2014: The Election That Changed India (22 page)

Chauhan was almost, in fact, being pushed by the Advani camp as a more acceptable alternative to Modi. In a speech in Gwalior, Advani suggested that Chauhan’s achievements in Madhya Pradesh were, to some extent, greater than Modi. ‘He has turned a backward, BIMARU state into a developed one, Modi has inherited a healthy state,’ he claimed. He even likened Chauhan’s understated style to Vajpayee’s.

Ever-smiling, self-effacing and courteous, the fifty-five-year-old Chauhan was a man with few enemies. If Modi had an aversion to an intrusive media, Chauhan went out of his way to cultivate journalists. Many journalists, including me, would often get invites to attend functions in Bhopal. ‘We’ll organize everything,
aap bas aa jaiye
[you just have to come],’ he would promise. I did not avail of any such junket, but those who did tell me that Chauhan was the perfect host.

But if Chauhan had any prime ministerial ambitions, he had carefully masked them. I asked him once about Advani equating him with Vajpayee. ‘
Main toh Advaniji ko bahut adar karta hoon par mein toh ek sadharan karyakarta hoon’
(I respect Advaniji a lot, but at the end of the day, I am a humble worker), he said with his characteristic humility. And then reminded me once again that I must visit him in Bhopal soon.

But any attempt to drag in Chauhan as a prime ministerial option was never going to gain any traction. The leadership of the BJP and the RSS had made up its mind and wasn’t going to concede an inch. The Modi decision was irreversible. ‘Frankly, some of us were just tired of Advaniji’s constant nitpicking. We even felt that if he wants to resign and leave the party, let him—we were done with his petulance,’ a senior BJP leader told me.

Within the BJP, the Advani–Sushma group was now labelled the ‘160–180 club’—those who believed that the BJP could not cross a certain threshold in a general election. Their calculation was that
with a maximum of 180 seats (the BJP’s best-ever performance had been 182 seats in 1999 in the aftermath of the Kargil elections), a Modi-led BJP would not be able to get allies and the party would be forced to look for an alternative leadership.

The Modi camp had their own numerical counter. ‘Mission 272-plus’ became the new buzzword, signifying a desire to win a clear majority in the general elections. Modi is partial to sharp, catchy slogans. When his aides came up with Mission 272 as the goal for 2014, he added the ‘plus’ word. ‘We must think positive. The more we aim for, the more we will get!’ he told his team.

Some of his supporters were more modest, looking at 200 plus as their initial aim. ‘Once we cross 200, we will get a rush of allies,’ was Jaitley’s view. The 272-plus number, though, had been pasted on the war room of Team Modi in Gandhinagar. The run chase was about to begin.

A key member of this Team Modi was Prashant Kishore, a young US-trained public health professional. I met the thirty-six-year-old Bihar-born Kishore to get under the skin of the Modi campaign. He told me he had been the head of a UN mission in Africa and was working on a UN project on malnutrition when he visited Gujarat for the first time for fieldwork in early 2011. ‘I guess it was a case of instant attraction because the chief minister told me he wanted me in his team and I readily agreed,’ he says.

Kishore was a policy strategist with a passion for technology and statistical data. His tasks were well defined—build a crack team of back-room boys who would take the Modi campaign to another level by staging high-profile events. The team’s first major election event was the 3D campaign in the 2012 Gujarat assembly elections (see chapter 9 for more). The 2012 assembly elections, in fact, would serve as a trailer in many ways for the general election campaign to follow. ‘We first commissioned detailed surveys for the Gujarat assembly elections in mid-2012 and then began to build for the general elections from January 2013 itself. We used the data collected to help shape the Modi campaign,’ says Kishore.

The database built by the Modi team was truly formidable. On
television, during our election programming, we would do national poll surveys with sample sizes in the range of around 15,000 to 20,000 respondents and feel satisfied. The Modi team had gone many steps beyond us. Its survey in January 2013, for example, had a sample size running into several lakhs and a detailed break-up of voting preferences, according to caste, community, age group. ‘I won’t reveal any secrets, but I promise you that our surveys would make your analysis look very limited,’ claimed Kishore (of course, what he wouldn’t say was just how expensive such exercises can be!).

I later found out that the BJP election surveys were supervised by a US-based agency, Penn Schoen Berland, one of the world’s leading political campaign and market research groups that had also been involved in the Obama presidential election. This was perhaps the first time in the history of an Indian election that an American company was so deeply involved in poll surveys. ‘It only proves the scale of our ambition. We wanted to get the best that money could buy,’ is how a BJP leader described their choice of pollsters.

In June 2013, Kishore set up a formal group called Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) with an office in Gandhinagar. The group claimed to be non-partisan, but its objective was clear—widen Modi’s appeal by showcasing him as a governance icon. Initially, it had just eight to ten full-time employees, but by the time the general elections campaign really kicked off in February 2014, the numbers had swollen to over 200 recruits, some of them working on short-term assignments. Many of the full-time employees at CAG were young, urban professionals who had given up secure jobs to work on the Modi campaign. Akhil Handa, a twenty-nine-year-old IIT Delhi alumnus, was typical. Bright and eager, Akhil had worked with JP Morgan as an investment banker in Hong Kong and was earning a salary running into a few crores, before chucking it all up in mid-2013 to join the Modi campaign. ‘I was just tired of seeing my foreign peers be so down on India. I realized we needed change and felt Modi was the man to effect that change,’ he told me.

Akhil was not alone. One of the striking features of Team Modi was how young many of them were. IIM and IIT graduates, lawyers
and accountants—they symbolized the energies of a new, younger India. Conventional wisdom was that the educated young had become cynical of public life and had switched off from politics. The back-room team of Modi challenged that assumption.

Interestingly, Rahul, too, had tried to reach out to the educated young India while building his election team. But there was a crucial difference. Modi’s young guns were not expected to involve themselves in micromanaging political strategy. Their task was to operate in more familiar territory—technology innovations, Internet, social media, made-for-TV events, statistical data interpretation. The nitty-gritty of election management—be it campaign planning, door-to-door campaigns or ticket distribution—was left to the full-time RSS and BJP political workers. In Rahul’s case, his Ivy League ‘boys’ actually took over the task of running the election campaign instead of leaving that to the older, more experienced, Congress leaders.

Not surprisingly, a prime target group for CAG was the ‘youth’. In June, CAG held a closed-door meeting on ‘Youth and Leadership’ in Ahmedabad where the guest speakers included former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and the HDFC group chairman Deepak Parekh. Modi sat in the audience through the day just listening to the speeches. In October, a one-day youth summit called Manthan was organized with the stated goal of setting the agenda for ‘young India’ in the 2014 elections. With an aggressive Facebook campaign, Manthan was able to attract lakhs of visitors to its site. ‘We invited several leaders for the summit, even Rahul Gandhi, but he chose not to attend,’ claims Kishore. Modi did come, speak and, predictably, was the showstopper. A journalist friend in the audience described the mood as akin to a rock concert.

It was clear by now that Modi had captured hearts and minds in urban India, especially among the young. A clever mix of town hall-type speaking engagements and well-planned rallies in the cities was making the difference. By September 2013, when Modi formally took over as the BJP prime ministerial candidate, a mini wave was already building up in his favour across urban India. The month of Modi’s coronation as PM candidate was also the period
when the rupee plunged to its lowest level to the dollar, and retail inflation was in double digits. The faltering economy had created an anti-UPA feeling in urban India in particular. Modi symbolized and channelized the anger against the government. ‘He was the right man at the right place with the right rhetoric,’ is how one senior UPA minister explained the rise of Modi in 2013.

But to win a general election and achieve ‘Mission 272-plus’, the magic needed to spread well beyond the bright lights of the metros. ‘Yes, we had taken elements from a Barack Obama-style presidential campaign, but we needed to innovate and fine-tune it to a diverse country like India,’ is how one Modi aide put it.

The findings of a nationwide survey done by Team Modi in the first half of 2013 had slightly worried them. The data showed that while Modi enjoyed instant recall and huge support in towns and cities, there wasn’t an immediate connect when it came to rural India. Taking the Modi campaign buzz to rural India was the next big, and even more difficult, challenge for Team Modi. The November–December assembly elections in states with a large rural population like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh would be a test case. ‘We knew we had a hit film in the multiplexes. Now we needed to spread the message to single-screen cinemas in small towns and villages too,’ says the Modi aide.

On 31 October 2013, Modi formally launched the ‘Statue of Unity’ programme—a project whose stated aim was to build the largest ever statue in the world, a 240-metre bronze statue of Sardar Patel, directly facing the Narmada Dam. The real target was to mobilize people from across India on a ‘nationalistic’ platform. Modi had been an unabashed admirer of the Sardar, Gujarat’s tallest political leader during the freedom struggle. Mahatma Gandhi had always been a national icon; Sardar was seen as a rooted son of the soil, a farmers’ leader who had evolved into the ‘Iron Man of India’ as the country’s first home minister. There was also a parallel narrative,
especially in Gujarat, that the Congress had been less than fair to Sardar Patel and that he, not Nehru, should have been India’s first prime minister.

Appropriating Patel’s legacy suited Modi. By taking on the mantle of the modern-day Sardar, he could take on the Gandhi–Nehru family and also boost his own image as a decisive leader. The fact that Patel had been a diehard Congressman (he was president of the Gujarat Congress for nearly three decades) or that he had banned the RSS after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 did not really matter. When there is an election to be won, history can be selective and expendable. Ironically, Modi’s original icon Guru Golwalkar had been arrested in the aftermath of the Gandhi assassination. But Golwalkar was an RSS folk hero; Patel was a national figure. Golwalkar worked for Modi in his previous avatar as RSS pracharak; Patel fitted a prime minister-in-waiting. Modi’s choice, then, was dictated by strategic pragmatism, not ideological affinity.

As was becoming typical, Modi came up with an innovative idea to bolster this strategy. He suggested that the Patel statue could be built by starting a donation drive across India, with a special focus on rural India. ‘Villagers can give us iron in the form of used farm instruments. It will be a way of getting farmers to connect with us,’ Modi told his aides. So, while ‘Unity Run’ marathons were organized in the cities, in rural India, there was a more direct campaign initiated to link Modi to the Sardar. A Loha Sangrahana Samiti was set up by the Sardar Vallabhai Ekta Trust to collect iron tools from across 7000 villages. Micromanaging the project would be the CAG team.

Modi was now in overdrive. The town-hall concept had served its purpose. The ‘Modi for PM’ presidential-style campaign had entered phase two and the need was to reach out to wider audiences. ‘We knew the core Hindutva vote would stand with Modi because of his past reputation. What we needed was the “plus” vote, the incremental vote that can make all the difference in an election,’ is how the strategy was explained to me by a Modi adviser.

Just days after being officially made the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Modi addressed his first ‘mega rally’ in Haryana’s Rewari.

The ex-servicemen were one constituency waiting to be tapped. Many of them were angry that the UPA had not delivered on its ‘one rank, one pension’ promise. Others were disappointed that the UPA hadn’t taken a tough stand on Pakistan. Retired generals would often come on prime-time television shows calling for ‘war’ with Pakistan.

One of the organizers of the Rewari rally was General V.K. Singh, who had retired as army chief after getting into a public row with the Manmohan Singh government. General Singh had political ambitions (he would eventually contest the Lok Sabha polls on a BJP ticket, win by the second highest margin after Modi and become a minister). Modi wanted the support of the men in uniform. It was a perfect match. In a fiery speech, he claimed that the country’s security problem was not on the borders, but in Delhi. ‘Till we have an efficient, patriotic government in Delhi, it doesn’t matter how capable our defence forces are!’ he thundered. No, he didn’t call for a war with Pakistan, and yes, he did conveniently forget the 1971 war under Indira Gandhi’s leadership when referring to military achievements. But the assembled crowd was impressed.
‘Dil se bol rahe hain’
(He is speaking from the heart), one of them told our reporter. If Modi was making a dent in Haryana, a state with a limited BJP base, then clearly there was a mood swing.