How Modi is simply crushing Manmohan: I&B Ministry unveils its latest analytic tool

The analysis of perception in the foreign media has a new metric: Word count

And according to the most recent calculations by the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is head and shoulders above his predecessor Manmohan Singh.

The Economic Times reports that during the first state (of the prime ministerial term) to the US, “27,639 words were written in 31 articles” during Modi’s maiden state visit in Septmeber last year, while “7,596 words” were written in eight articles when Singh visited the US in 2009. Compare this to former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao’s US visit in 1994 that only received 1,825 words split across two articles.

What this quoting of numbers fails to account for is an alternate thread of analysis: That perhaps longer articles are on their way out. After all, the articles that covered Modi were on average, 890 words long; Rao, 912 and Singh, nearly 950.

Nevertheless, citing an I&B Ministry report titled ‘Comparative coverage analysis of the PM’s foreign visits and visits of international leaders’, the article also refers to a publication-by-publication comparison of coverage of Modi and Singh’s US visits. While the Guardian gave Modi 3,795 words, his predecessor received 1,408; The Wall Street Journal  lavished 1,407 words for Modi, as against 883 words for Singh; New York Times had 6,432 words on Modi in contrast to only 2,038 words on Singh; and the Washington Post gave Modi 1,326 words, while expending a mere 479 words on Singh.

The report in The Economic Times also lists the word count rating of President Barack Obama’s two state visits to India. It mentions that during Obama’s January 2015 visit to India, “the top 10 TV news channels dedicated 255 hours of relentless coverage to him, while in 2010, when he visited India during the UPA regime, the coverage was just about for 82 hours”.

It is unclear whether or not these statistics take into account the fact that Obama’s visit in 2015 was firstly, an unprecedented second state visit by a US president and secondly, a visit that included being chief guest at the Republic Day parade.

What is undeniable however, is that Modi’s foreign outreach has been far more energetic than his predecessor’s, kicking off even before he has set foot in an aircraft. His Twitter (and in the case of China, Weibo) greetings to his host nation before a visit are de rigueur now, so too is his regular stream of tweets that makes each state visit appear to be a huge deal. But it doesn’t stop at social media.

A May report in The Times of India pointed out that Modi’s China visit saw him visit three cities and undertake 25 engagements in three days, while the former prime minister embarked on a four-day visit to the Middle Kingdom in 2008, where he had 10 engagements in Beijing.

“Similarly when Singh visited US in 2009, he visited only 1 city and held 15 engagements. During his trip to US in 2014, (excluding the UN segment), Modi visited 2 cities and had 33 engagements, including the historic MSG address,” said a government official to The Times of India.

The nearly two-decade age gap between the former and present prime ministers notwithstanding, Modi’s foreign visits, since taking office, have always had a more big-event feel than Singh’s more stoic almost-professorial foreign interactions. In terms of effectiveness too, as this article in Business Standard highlights , “a total of 57 bilateral treaties/conventions/agreements were signed” during Modi’s first seven months, compared to 22 and 37 bilateral treaties during the first year of UPA-I and UPA-II respectively.

All of which probably explains why the foreign media felt the need to lavish so much more attention on Modi.