. The government tailored programmes, such as the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, to help the poor at a cost of Rs 1.7 lakh crore

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Modi’s detractors pegged a bulk of their attacks to his policy-making during the Covid period by hyping the unprecedented exodus of thousands of jobless migrant workers—many, including the old and very young, were on foot or bicycles, braving police action and enforced state government detention and isolation in terrible conditions—from urban centres back home to their villages. Less than four months into the lockdown, Modi launched an employment scheme for migrant workers who returned to villages in their home states. The Rs 50,000 crore job scheme, the Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan, was implemented on mission mode in 125 days across 116 districts in six states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Odisha) that received the most number of returning migrant workers. The works covered rural housing for the poor, plantations, drinking water provision through the Jal Jeevan Mission, construction of panchayat bhavans, community toilets, rural roads and mandis, cattle sheds and Anganwadi Bhavans.

There is a tendency to tar all populist leaders with the same brush, but Modi adopted a course that was divorced from other populist leaders. Choosing to lead by example, he aggressively promoted the use of a face mask in public regularly by appearing fully masked on public television. At some events, he chose to use a gamchha, or a locally made cotton towel used all over rural India, to advertise the need for face mask of any sort to protect both oneself and others from Covid. In this, he was distinct from both Trump and Bolsonaro, both of whom had often scoffed at the ‘fear mongering’ over Covid and even ridiculed the effectiveness of masks for protection against infection. Unlike them, Modi also chose to take firm control of decision-making centrally, instead of delegating responsibility in an uncoordinated mess to innumerable regional centres. Brazil’s Bolsonaro, in studied contrast, had called the pandemic a “little flu” and maintained that the cost of a nationwide lockdown would be worse than the disease itself. In Mexico, where thousands had succumbed to the infection, President Andrés López Obrador was compelled to reactivate the economy even while infections were rapidly rising. In the US, by mid-November, a staggering 250,000 had died of Covid. In comparison, by end-November, India, with a much bigger population, had only witnessed 1.33 lakh deaths due to Covid.

Thanks to proactive measures, as early as May this year, India had become the second-largest maker of PPE kits for medical and paramedical personnel on the frontlines, next only to China. From a situation of import, the Government quickly pulled out all stops to ensure that from only one lakh PPE kits per day, India moved to making a peak 2.06 lakh PPE kits daily. In January, it was importing 2.7 lakh PPE kits. By May, India was able to create a buffer stock of 16 lakh PPE kits, even exported 23 lakh more to the UK and some African nations. More than 600 companies had been lab-certified to make quality-tested PPE kits. Automakers were asked to make ventilators and many alcohol producers switched swiftly to making essential alcohol-based sanitisers. Thousands in home isolation, including self-help groups (SHGs), micro ventures and cooperative groups, started making affordable and disposable/non-disposable cloth masks even as it became clear that surgical masks were not imperative. Ventilator production was upped from a mere 2,500 in February to almost 6,000 by March. By August, 60,000 home-produced ventilators were part of government buys. By July, 18,000 ventilators had been supplied to government hospitals across the country. In comparison, the total Indian market for ventilators in 2019 was a mere 8,195.

Trains transported grains to the entire country. Flights evacuated Indian citizens stranded in other countries. The government tailored programmes, such as the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, to help the poor at a cost of Rs 1.7 lakh crore

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Modi’s determination to enable India to triumph in the battle against Covid persisted in the face of derision and attacks. The concerted disdain, harnessing every issue from the economic impact to joblessness to his efforts at earning the cooperation of an embattled citizenry by encouraging them to ring bells and light lamps to honour medical professionals, all of this peaked with the demonising of his motives and questioning of his intentions about the distress of migrant labourers.

Responding swiftly to each trial thrown up by the war against Covid, Modi displayed a firm belief in optimising social capital and in the power of the collective. No leader of a government proved as acutely aware that when a nation is up against a dangerous enemy of unknown strength, the strategising cannot be left to health workers or administrators alone. It cannot be won without enlisting a majority of the citizenry.

By successfully doing this, he achieved three goals: One, he shored up the morale of the health professionals who were working against heavy odds. Both Italy and Spain faltered in the initial months because of lack of support for health professionals and had to send SOS messages to Cuba, which had beaten back infections significantly, as had Vietnam. Second, he raised their status to the level of soldiers on the border, giving them a central position in a critical national mission. Third, at a time when calls for defunding the police were peaking in the US, he heaped praise on the police for doing their duty in a time of crisis. This, despite widespread reports of police personnel indulging in overzealousness against lockdown violators. Modi knew that valorisation of the police force was imperative to keep law and order from disintegrating. His studied response was to only signal state governments to reopen economies when the danger on both infection count and fatalities was reduced. It was time then to switch the focus from protecting lives to protecting livelihoods. None of these decisions was universally supported or adhered to without question in a country where indifference to ordinary rules and resistance to following protocol were commonplace—and in a prolonged situation of dwindling incomes, job losses, and other attendant forms of distress. None of these was guaranteed to translate into a political super bonus. Yet, Modi persisted.

Among the toughest battles that Modi may have to fight in the context of Covid-19 will be its adverse impact on the economy, which contracted by 23.9 per cent in the first quarter of the fiscal year. Government data showed that all sectors of the economy, with the exception of agriculture, shrank in the first quarter. Economists have projected that India’s economy may be among the worst hit by Covid, well up to 2025. Some estimates say that growth could drop to only 5 per cent from the 6 per cent prior to lockdown and over 7 per cent before the global financial crisis. The bad news on this front seemed unending. A Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) survey pegged India’s GDP growth at (-)4.5 per cent for FY21, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) pegged that at a 4 per cent contraction and Moody’s forecast an 11.5 per cent contraction in India’s economic growth in FY21. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has predicted that GDP will shrink 10.3 per cent in the year till March 2021 as a consequence of the nationwide lockdown freezing all economic activity. A recent HSBC Holdings Plc study projected a 4.5 per cent potential growth over the next five years, lower than the 6.5 per cent before Covid hit the economy. An RBI paper worryingly pointed to a historic technical recession in Asia’s third-largest economy.

But there are already indications of the shoots of economic recovery as activities gradually resume and a sharp rebound has been forecast by some economists. Automobile, real estate, horticulture and nurseries, online retail trade and online education have all begun to show robust growth. None of the doomsaying by economists has, however, deterred Modi. Critics have been aggressively pushing for largescale measures to boost demand. Throwing money at the problem would be an easy, popular option. But the lessons learnt from the 2008 package have prompted Modi to reject these exhortations for jumbo relief measures. With the economy already under stress, Modi has chosen to take measured steps towards boosting recovery and growth and not give in to the loud chorus. He has prioritised focus on land, labour, liquidity and laws besides targeting cottage industries, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), the working class and the middle class—in that order—for spurring growth. It is a leap of faith that he is confident will pay off handsomely for India, in terms of growth.

In her book Forged in Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times, business historian Nancy Koehn chronicles the lives of five extraordinary people who found themselves at the centre of a crisis but battled turmoil, long odds and trials by fire to become stellar examples of determination and leadership. Abraham Lincoln, former US president, was shaped by the decisions he was compelled to make to keep the Union together despite the heavy death toll in the Civil War. Rachel Carson, marine biologist and nature writer who empowered the global environmental movement, quietly but firmly took on a powerful pesticide lobby with her path-breaking book Silent Spring. Talking about the protagonists and how battling crises shaped them, Koehn said, ‘If you read their stories, you realise that part of what fuels each of them…is the mission. The goodness of what they’re trying to do gives them the energy to take the next step. It’s not like they wake up and are born with the genes of Jesus or that they’ve been endowed with a prophet’s sense of purpose…’ Narendra Modi could well fit that bill. In the crucible of his time in New Delhi, the leadership skills of India’s prime minister have been forged by fire.

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PR Ramesh