From his natty formals to the extempore speech which quoted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s statements six times to prove how he was a step ahead in reforms and governance, or even quoting Mahatma Gandhi, Narendra Modi was at his hard-selling best at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas on Wednesday.

Modi—by his own admission the only Chief Minister, along with Sheila Dikshit, to have attended all editions of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, marketed Gujarat as the “growth engine of the country”. Rattling out statistics and ensuring that he didn’t read out from the text of the written speech, yet reminding all that there is one, Modi made the Prime Minister his reference point in explaining the Gujarat “success story”.

“The Prime Minister and the Planning Commission set out a growth target of 10.2 per cent in the last five-year plan, we achieved 10.6 per cent,” the Gujarat Chief Minister said. He then went on to quote the Prime Minister on issues like “education, India development foundation initiative and the PIO university” to aid his marketing of the state as an ideal investment destination for NRIs and to suggest that the state had made rapid strides in “reducing dropout rates, empowerment of women et al”.

Though Modi expressed his willingness to offer Gujarat as a destination for setting up the proposed PIO university, he slipped on the fact that the bidding for the same has been over long ago.

Later, Modi made his press conference in the afternoon an “interaction session” mostly with the NRIs. When Abdul Qadir, an NRI from Saudi Arabia, asked “whether the state has any incentives for the NRIs who invest in Gujarat”, Modi said: “We do not believe in the policy of giving incentives, which is not a sustainable model in the long run. Rather we would give favourable environment for the industries to come up.” More importantly, Modi made it a point to quote “Qadir bhai’s” comment that Gujarat had made “significant development” in the past five years” while answering the next few questions.

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