Narendra Modi’s super-centralised decision-making gives little hope that he will be ‘collective’ as he sets about constructing a coalition government. This centralisation is also why he has had to face a far less-than-ideal outcome this election. This is part one of a series that looks at Modi’s PMO – which reflects this tendency far better than any other metric. Read the second here.
New Delhi: As someone who has been leading his party in general elections since 2002, first in Gujarat and then nationally, Narendra Modi has never failed to come to power on his own. Until the Indian voter delivered a deadly blow to him in 2024, that is. If in 2014 and 2019, he chose to head a government that was notionally coalitional, he will now – if he is elected by his party and coalition – be forced to function within the actual constraints of a coalition and the question everyone is asking is whether he is capable of pulling it off.
Coalitions require accommodation and the spirit of give and take, not just in matters of politics and policies but also in terms of personnel. And here, Modi’s track record is unlikely to inspire confidence. Going by his choice of bureaucrats and key officials, especially in the PMO, Modi has not just been parochial to his party and ideology but also – quite demonstrably – to his own state of Gujarat.
Will he be able to move away from a ‘BJP first’ approach to coalition government when he steadfastly remained wedded to a ‘Gujarat first’ approach to administration?
All of India’s prime ministers have cultivated loyalty and surrounded themselves with trusted bureaucrats. But never until Modi’s arrival in May 2014 has regionalism been such an important factor in the staffing of key positions in the PMO and elsewhere. From day one, the prime minister’s parochialism has been evident
Modi is not the first Gujarati to be prime minister of India. That distinction belongs to Morarji Desai. Desai’s path to the nation’s top office was also through the chief minister’s chair – though of the larger ‘Bombay state’ – of which Gujarat was a part. Yet, the PMO he ran was not as ‘Gujarat-Gujarati’ as Modi has made it.
Indeed, the record shows no previous prime minister has made their office so heavily tilted towards the state or community they came from. The composition of the Modi-era PMO, particularly after getting a stronger mandate in the 2019 elections, brought more of Gujarat to South Block. This matters because the Prime Minister’s Office under Modi has become the locus of all decision making in the policy sphere – and the lack of regional diversity has led to unhealthy imbalances.
Gujarat cadre principal secretary
Modi’s principal secretary P. K. Mishra, the topmost bureaucrat of this country, is a Gujarat cadre IAS officer. By coincidence? Not likely, if you take into cognisance the overall composition of the PMO, particularly the key divisions and posts.
Weeks after returning to power in 2019, the Modi government had taken the unprecedented decision to grant cabinet rank to P. K. Mishra, then serving as additional principal secretary at the PMO.
Gujarat cadre private secretary to the PM
Modi has two private secretaries; the one that wields all the power at the PMO is Hardik Satishchandra Shah, also a Gujarat cadre IAS officer; of the 2010 batch. (The other is Vivek Kumar, an IFS officer).
As a young officer, Shah’s claim to fame was modernising the Gujarat Pollution Control Board’s operations; Modi picked him in 2017 to be the private secretary to the then Union environment minister Harsh Vardhan.
In August 2019, he was brought to the PMO to take over as deputy director, and went on to assume the post of PM’s private secretary in July 2020.
Modi’s first time was also no different. His then private secretary was Rajeev Topno, a Gujarat cadre IAS officer. Since Topno was in the PMO of Manmohan Singh since 2009, the only Gujarat cadre officer at the office then, Modi’s decision had raised a few eyebrows. But Topno was no stranger to Modi. Before joining Singh’s PMO, Topno was the chief executive of the Gujarat State Disaster Management Authority which Modi as the chief minister headed.
In May 2020, Topno, as Modi’s private secretary, was one of the two witnesses to sign on the infamous PM Cares Fund deed. The other witness was Bhaskar Khulbe, another IAS officer who was later sent from the PMO to Uttarakhand to oversee the Char Dham project, a flagship initiative of the Modi government.
In June 2020, Topno was sent to the World Bank as senior advisor to the executive director of the World Bank in Washington D.C. Curiously, since then, periodically, we have been seeing the World Bank putting the economic growth rate of India at 7.5%.
Topno’s term was extended till May 2024.
The Modi government’s Gujarat alumni also includes G.C. Murmu, a trusted aide who was first brought to the Union finance ministry and then sent as lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir before being made the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.
Another Gujarat officer who was given a key job in Delhi was Y.C. Modi, who first came to the CBI where he slowed down the Babri Masjid demolition case and was then made head of the National Investigation Agency. And then there was Rakesh Asthana, brought into the Central Bureau of Investigation and then made Police Commissioner of Delhi.
Gujarat-heavy Communications Dept of the PMO
One other crucial wing of the PMO is its communications’ wing. Under Modi, it too is Gujarat, rather Gujarati, heavy. Hiren Joshi, a close aide of Modi since his Gujarat CMO days, heads the department.
A member of the BJP in Gujarat, Hiren Joshi, a native of Rajkot, was closely associated with Modi’s election campaigns as chief minister. Joshi, now posted as officer on special duty (OSD), communications and information technology, at the PMO, is among the few people who have a direct access to the prime minister. Joshi handles the PM’s social media accounts. A source in the government claimed that Joshi, though stays away from the media glare, also acts as a ‘go-between’ the PM and some ministers, and his party leaders.
Lending a hand to Hiren Joshi in handling such a strategic post at the PMO is another close aide of Modi from his Gujarat days — Pratik Doshi. He was elevated to the post of joint secretary in June 2019. Pratik, who has been working with Modi since 2014, and is currently the OSD, Research and Strategy. Incidentally, he is also finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s son-in-law.
Another member of the communications team from Gujarat at the PMO is Sanjay Bhavsar, OSD, Appointment and Tour. In 2016, the Modi government had elevated Bhavsar into the rank of an IAS officer. It was to ensure that this Gujarat administrative service (GAS) officer who has always been seen in Ahmedabad as rather close to Modi when he was the state chief minister, continues as OSD to Modi at the PMO. He was assigned the Gujarat cadre and continues to be a part of Modi’s core team at the PMO.
Other communications officers at the Modi-led PMO also hail from the PM’s home state. Take Nirav K Shah, who has worked for Joshi since his Gujarat days. Yet another young colleague of Joshi’s, from Gujarat, also posted as communications officer at the PMO is Yash Rajiv Gandhi.
Another communications officer with a Gujarat connection is Suhas Ambale – though he identifies himself only as ‘a public policy analyst’ when he writes opinion pieces in the media supporting the Modi government. The reading public is not told that he works as a communications officer of the Modi government. Under-secretary Chirag M Panchal was personal secretary to Kaushik Patel, the Gujarat revenue minister, before joining the PMO in 2020.
Some former Gujarat cadre IAS officers who found their way to the PMO under Modi, have gone on to carry out other important assignments. One example is Arvind Sharma, who took voluntary retirement and got elected to the Uttar Pradesh assembly in March 2022, and since then has been known to be ‘closely monitoring’ the work of the Adityanath government as a minister for the Prime Minister. Known more as PMO’s choice than the CMO in Lucknow.
The IAS has been dominated from time to time by various states and UP has been a prestigious and powerful cadre for decades. This may have coincided with several PMs being thrown up by the state. Indira Gandhi too was known to rely on officers who were Kashmiri pandits. But analysts say the kind of dominance that exists now, is matched only by the long shadow that Modi, a 12-year chief minister of Gujarat has cast, on Indian politics.
Note: This article was updated on June 11, 2024 with additional details.
