2014: The Election That Changed India (32 page)

That Modi and Adani shared a ‘special relationship’ is beyond doubt. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, when Modi was confronted by senior industry voices at a CII conference, Adani had stood by him and set up a parallel body of Gujarati businessmen, ‘The Resurgent Group of Gujarat’ (see chapter 1). News reports claimed that in the decade of Modi’s rule in Gujarat, Adani’s assets had grown twelve-fold to over Rs 35,000 crore, with interests in ports, power, coal and edible oil. At Adani’s son’s marriage, Modi had attended almost all the ceremonies, including flying down to Goa for the celebrations.

While the Ambanis had responded with legal notices, the Adanis had stayed mostly silent. ‘Gautambhai doesn’t want to get into a blame game with anyone,’ is what I was told. Which is why I was a little surprised when in April 2014, while the campaign was picking up steam, I got a call from a London-based businessman that Gautambhai was keen to do an interview. The reason for his anxiety was obvious. Now, it was no longer Kejriwal pointing fingers; even Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was attacking the Modi–Adani ‘nexus’ on land deals.

‘Can you fly down to Ahmedabad urgently tomorrow? We want to show you our port and then do an interview,’ I was told. I said it would not be possible since I was shooting elsewhere. I sent our national bureau chief, Bhupendra Chaubey, instead. Adani vigorously defended himself in the interview, saying he had got a clean chit from the courts and had received no special favours from Modi; he insisted that he was charging the BJP’s prime ministerial
candidate ‘commercial rates’ for use of the aircraft. ‘I am not the BJP’s or Modiji’s ATM machine—I have friends in all parties,’ said Gautambhai, in his heavily Gujarati-accented Hindi.

We thought we had an exclusive interview. As it turned out, Gautambhai gave nearly half a dozen interviews over the next forty-eight hours. For a self-confessed low-profile individual, the PR overdrive betrayed his anxiety at being caught in the midst of a political battle.

What is true, though, is that like all upwardly mobile business leaders, Gautambhai had struck friendships with politicians from different parties. He kept a steady equation with Congress leaders in Gujarat and beyond (a photograph of him with Robert Vadra at the Mundra port site also made it to the papers). Perhaps his closest friend in politics was NCP leader and UPA minister, Sharad Pawar. When a journalist friend went to interview Pawar once, he saw a relaxed Adani watching television with Pawar’s family in the adjoining room. The two would often dine at each other’s houses, and had reportedly even gone on a holiday together once. ‘People seem to forget that Gautambhai has as many business interests in Maharashtra as he does in Gujarat,’ an NCP leader told me. A senior Congressman from Maharashtra even claimed that the Adanis had ensured that Modi did not campaign aggressively or put up a tough candidate against Pawar’s daughter Supriya or the NCP’s high-profile minister Praful Patel.

Indeed, most corporates at election time prefer keeping their options open while funding political parties. In 2014, though, the balance of power had clearly shifted. No one wanted to divulge exact numbers, but one industrialist summed it up for me. ‘If in 2009, we gave sixty paise to the Congress and forty paise to the BJP, this time, it’s eighty paise to the BJP and twenty to the Congress.’ The 2014 election was perhaps the first time in Indian electoral history that the Opposition was getting more funding than the ruling party.

When a businesswoman met Sonia Gandhi at the height of the 2014 campaign in April, the Congress president looked troubled. ‘I
don’t think something like this has ever happened to the Congress party in any election,’ she said. ‘We are struggling to raise money.’

Motilal Vora, the octogenarian treasurer of the Congress party, was getting desperate. The Congress’s cash cow state in 2009 had been Andhra Pradesh, but its main fundraiser Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy was now dead. In Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan didn’t have the rugged ability of his predecessors to get the state’s powerful builder lobby to contribute to the party. Haryana and Karnataka were the only Congress-ruled states that could be tapped for funds. ‘Even individual Congress leaders who had acquired large personal wealth weren’t willing to help,’ claims one Congress office-bearer, adding, ‘the public was knocking us for being corrupt, but even this so-called corrupt party was short of cash.’

In fact, one senior Congress minister who had contested several elections rang up Vora seeking funding for his campaign. ‘But you are such a wealthy man, why do you need money?’ the beleaguered treasurer asked. ‘Well, every rupee counts!’ was the unashamed answer.

Ahmed Patel, who had handled the party’s funding for years, then stepped in. He rang up several top industrialists. One of them told him, ‘Yes, sir, we will definitely give money, but you know how business is at the moment.’ Another corporate leader who had felt unfairly drawn into a legal tangle by the CBI was more direct. ‘When I needed you, no one helped me. Now, how can you expect me to bail you out?’ One Congress MP jocularly remarked, ‘Even those who wanted to help would see the opinion poll figures and rush back home with the money. No one wants to waste cash on losers!’

By contrast, a senior BJP leader was receiving so much money that bundles of 1000-rupee notes were lined up along the walls at his house. There was so much cash floating around for the BJP that not only did it fund several candidates, some of it was eventually returned to the party coffers. ‘I had never seen anything like it. Not a single high net worth individual or corporate we contacted said no to us,’ the leader told me later. It wasn’t just the big corporates; even several small- and medium-size enterprises were willing to give the
BJP around Rs 10 to 20 crore each. Also, all corporates with large investments in Gujarat lined up firmly behind Modi. They included groups like the Ruias of Essar who had found themselves under the legal scanner in the 2G scam. Non-resident Indians, especially non-resident Gujaratis, were also willing to pump money into the BJP campaign.

Did the contrasting financial positions of the two main parties make a difference in the campaign? Yes, to some extent. Generally, parties like the Congress and the BJP have a ‘graded’ system—‘winnable’ candidates are provided a sum of around Rs 2 crore from the party funds, while the next category gets Rs 1 crore. The balance amount is expected to be raised by the candidates, with Rs 5 to 10 crore being the average cost for fighting an election (in states like Andhra and Maharashtra, it can go up to Rs 15 to 20 crore, but is less in north and east India; while urban seats are more expensive than rural ones).

‘We had to rely on our individual connections more than ever before to raise money,’ a defeated Congress MP told me. In contrast, the BJP told their candidates that any fund crunch would be compensated by the party. They would also not have to spend a single paisa on any Modi campaign in their constituency—the leader had a sufficient war chest to manage his entire campaign blitz.

With the campaign stretching over several months—remember, Modi was on the road for almost nine months—the ready availability of cash meant that there was no let-up in the intensity of the BJP campaign. The Congress funding began to dry up as the campaign wore on. By the last stage, it had become a one-way street as the BJP campaign reached a crescendo and the Congress became practically invisible.

So, how much did the two main parties actually spend? When I put this question to the two party treasurers, they would not reveal any figure—Piyush Goyal of the BJP at least laughed at the figures I threw at him; Vora of the Congress just stared blankly at me. Election expenses remain notoriously opaque. Only a few business houses have set up official electoral trusts to give money by cheque. Most
of the election money is generated through cash-rich businesses like real estate, liquor, stockbroking and mining.

At a rate of around Rs 8 to 10 crore per ‘winnable’ constituency plus other campaign expenses, the BJP had raised anywhere between Rs 4000 to 5000 crore—at least that’s my hunch, though Goyal insists it was much less. The Congress was probably a few thousand crores behind in the race this time. Given the mood in the country, the Congress would have almost certainly still lost badly. Money talks—but it can’t influence a wave election like that of 2014, it can only provide additional momentum. A few years ago, a prominent Congress politician from Andhra is believed to have spent more than Rs 70 crore on a by-election and still lost! As one corporate leader told me, ‘We didn’t decide this election, we only backed the right horse!’

I got a sense of the mood in the business community when in February I made a presentation on likely election scenarios to a group of foreign investors in Mumbai, and placed a clear Modi win as the top possibility. The prospect seemed to enthuse the gathering. ‘If Modi wins, the India story lives,’ said one of them effusively.

One of the investors, though, still seemed troubled. ‘Please tell me, is there any chance of another hung Parliament and a third-front prime minister after the elections?’ Mamata Banerjee had once again announced her intention to forge a federal front of non-Congress, non-BJP parties. And Jayalalithaa, too, had said she was in the prime ministerial race. If there was a prospect more nightmarish than Kejriwal for the business world, it was the revival of a khichdi sarkar.

Teen Deviyan
is a 1965 Bollywood film where Dev Anand, the hero, courts three women—Nanda, Simi Garewal and Kalpana. In early 2014, Lutyens’ Delhi would joke of how the next prime minister needed the support of at least two of three women leaders—Mamata, Jayalalithaa and Mayawati—to form a government. All three were expected to get between twenty and thirty seats, so any party or
pre-poll alliance that crossed 200 seats but was short of the 272-seat majority would need their support. ‘Just think of it, the prime minister will go crazy having to deal with them!’ a senior bureaucrat laughed.

Mamata, Jayalalithaa and Mayawati—women who have endured a brutally patriarchal world of Indian politics and have survived to play and to win. Scarred by their battles, what seems to unite them is a stern authoritarianism in their leadership styles, and being the centre of a personality cult that commands the reverence of their male cadres. The ladies are doughty, intolerant fighters, yet trapped in a way by the family honorifics of Didi, Amma and Behenji.

Of the troika, I know Mamata best. For some reason, Didi appeared to have a soft corner for me. She would call me over for tea, give me lengthy interviews and had offered me a Rajya Sabha seat, which I politely declined. She even cooked a Bengali meal for me once. The sight of the Bengal chief minister in the kitchen, her crumpled sari tied in a no-nonsense knot, sweat pouring from her brow, rushing between steaming pots of Bengali delicacies was, I must confess, more than a little disconcerting. The food—
macher jhol
,
aloo poshto
and
kosha mangsho
—was fit for a Durga Puja banquet. When we left that evening, she made a Trinamool leader (who was also mayor of Kolkata!), carry large packets of ice cream into the car. ‘Give it to the children, they will like it,’ she said. She wasn’t an easy person to say no to!

And yet, she was mercurial and moody, appearing almost bipolar at times. She could be warm and caring (every Puja she sends me a kurta), but also ferocious and short-tempered. In 2012, she agreed to do a show with us in Kolkata’s Town Hall on the completion of one year of the Trinamool Congress government. Our deputy editor at CNN-IBN, Sagarika Ghose, was anchoring the programme. When we began recording, Mamata’s mood appeared to be cheery. Barely ten minutes into the show, her attitude swung dramatically. A student asked her about her handling of the Park Street rape. It was enough for Mamata to flip. ‘You are a Maoist, this audience
is full of Maoists,’ she shouted in a manic manner and walked out, with Sagarika struggling to hold her back.

A year before, I had an even more bizarre experience when we chose Mamata as the CNN-IBN Politician of the Year for her stunning achievement in dismantling the left citadel in Bengal. Just a day before the function, Mamata rang me up to say that she would not attend. ‘I will not share a stage with Anna Hazare,’ she said emphatically. Anna had been chosen as the Indian of the Year for being the mascot of the anti-corruption movement. I pleaded with Mamata and promised her we would give away her award first so that she wouldn’t have to encounter Anna. She relented.

The next evening, she entered the Taj Palace Durbar Hall with a large contingent of Trinamool MPs. She seemed happy at all the attention being showered on her. We had tried to keep Anna away from her in a room next to the hall but couldn’t hold him there for long. The moment he entered and their paths crossed, Mamata blew a fuse. ‘You have not kept your promise, Rajdeep—I am leaving,’ she hollered. Dressed in my bandhgala, I ran after her right across the lobby of the five-star hotel, pleading with her to come back. Finally, as she was driving off in her blue Maruti, at the gate, I almost physically pulled her out. With a little help from Trinamool MP, Dinesh Trivedi, we escorted her back to the award ceremony. She received the award, gave a brief speech, smiled for the cameras and left. I don’t think the Taj has ever seen a scene quite like that.