On the evening of Friday, June 21, as India reeled from the shock of the calamity in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi landed up in Dehradun with a handful of officers. By Sunday, it was claimed that he had rescued 15,000 stranded Gujaratis from the wreckage of Uttarakhand and sent these grateful folks back home. This miracle was played up in media. But how was this feat achieved in a day or so, when India's entire military establishment has struggled to rescue around 40,000 people over 10 days? Reports say that Modi pulled off this coup with a fleet of 80 Innovas. How did these cars manage to reach places like Kedarnath, across roads that have been washed away, over landslides that have wrecked most access routes?
But let us assume Modi's Innovas had wings as well as helicopter rotors. Including the driver, an Innova is designed to carry seven people. In a tough situation, assume you could pack nine passengers into each car. In that case, a convoy of 80 Innovas could ferry 720 people down the mountains to Dehradun at one go. To get 15,000 people down, the convoy would need to make 21 round trips. The distance between Dehradun and Kedarnath is 221 km. So 21 trips up and down would mean that each Innova would have to travel nearly 9,300 km. It takes longer to travel in the hills than in the plains. So, assuming an average speed of 40 km per hour, it would take 233 hours of driving to pull off the feat.
This assumes non-stop driving, without a second's rest to identify the Gujaratis to be rescued and keeping the rest of the distressed folk at bay, or any time to load and unload the vehicles. And forget about any downtime for the gallant rescuers. That is nearly 10 days of miraculous work. And Modi pulled it off in a day. Actually, in less than a day: a breathless media reported that by Saturday, 25 luxury buses had brought a group of Gujaratis back to Delhi. For some reason, four Boeing aircraft also idled in some undisclosed place nearby.
Modi, ever modest, himself did not make the claim of rescuing 15,000 Gujaratis from Himalayan disaster in a day. It was likely dumped on a gullible media by his public relations agency, an American outfit called Apco Worldwide. In 2007, Apco was hired, ostensibly to boost the VibrantGujarat summits, but to actually burnish Modi's image, for $25,000 a month. He is in good company. Apco has worked for the dictator of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, the governments of Malaysia and Israel and the American tobacco lobby. For the latter, it set up front organisations to rubbish evidence which proved that tobacco causes cancer. Apco has also worked for pariah regimes like Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha. Its powerful advisory council includes former Israeli diplomats Itamar Rabinovich and Shimon Stein, as well as Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, who was the highest ranked officer in the Israel security agency.
Apco is credited with Modi's makeover and his holographic campaigns. Before Apco, VibrantGujarat was a tame affair: the first three summits generated investment promi-ses between $14 billion and $150 billion. After Apco, in 2009 and 2011, these jumped to $253 billion and $450 billion. Apco worked tirelessly to rope in investor interest from America. It also lobbied with politicians in Washington to remove the ban on Modi travelling to the US. The ban was imposed after the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat as Modi presided over the state in 2002. So far, Apco hasn't succeeded in getting Modi a US visa.
And the Vibrant Gujarat numbers are all hot air. An analysis by my colleague Kingshuk Nag in his biography of Modi shows that only 3.2% of the 2009 number has materialised on the ground. Of the 2011 figure, a mere 0.5% is for real. But Modi does not need Apco to lie. In 2005 he announced that state-owned company GSPC had made India's biggest gas discovery: 20 trillion cubic feet (tcf) valued at more than $50 billion, off Andhra Pradesh. This was 40% more than what Reliance had found in the same area. Modi then egged on GSPC to grab projects in Egypt, Yemen and Australia.
Many suspected that Modi's gas claim was hot air, but in the absence of evidence few could say so. But by 2012, the Centre's directorate general of hydrocarbons (DGH), which analyses and certifies all energy finds, said that it could vouch for only a tenth of Modi's claim: there was only 2 tcf of gas. And that too in areas tough to exploit. Meanwhile, under Modi's rousing leadership, GSPC had poured in nearly $2 billion into exploration, much of it raised as debt based on its supposed 20 tcf gas find. When the gas vanished, GSPC went bust. To rescue it, Modi asked the company to venture out into more areas, like city gas distribution. There have been problems with these businesses as well, including a very dubious transaction with a company in Barbados. In every area the Modi narrative is a tale of bluster and bluff. But his Himalayan miracle is a barefaced, cynical lie.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Modis-Himalayan-miracle/articleshow/20765218.cms
Narendra Modi never said he saved 15,000: Rajnath
BJP chief Rajnath Singh on Wednesday said the Gujarat chief minister never gave such a statement..."How it is being publicized is beyond understanding," the BJP chief, who is on a two-day visit to the state, said. Singh said he had appealed to party workers that no statement should be given to politicize Uttarakhand disaster. "I have asked them that there is no need to be aggressive even if leader of any other political party make any statement," he said. "BJP workers are sensitive and consider expressing sympathies and extending helping hand as their religion," Singh said. The claim on rescuing 15,000 Gujaratis was made to TOI by the BJP's spokesman for Uttarakhand Anil Biluni, in the presence of the party state chief and several bureaucrats from Gujarat who had come to Uttarakhand to help conduct the rescue operations..
See also:
Back home from Uttarakhand, Guj official says Modi govt claims 'cheap stunt'
The state government's efforts to bring back Gujarati pilgrims from flood-ravaged Uttarakhand have left many unimpressed, among them one of its own engineers who too was stranded there along with family members and friends for days.
Narendra Modi’s PR agency - APCO Worldwide: Orchestrating our Future -
In this dynamic and ever-changing world, Apco Worldwide stands tall as the giant of the lobbying industry. The firm, in its own words, offers “professional and rare expertise” to governments, politicians and corporations, and is always ready to help clients to sail through troubled waters in the complex world of both international and domestic affairs. Margery Kraus founded APCO Associates in 1984 as a subsidiary to Arnold & Porter, one of Washington’s largest law firms, and from where APCO’s name is derived. Arnold and Porter is now Israel’s largest and longest serving registered foreign agent (not that there aren’t more than a handful of unregistered ones).
Beating the War Drum Doing public relations for dictatorships is perhaps the more charitable part of Apco’s activities. Apco has a battalion of pro-war lobbyists under its wing. The firm is also a strong advocate of expanding armaments and the US military role in world affairs. In October 2004, Apco and Kissinger Associates (owned by Henry Kissinger) formed a strategic alliance. Beside Kissinger Associates, Apco also built a broad network or coalition of conservative pro-Zionist lobbyists and consultancy groups including Heritage Foundation, Frontier of Freedom, Jewish Policy Center, etc. In the name of war against terror, Apco helped to coordinate government communications to convince the public of the necessity of war. Its job also included manufacturing public opinion and feedback in supporting the war efforts. Basically it exploited Islam-phobia in Western society to sell aggression as the solution to regain security in the West.
In addition to supporting George Bush, Apco also defended British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s unpopular move to enter the Iraq war. Apco had assisted Tony Blair to consolidate the war alliance. Together with the London-based Foreign Policy Institute, Apco prepared and published the pamphlet, ‘A Global Alliance for Global Values’ in which Blair declared: “We must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us.” After the invasion of Iraq, Apco swiftly positioned itself to help American companies plunder Iraqi wealth and resources. In May 2003, Apco Worldwide launched a task force headed by Marc Ginsberg, the former US ambassador to Morocco, to help U.S. clients secure contracts for Iraq’s rebuilding.
Apco is described as a lobby firm that “specialises in helping corporations advance their goals by manipulating legislators, and drafting and advancing model legislation and regulations. Key tools include the creation of business coalitions and fake, corporate-funded ‘grassroots’ groups tailored to specific issues.” Recently there was a report published on the importance of finding a legal basis for an attack on Iran. Interestingly the authors, Jeffrey H. Smith and John B. Bellinger III, lawyers at Arnold & Porter, supplied such a basis. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/providing-a-legal-basis-to-attack-iran/2012/09/27/e30e87a4-043b-11e2-91e7-2962c74e7738_story.html
Modi's image builders have dictators on client list Adolf Hitler was a brilliant propagandist. Narendra Modi too believes in the power of image. This is probably why the chief minister hired a US lobbying firm which has serviced clients like former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and President-for-life of Kazakhstan Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev. This Washington-based firm, Apco Worldwide, was hired by Modi sometime in August 2007, in the run-up to an important Assembly election, to improve his image before the world community. Among its recent clients are Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Communist youth leader-turned-Russian billionaire with mafia links.The firm has a distinction of taking contracts of boosting images of leaders who fell out of favour of their followers. On the face of it Apco Worldwide’s brief is to build and sell Brand Gujarat to the international community. APCO, through its 32 offices across the globe, has been promoting Gujarat as a great investment destination. APCO has also been managing Modi’s own behaviour and projection, for which the cost has been over $25,000 per month since 2007. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/specials/Modis-image-builders-have-dictators-on-client-list/articleshow/2600140.cms? “Although TIME’s cover story is not an endorsement, it contains inaccuracies, half-truths and glaring omission of pertinent details on Mr. Modi’s tenure as Chief Minister. These betray its real objective – an attempt by APCO Worldwide, Modi’s PR firm in Washington DC – to combat negative coverage of their client’s documented connivance in gross human rights violations, in order to project him as a Prime Ministerial candidate,” said Mr. Shaheen Khateeb, President of IAMC. “Mr. Narendra Modi as the potential Prime Minister of India is a diplomatic and moral conundrum for the United States and other countries of common human values,” added Mr. Khateeb.
See also:Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Industrialization of the Mind
K. SHANKAR BAJPAI: The closing of the Indian mind
Praveen Swamy: Using hate to challenge modernism
Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism in India
Public Appeal by R.B. SREEKUMAR, FORMER DGP, GUJARAT
MEREDITH TAX - Fundamentalism and education
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