Narendra Modi's Enormous Ambitions

Assessing Narendra Modi's enormous ambitions, for India and himself.

-  Tom Lasseter & Kartikay Mehrotra

ON the evening of Feb. 17, a white sedan pulled up to Shastri Bhawan, a drab brick-and concrete government building in central New Delhi, and parked at the front gate.

As with most edifices of bureaucracy in India, the streets outside of Shastri Bhawan, named for India’s second prime minister, are a jumble of activity during the day: people shuffling by with documents in their hands as shoeshine men wait for business, auto rickshaws honking their way through traffic, snack vendors tending pans of frying lentils.

But at 9 p.m., with a sliver of a moon overhead, the tree-lined boulevards were quiet. Two men climbed out of the car— brothers who’d formerly worked in the building in positions with the official title of “multitasking staff,” a lowly position often referred to as “peon” in India’s stratified bureaucracy.

Lalta Prasad, 36, and Rakesh Kumar, 30, were jobless men who both left school after the 10th grade. With fake government passes in hand, the pair strolled in like they owned the place, went upstairs to the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, and began photocopying piles of documents, according to police reports.

Emerging two hours later with their illicit haul, they walked into the waiting arms of the cops. Prasad had a black bag slung over his right shoulder; inside was a stack of 95 pages ranging from a brief on “Further Opportunities in Sri Lanka” to assorted documents from the ministry’s Exploration Division. Kumar carried 109 pages, among them 38 ministry pages marked secret and two more about the national gas grid that were meant for the finance minister’s national budget speech.