- 7 months ago
Between 2005 and 2015, India experienced a defining decade of rapid growth, global ambition, political turmoil and public unrest. From reform and welfare to terror, corruption and calls for change, the period reshaped the nation’s politics and society. Here’s a concise look back at those pivotal years through India Today’s lens.
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00:00I wanted to join India Today group when I was in 8th standard.
00:11India Today is the apex of journalism, quality, high quality journalism.
00:18And for readers, you had to cap it all by reading it in India Today.
00:22People trust us, you know, they know that our spines are intact.
00:29We do responsible journalism.
00:31It's intimidating but it's quite liberating because suddenly you realise that you are
00:35being noticed, you are under scrutiny and then you realise what India Today stands for.
00:40It has actually become a huge, huge empire but the philosophy I think is still very much there.
00:47You have to explain it to the world, you have to make sense of the world.
00:51One of the big lessons that India Today taught all of us was if you're not satisfied with just doing the job,
00:56go that extra mile, go and get the story.
00:59The 2005 to 2015 decade was a decade of great economic growth for India.
01:05Unfortunately, it ended with corruption.
01:092005 was a decade that was very surprising because Congress returns to power and you had what
01:19was so called the accidental Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh take charge.
01:23That brought a huge amount of hope in terms of change in the country and his background
01:28denoted change in a big way.
01:30Dr. Manmohan Singh was somebody who never talked much, who had kept his counsel to himself.
01:35was obviously a very decent and honest man.
01:38I believe our government is going to last for full five years and let there be no doubt
01:46or ambiguity about this.
01:48He was actually a very balanced person.
01:51He wasn't the head of the party but he was supposed to be running the government.
01:55It wasn't a congress-led government, it was a congress-led government.
01:59It had a lot of other opposition parties and the person coordinating all this was the head
02:05of the Congress party, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi.
02:08She was not of Indian origin.
02:10She didn't learn the language too well.
02:12She had seen India through the eyes of Rajiv Gandhi.
02:15Then she had to do it herself.
02:17She also realized that the Congress could no longer do it on its own.
02:21Her great thing was taking people along.
02:30She went around stitching alliances.
02:32She worked on Lalu, won him over.
02:34Won him over.
02:35Won him over Sharad Pawar.
02:36She tied up with the DMK.
02:37The DMK helped the LTT in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination.
02:41But she put all that behind her.
02:43So she was willing to forget the past and just focus on the larger aim and minor,
02:47which was to defeat the BJP.
02:49And she did it.
02:50So when she sprung Manmohan Singh's name up, the BJP didn't have anything to say.
02:58So she just defanged the BJP in 2011.
03:02And she knew that nobody else could do it for her.
03:05There were things that she could do.
03:07The political power was with Sonia Gandhi.
03:10The administrative power and everything else that comes with the Prime Minister is with Manmohan Singh.
03:16That's not a normal arrangement.
03:18At least in India that wasn't seen to be.
03:22UPN had a kind of a strange structure.
03:25There was a National Advisory Council chaired by Sonia Gandhi.
03:29And it had a range of members there who were ex-bureaucrats,
03:34civil rights activists, and other members of civil society.
03:37They were the right people.
03:40They were advising her.
03:42At the same time, Dr. Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister was advising her.
03:48He understood the equation between good economics and good social welfare programs.
03:55Therefore, both advice as she received.
04:00And she was a quick learner and she knew how to balance strong economic growth and spending money for social welfare programs.
04:10And they introduced a lot of things which are still there.
04:14The right to education.
04:16The right to food security.
04:18The right to information.
04:20The manrega which is still going on.
04:23So these were new things which came up.
04:26But I think that paralyzed him to some extent.
04:30Okay, my name is Ravi Shankar.
04:34I worked in India today as a political cartoonist.
04:37You know Sonia was one of the most interesting personalities in Indian political history.
04:44And it's not just the power she was capable of.
04:47But the woman had an amazing capacity to unite things.
04:51She said, I have zero tolerance for corruption.
04:54So I had that.
04:55I mean, contradicting what she's saying.
04:59They were pissed off but nobody really got that.
05:03Didn't react in some adverse manner to you.
05:07And he would then create these fantastic caricatures.
05:10Which would bring a smile to your face but also tell you the satirical side of the story.
05:16Unfortunately, the political cartoonist is a nearly extinct animal.
05:20But here, in spite of Arun being so particular about what went in.
05:26He never censored a Sindhul Kathu. Not one.
05:31UTA's first two years were terrible.
05:33And there was a lot of frustration that there is this golden triangle dream team.
05:37Of Montek, Manmohan, Chedambaram.
05:40And they're doing nothing.
05:41And India today's stories would bear witness to this.
05:44That there was a lot of frustration.
05:45Where is this dream dream?
05:46Nothing is coming.
05:47There was this thing about Sonia Gandhi wanting to take the policies in a certain direction versus Manmohan Singh.
05:52And we wrote about it.
05:53Actually, what was happening is the lag effect of Vajpayee's reforms were taking time to show up.
06:00That shine that we talked about took time to percolate.
06:03And then they started percolating.
06:05And so between 2005 and 2008, we had three years of extreme well-rounded boom.
06:12India had the best three years of its economy ever.
06:16We had nine percent plus growth.
06:19It was the strongest growth years.
06:23Fiscal deficit, current account deficit, FDI, and a strong capital market.
06:30These are the four or five things that have to be done for any economy to pick up speed.
06:37And that's what we did.
06:40No three-year Indian economy ever had such a boom.
06:45Three years of nine percent growth, per capita income very high.
06:48We were launching new products.
06:50Ladies and gentlemen, globalization is both an opportunity and a challenge.
06:58Indian industry and our professionals have demonstrated to the world that ability to step out with confidence from a highly protectionist environment into a mercilessly competitive one.
07:15In 2001, we strongly felt that we needed a platform, a space for thought-provoking discussions on democracy, geopolitics, and everything that shapes our times.
07:28So we started the India Today Conclave.
07:32And since then, this developed into quite a forum.
07:36It actually filled the gap of having a conclave or a conference of thought leadership.
07:42As we sit here tonight, we're also privileged to have ringside seats to history in the making.
07:49We've had President Clinton in the end, former President Musharraf, Imran Khan, leaders from all over the world.
07:57So it's become quite an institution.
08:00And the things that would happen, you know, for example, Hillary Clinton would say she would come only if she gets a private pay.
08:07That's such a bummer, right?
08:09But Prabhu Chawna calls Alan Mittal the world's biggest steelmaker who has a private pay.
08:14Then Hillary Clinton flies private in a private jet.
08:17Not India Today Conclave.
08:19Senator Clinton, thank you for being here with us.
08:22It's really a pleasure that you are in India.
08:24What is your take out from India?
08:26I'm very impressed by the confidence and positive attitude that I've encountered.
08:35One of the innovations that India Today did was surveys.
08:40We believe that going out there and actually reflecting what is happening in society but with data rather than just impressions.
08:49We did the state surveys where we compared states in terms of various parameters.
08:56Also followed with an event and with an award.
08:58It became a regular run for many years.
09:01Can you make states compete to improve the governments?
09:04The rankings were very, very robust.
09:07Every Chief Secretary or Finance Secretary of the state would want Excel spreadsheets, how we've ranked them.
09:12So that created a very healthy split of competition, which is what journalism is all about.
09:16We started the college survey, the best of colleges survey.
09:26We did the sex survey.
09:28Things like sex survey.
09:29We would get such letters, you know.
09:31I mean, it would be one long litany of abuse.
09:35How can you do this?
09:36I cannot show it at home.
09:39I was so proud to keep it on my coffee table.
09:42Now I keep it face down, etc, etc.
09:44We were shaping a new worldview that understood urbanization.
09:49A worldview that understood economic reforms.
09:52A worldview that understood the changing Indian sexuality.
09:56What was happening to adolescent mental health, much before the whole world realized it.
10:01Hi, I'm Suhani Singh.
10:03I'm currently the deputy editor of India Today magazine.
10:06So when you had the Khans doing the romantic, sort of escapist, entertaining kind of film.
10:13People sort of felt like there was a need to balance it out.
10:16Like this cannot be all hunky-dory.
10:17We need to see the darker side of the, you know, the picture as well.
10:22And through the course of decades, a certain kind of, I would call it like sort of the independent movement emerged.
10:28So these were people who were like, we don't have the stars.
10:31We don't have the Khans.
10:32We don't have the budgets either.
10:34But we're going to tell you a story that you will relate to.
10:37The work Dipakar did with Khosla Ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Shanghai.
10:42Anurag Kashyap worked with Rangopal Verma, who in turn then would make a film like Black Friday.
10:51It has given me a platform where if I control my economics,
10:55if I don't pay much money, then I can get the best film.
10:59On one hand, you have a Bhansali making a Devdas with Shah Rukh,
11:02and then you have Anurag saying, no, this is my version of Devdas.
11:06Then you had obviously Ibtiazani coming in, and you would have films like Jab We Met come up, you know.
11:13Mr. Hirani was a voice, a filmmaker, much like how we had Manmohandesai.
11:19You know, this is a filmmaker who sort of defined the kind of cinema that we like watching.
11:24It says something meaningful.
11:26Who would have thought of a film like Lage Roho Munna Bhai?
11:29To do a film on a gangster meeting Gandhi.
11:33So, obviously, there are some influences of Gandhi which are trying to give it out.
11:38If you can convince the people, they will buy that thought.
11:41It's cool, we never learnt about Gandhi, but I remember when I saw Attenborough's Gandhi,
11:44I said, what a man.
11:45And that's when I started reading about him.
11:47I am a strong believer that we have perceived notions,
11:49and somebody breaks that notion.
11:51It's a great feeling.
11:52Gandhikiri also came from that belief.
11:54Only a person like Rajkumar Hirani could make someone like Sanjay Dutt
11:59an appealing, sanitized, you know, lovable hero.
12:04But all this really meant that there was a middle class that was emerging
12:08that was not afraid to consume fashion, food.
12:13You know, so you had the rise of coffee shops.
12:15You had the rise of food pop-ups.
12:17You had the rise of parties.
12:19And the middle class itself feeling that, okay, it pays its taxes and does its work.
12:26But it deserves a break.
12:27It deserves to go to the malls.
12:28It deserves everything that life offered to it.
12:32Because it had seen perhaps its parents, you know,
12:35who had not really had the pleasure of all of this.
12:38And till then we were primarily, I think, a saving society.
12:42And then we became a spending society.
12:44And I think we've been spending since then.
12:46The big industrial revolution of cricket took place
12:49when India won the 2007 T20 World Cup.
12:53Again, India today, bless them.
12:55I had made a pitch for that story
12:57because I knew that this event was taking place.
12:59And it was a very India today kind of a story.
13:01My main thing was, if we win, I know it's going to be a big story for the magazine.
13:05If we don't win, it'll be.
13:06It'll be.
13:07It'll be.
13:08And there was Dhonvi.
13:09He just looked different and new and fresh.
13:11And it's okay, he can be the new captain.
13:12He was young at the time.
13:14And when you had that match, that Pakistan final that you had,
13:18I remember Pakistan suddenly, like they picked up their scoring
13:21and you just got a bit nervous.
13:22Are we going to lose?
13:23But then as a fan, you just like switch off.
13:25And you say, boss, you're not a fan today.
13:26You just watch.
13:27And then we went on and won it.
13:29When you saw that, you just had a feeling that something was shifting.
13:34I don't think we realized what a big after effect was going to be there.
13:39Change everything.
13:45What the IPL did was take that moment and turn it into like 2020 World Cup every day
13:51and India is always going to win.
13:52The perfect franchise model that's been developed basically as a profit making franchise model.
13:56We saw Bollywood.
14:00We saw cricket.
14:01We saw business.
14:02There was so much politics.
14:04And you saw the superstars of each of these industries coming together.
14:10It was a mix of everything.
14:12It was so heavy.
14:13You had these cheerleaders and you had different kinds of cricket being played
14:17and you had these wild crowds.
14:20It was a very exciting thing to chronicle.
14:22And I think we did the business.
14:24We did the circus effect of it.
14:27And of course, there was Lalit Modi who, now you realize,
14:30was absolutely insane in coming up with this plan and pulling it off.
14:34It's not Indian cricketers only that are benefiting from it.
14:39It's the whole global economy of cricket that's turned its attention towards India.
14:44It was really a billion dollar baby.
14:46A billion dollar baby who continues to fascinate us.
14:49And I think India had not seen anything like this.
14:53There's always used to be a story in the papers or in the magazine
14:56why we don't win medals at the Olympics.
14:58It's just bad shit governance and they didn't want to.
15:00So they blamed everyone else but themselves.
15:02And when it began to change is when private investment
15:05in say around the middle of the first decade of the 21st century
15:09started to happen where you had said,
15:11listen, we'll support a great elite athlete
15:14and push them all the way through.
15:15Abhinav Bindra's first Olympic gold at the Beijing Olympics
15:18will be my dinner time story as long as I live.
15:21He's an old soul.
15:22He's a young man but he's an old soul.
15:24For 15 years of my life, I would go to bed with one single dream
15:27which was trying to win a gold medal at the Olympic Games
15:30and I would wake up every morning trying to make that dream a reality.
15:34In the Olympic Games in 2004, I had a very cruciating and disappointing defeat
15:40and I ended up in seventh place.
15:42His first Olympics in Sydney, he had a very bad final.
15:44Then I asked him, I said, have you eaten?
15:46He said, no, I'm digesting my nines.
15:47So nines is a very bad score in a final.
15:49Fed up and whatever.
15:50I'm going to retire.
15:51I said, don't talk nonsense.
15:52You're going to win gold in Beijing.
15:53It just came out.
15:54And he never forgot it.
15:55And then, of course, the next time when he was in that final,
15:58I was sitting next to Mini Kapoor of the Indian Express.
16:00I wanted to vomit when the final was.
16:02I was physically feeling scared.
16:04I was, of course, extremely immersed in performance.
16:08I went into the last shot just simply trying to execute the best possible shot that I could.
16:14And it was my best shots of my life.
16:16And Mini said, it's gold.
16:17He's won gold.
16:18He's won gold.
16:19I said, no, no.
16:20There is a shot left.
16:21She said, no, no.
16:22He's won gold.
16:23It was just completely mental.
16:25It was just an absolutely mad day.
16:27But we were so happy, crying, weeping at National Anthem.
16:32It was a moment of massive thrill.
16:34It was a moment of great pride.
16:36Everybody asked us, you know, country of a billion people and no individual gold medal.
16:41And for me to be able to change that history is a great, great honor.
16:48And the first words which came out of my mouth to Shah Dawa were,
16:51you told me this would happen four years ago.
16:55I never remembered it until he told me.
16:57I was so embarrassed.
16:58What Abhinav Bindra gold medal did was, it recalibrated the GPS of our sport.
17:03And it just broadened our minds and said, boss, it's possible.
17:06And the part that gender played in this transformation that has happened,
17:10it came from the women athletes.
17:13So it came from Saina Naival and it came from Sanya Mirja.
17:17You know, we were able to achieve results that in my generation,
17:21I never imagined I'd see.
17:23And then you're also seeing, you're seeing PV Sindhu.
17:26Then you're seeing MC Mericon.
17:28Then you're seeing Sakshi Malik.
17:29So you're seeing female athletes come through in a way that you have not seen them before.
17:33And how we've become a country that can play a lot of sports.
17:37Things are going well for India.
17:40We signed the nuclear deal with America, which is a really a landmark deal,
17:46which kind of broke India out of the pariah status of having tested an atomic bomb.
17:54India, US civil nuclear cooperation is in the interests of India,
18:03is in the interests of the United States,
18:06and is in the interests of world at large.
18:11Our nuclear weapons were like the elephant in the room when we dealt with America.
18:15America came to terms with the fact that we were a nuclear weapon state,
18:18came up with this fantastic deal where we were allowed to keep our nuclear weapons
18:22and they would give us nuclear technology.
18:24It's a big breakthrough with Indo-US relations,
18:26which so far had been full of ups and downs.
18:28Now this was a very major change.
18:32I mean, it acknowledged India's right to have a nuclear weapon
18:36without us having joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty,
18:40but gave us the privileges of being able to retain the nuclear weapon
18:45and being able to trade in nuclear technology and nuclear materials.
18:51It was a pretty risky and politically tough thing to do.
18:56The left was totally opposed to the nuclear deal.
19:00The only option left for this government is to resign.
19:05The Prime Minister should quit.
19:07And they made it very clear to Mrs. Gandhi that if you go ahead with the nuclear deal,
19:13we're going to drop out of the government.
19:16They did walk out of supporting the government.
19:20Manmohan was able to persuade her that,
19:23look, this is good for the country,
19:25and we should not be cowed down by this threat.
19:28He was able to mobilize to bring in Mulaim Singh.
19:40So the government didn't fall because Mulaim Singh supported them.
19:44It is now my honor to sign the United States-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval
19:51and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act.
19:53And that broke the pariah status that India had,
19:58which was Dr. Manmohan Singh's crowning foreign policy achievement,
20:03a decisive movement in terms of partnership with the U.S.
20:06One of the things that has been my particular pet project or fascination has been the Indian Space Program,
20:15and I've covered it since 1984.
20:18Arunpuri and me used to have this huge sort of debate all the time as to what the hell is happening on space
20:25and why should we give it so much place in the magazine?
20:30In one of the edit meetings, he said,
20:32you know, you've got suckered by the space scientists.
20:36They'll never get to the moon.
20:37Why did you just bring this on the cover?
20:39So we had this huge debate going on.
20:44I don't know who said, let's bet on it.
20:46And the bet was that a champagne bottle.
20:49First we thought of money, but champagne bottle is the neutral thing.
20:52And he said, mission happens, then you'll get the champagne bottle.
20:55I told him that there is a moon mission that is going to happen.
20:59And he said, incredulous, this can't happen.
21:03And sure enough, Chandrayaan one went up.
21:10So we carried the issue called India's moon shot at that time.
21:17Of course, the bet, I'd won the bet.
21:19And then Arun, of course, gave me a bottle of Dom Perino as the sort of trophy for winning the bet.
21:26Here was a country that had the world coming to its feet.
21:29And then suddenly it all went.
21:32Then, of course, came the terror attacks in Mumbai.
21:39The city was held to ransom by just a couple of machine gun-toting terrorists.
21:45The 2611 attack in Mumbai was really shocked me because it's the way these people planned it, came in, and entered this iconic hotel in Bombay, the Taj, and also the Oberoi.
22:01The live coverage was helping the terrorists because it was being seen by the handlers in Pakistan who were giving instructions to the terrorists in the buildings of what to do.
22:13It was very well coordinated.
22:15It took everyone by surprise, even the security forces.
22:18India didn't know how to deal with a live event like this.
22:22And I think lessons had to be learned from this.
22:25And the impact of that changed the ordinary Indians' approach towards Pakistan.
22:34They felt that they had violated all norms.
22:38So we saw the complete downturn in India-Pakistan relations after that.
22:43And then comes the biggest blow of them all, which is the financial collapse that happens in the US.
22:52And the shockwaves they felt of that.
22:54And suddenly the economy began slowing down.
22:56But it doesn't prevent Dr. Manmohan Singh and the Congress from winning in 2009 because the economy in those five years had really boomed.
23:09And Dr. Manmohan Singh was back in the saddle as Prime Minister again.
23:15And then the decline begins.
23:18UPA2 got into a whole image of corruption, which was basically led by the Commonwealth Games, which happened.
23:29There was a whole lot of money which was kind of misappropriated.
23:33India was in a state of crisis even before the Games had begun.
23:43Commonwealth Games, which was the pride of what India was to do.
23:47It was the showcase of India.
23:49We suddenly find that filled with scandals of the way the state stadiums were built.
23:53The Congress has to answer that.
23:57And then there was the 2G scam, the telecom scam, in which a lot of big names were involved.
24:03One lakh crore reviews, more than one lakh crore.
24:05I clarified many times.
24:06I clarified many times.
24:07The matter is sub duties.
24:08I put everything before the court.
24:11And there was this concept which came up called presumptive loss.
24:16The opposition picked it up and tainted the UPA2 as a corrupt government.
24:25And then cold scam breaks out.
24:28You have a whole lot of other, you know, shady deals that were going.
24:34And then the decline of the Congress.
24:37So it was a great time for news, but a sad time for India.
24:43A man like Anna Hazare, who was kind of a Gandhian figure, kind of led an anti-corruption campaign and got civil society behind it.
24:53People poured out on the streets, and the government's response made things worse.
25:14And this also saw the emergence of Armin Kejriwar.
25:28I think it's, it's the beginning of a journey.
25:30It's still a long way ahead.
25:33Here was a man who was fresh, seemed to be honest, who could do a good job for them, other than the traditional politicians.
25:41And he came to signify the common man because everyone was so fed up with the kind of corruption which they had seen in UPA2.
25:52You know, that was the era where I think the citizen India really came of age.
25:58And it was becoming a citizen first democracy.
26:00And we had one cow I remember was when the Supreme Court recriminalized homosexuality in India.
26:09You had a situation where it was being heard in the Supreme Court.
26:14You had a huge groundswell of people who believed love is love.
26:19I mean, no matter what the Supreme Court says, a court cannot, in that sense, in this day and age, take back rights.
26:25And I think we wanted to capture that, that there was this community just fighting to be with someone they loved, regardless of what the sexuality was.
26:35So I think we felt very compelled to tell that story.
26:38We finally came up with the idea of Vikram Seth and he was available, thankfully.
26:44He's the guy who wrote A Suitable Boy and much more.
26:47And he wrote in his hand, not a criminal.
26:51It was something that needed to be said.
26:53And then you had the Nirbhai agitation.
27:00Hi, I'm Kaushik Deka.
27:02This is my 20th year in the group.
27:05I went to Nirbhai's house.
27:06Think of a space like this much.
27:09And five people living in that space.
27:12And from there, one girl is trying to liberate herself.
27:16Dream for a life, better life.
27:18That was a story that everyone in India wanted to happen.
27:23But that story was cut short by some people.
27:27That heinous crime and the kind of brutality, it shook the mankind's inherent belief in compassion or cohabitation with each other.
27:39That's something everybody was shaping.
27:44There was a huge outpouring of anger against women's security.
27:49I mean, when I look back at some of the covers.
27:50The images are really of angry people.
27:51You know, the angry innocent people.
27:52I mean, when I look back at some of the covers, the images are really of angry people.
27:53You know, the angry Indian and angry young women on the street.
27:57The angry Indian and angry young women on the street.
28:00I mean, when I look back at some of the covers, the images are really of angry people, you know, the angry Indian and angry young women on the street.
28:22Are they protecting us or are already destroying us?
28:29And there had been so much hatred of the kind of politicians who were the professional politicians who were there, kind of got the narrative of the country.
28:39That time, there are so many things happening all around and there is chaos everywhere.
28:57So people are confused about the Congress narrative.
29:01My opinion on the ordinance is that it's complete nonsense and that it should be torn up and thrown out.
29:08That's my opinion, my personal opinion on the ordinance.
29:11You know, people forget the kind of absolute disintegration that was happening.
29:16Ms. Manmohan Singh's second term was really of, you know, it was such an age of disappointment.
29:22Manmohan Singh was, in fact, quite paralyzed in this last couple of years of UPA2.
29:29Because the UPA2 government was so tainted with corruption and there was quite a bit of backseat driving on Mr. Manmohan Singh as prime minister.
29:39In fact, we ran a cover story saying Dr. Doolittle with Dr. Manmohan Singh on the cover.
29:46Manmohan Singh became such a bad word, the most corrupt government, it was controlled by Sonia Gandhi.
29:54And India was looking for a leader.
29:56They wanted a corruption free, India.
29:59They wanted a leader who was strong.
30:01They wanted a leader who could deliver.
30:03The opposition then begins to highlight Narendra Modi, who's then chief minister,
30:07and his ability to vocalize and take over the BJP leadership during that particular period.
30:14And it also happened at a time when the BJP was desperate in looking for a leader who could replace the Vajpayee Advani generation.
30:25And he was at the right time, at the right place.
30:28And he gave out the right impulses.
30:31India Today runs a bi-annual Mood of the Nation poll.
30:36We've been running it for over two decades.
30:38The idea was to just dip into what people were thinking.
30:42And that's where he saw the emergence of Mr. Modi coming in.
30:46A politician from the state, who had been very successful in improving the economic well-being of his state,
30:54to come into national politics.
30:56Mr. Modi was seen as the man who actually represented the best of modernity at that particular point.
31:06And Gujarat was seen as a model of what India could do.
31:11Because he says, I will change things, I will bring you development, I will make it faster, I will do things better.
31:16It's enough of the kind of corruption that was going on.
31:19You need a clean government, and Mr. Modi spelled hope at that time.
31:23And, a large section of India rallied to say, look, we need a change. We need to break through, as a country.
31:48a country and he probably was the best hope and that took the place.
31:53That propels Mr. Modi to center stage and suddenly to the center.
32:00I am Narendra Damodavras Modi, I am a savior.
32:16This was the first time in 25 years we were getting a single majority government.
32:21And so he had really conquered India.
32:24And the best way to project him was like an emperor.
32:30And the next decade will define India that one would call as the Second Republic.
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