New Delhi: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday moved to gag his party MPs, telling them not to air individual views to the media and to let only party spokespersons to do the talking.

Just back from London where he faced black flag demonstrators over his handling of brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in India-held Jammu and other similarly heinous crimes against women generally, Modi presided at a cabinet meeting where the punishment for child rape was proposed as death penalty.

His party ministers in Jammu had led rallies against police investigations into the rape and murder of the child. In Uttar Pradesh, a party MLA accused of rape appeared invincible before the media before nationwide protests led to his arrest.

Modi was addressing MPs and MLAs of the Bharatiya Janata Party via video chat through his personal NaMo App. This was a day after former foreign minister Yashwant Sinha, a bitter critic of the prime minister, resigned from the party.

“The levers of governance should be moved for issues of larger public interest keeping the principle of ‘sarvajan hitaaya, sarvajan sukhaaya’ (that which benefits everyone will bring happiness to everyone) rather than to push individual interests. If you push individual interests you will find the levers of governance stuck, whereas it will move for larger interests,” he said, in a significant statement to his partymen a year before the general elections.

That warning was also accompanied by another advice, that partymen should desist from commenting on “every socio-political or cultural matter”, from which the media would report the most catchy “masala bits”. He added that they should also desist from blaming the media later for doing so.

“The media is doing its job, you should do yours of serving the people. Designated spokespersons of the party will comment on issues as and when necessary. If everyone comments on everything then the conversation around issues change, this harms the country, the party and hurts our own personal image. In the last few years I saw that in the 16th Lok Sabha there were 8-10 MPs from our party who had this habit but after I spoke to them they desisted from it and the party was spared any humiliation in public as a result,” he said.

Prime Minister Modi’s outreach to party MPs and MLAs was also in the manner of a pep talk as the party gears up for a tough electoral year, with Karnataka going to polls in May, and Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh going to polls in November-December.

Published in Dawn, April 23rd, 2018