To wrest the Golden Fleece any which way.

Although Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a "naturally gifted communicator", Modi's party the BJP lost recent assembly elections because the party lost the battle of getting its message across, wrote S Dhume. The Congress routed the BJP in Chhattisgarh, and was short of absolute majority in Rajasthan by one seat and in Madhya Pradesh by two seats. This was shocking because the BJP was ruling all three states with absolute majority, because these are Hindi states with large numbers of seats in parliament and because these are said to be part of the 'cow belt', a pejorative term to describe Hindus who support the BJP. Modi has not held even one press conference since he was elected. "Modi reached perhaps the nadir of this cossetted approach at an event in London earlier this year where he answered questions so obviously canned that they would have made a Soviet dictator blush. Sample: 'I have only this question for you -- from where do you get so much energy'." Modi has not hesitated to spend $920 million, Rs 65.9 billion, on foreign trips and advertisements, wrote I Marlow for Bloomberg. "The globe-trotting prime minister's 84 trips around the world cost roughly $280 million, while the government spent $640 million on promoting Modi's flagship projects and achievements, according to new government data." Foreign trips provide fantastic photo ops, even if the result is signing vague agreements to cooperate in the field of health or in exploration of outer space for peaceful purposes. "The less said about BJP's presence on social media the better: Over the past few years, the party's information technology cell has evolved into an instrument of intimidation and a conveyor belt of falsehoods," wrote Dhume. BJP supporters dismiss such charges with, "These are elite concerns. Real voters do not care about press conferences, spokespersons or Twitter trolls." Only "28 million Indians read an English newspaper in 2017" and 7.8 million use Twitter. Maybe, but "A tweet written in Paris could end up translated and published in a Hindi newspaper in Patna." The BJP has a core base which gives it a higher number of seats compared to its share of votes, wrote R Kishore. It may suit Modi to avoid being questioned by suppressing the mainstream media through threats and actual violence so that he can preach to the nation over the radio every month. His personal popularity may have dropped a tad but he is still favorite to hang on to power in the 2019 general elections. That, after all, is the Golden Fleece.