2014: The Election That Changed India (41 page)

Fact or fiction, the chaiwallah story had acquired a life of its own. As always with Modi’s campaign, the choreography and use of technology was brilliant. The first Chai pe Charcha event took place on 12 February 2014 from the Iskcon tea stall in Ahmedabad. It was relayed live in 1000 tea stalls in 300 cities, all connected by video conference. Modi would appear on a giant screen at each stall with a cup of a tea in hand, taking selected questions from the CAG website. ‘We created a truly multi-media event that played out on television, Internet, mobile and DTH,’ says Kishore.

The theme for the first ‘charcha’ was Modi’s favourite subject—
good governance. In March, on International Women’s Day, Modi’s second discussion over ‘chai’ was on women’s safety and empowerment. Modi sat in a tea stall in Delhi, a city which in the aftermath of the anti-rape protests was a perfect location for the subject. The third and final charcha was at the end of March, from Vidarbha in Maharashtra, where the conversation was on farmmer’s suicides in a region where agrarian distress was a major concern. ‘The locations, the topics, all were chosen with an eye on what makes news,’ says a Team Modi member. Using satellite technology, the three Chai pe Charcha events touched 500 cities and 4000 locations—the messaging had been scaled up in typical Modi style. Interestingly, one of the country’s largest corporates, Videocon, loaned their field staff to set up the infrastructure for the Chai pe Charcha events. This again was quintessential Team Modi—plan in-house and then get an outside vendor with expertise to execute the project.

I didn’t find the content of the charchas particularly news worthy. The questions asked had been carefully vetted. Most of the time, Modi would give lengthy answers, and no cross-questions were posed. As a journalistic exercise or an exercise in democratic questioning of a politician, it didn’t really work. As a public relations ploy, though, it was a cracking success. Modi, the humble ‘chaiwallah’, was aspiring to be the country’s prime minister—it was a classic poverty-to-power script that even Salim–Javed couldn’t have bettered.

I realized just how effective Chai pe Charcha had been while covering the elections in south Bangalore. I was trying to get the usual vox pop on the street, asking people what they thought of Modi. At a local restaurant, a group of young men smiled at me and said, ‘We are all with Modi,’ and then holding up cups of tea, they exulted, ‘Time for Chai pe Charcha!’ If, in the heart of south Indian coffee country, tea was the flavour of the season, you knew something unique was happening.

On 5 March, the Election Commission sounded the bugle for the sixteenth general elections. A nine-phase poll would be held from 7 April to 10 May, with the counting scheduled for 16 May. We had commissioned another election tracker in the week leading up to the announcement—once again, it showed the NDA steadily inching up, now crossing the 240-seat mark. The UPA was in danger of falling further behind. A Modi-led government now seemed inevitable. The only question raised in the television studio was whether Modi would have enough allies to form a coalition government, or would he be isolated like Vajpayee was in 1996, because of his ‘communal’ tag. On our expert panel, P. Sainath, the distinguished journalist, made a memorable remark. ‘Rajdeep, once the BJP crosses 220 seats, it will become a secular party for everyone!’

Prophetic words. Just a week before the big election announcement, Ram Vilas Paswan joined the NDA. It was a psychologically important moment. Paswan, after all, had left the NDA in 2002 over the Gujarat riots, demanding Modi’s resignation. Now, the Dalit leader from Bihar was sharing a stage with the man whom he once accused of ‘dividing’ the country.

The backstory to Paswan’s re-entry into the NDA fold is indicative of how the die was being cast. For months, Paswan had been trying to forge a grand ‘secular’ alliance in Bihar with Lalu Prasad and the Congress. Lalu wouldn’t take his calls, the Congress was undecided. Then, one evening, Paswan met Bihar BJP leader Shahnawaz Hussain on a flight. ‘Why don’t you consider joining the NDA—we may be able to give you a better deal,’ Hussain told him.

Paswan prevaricated at first but his son Chirag grabbed at the idea. The dashing young man had tried his hand at Hindi films, failed, and was now looking for a break in the family business of politics. ‘Modi is winning the elections,’ Chirag told his father. ‘Let’s just join the right side this time.’ When I interviewed Paswan for a programme, it was his son who did all the talking. The pro-Modi generation gap was showing here as well!

Getting Paswan on board suited the RSS too. Part of the Sangh’s strategy was to woo as many Dalit leaders as possible to their
side—Udit Raj in Delhi, Ramdas Athawale in Maharashtra were all brought on board. ‘We wanted to create a sense of a pan-Hindu identity without saying so openly,’ admits a BJP strategist.

More allies quickly followed. From Maharashtra came an important farmer leader, Raju Shetty. Just weeks earlier, Shetty had come to see me and said he had an offer to join the AAP. I later asked him why he had switched to the Modi camp. ‘In rural Maharashtra, there is no AAP. The only person the rural youth want to listen to is Modi!’ he said. The deal was stitched by the Maharashtra BJP leader Gopinath Munde.

The BJP also tried to strike a secret deal with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) leader Raj Thackeray. In the 2009 elections, Raj’s presence had cost the BJP–Sena alliance around eight seats because he split their vote. Gadkari was assigned the task of wooing Raj. The meeting was fixed in a five-star hotel in central Mumbai. ‘The only problem was that as we entered the hotel lift, a journalist saw us. The meeting was no longer secret,’ Raj told me later. The Shiv Sena, which was engaged in a family war with the MNS, wouldn’t allow the deal to go through. But an agreement was still reached—Raj would at least support the idea of Modi as prime minister.

Raj, unlike his cousin, the very earnest-looking Udhav, was charismatic. He had modelled himself on his uncle, Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray. Like Balasaheb, Raj enjoyed the good things of life—beer, cigars and an enviable DVD library of old movies; he also had an impressively large collection of aftershaves. The Great Dane which guarded his residence seemed to trumpet his tough style. We had common friends, most notably Sachin Tendulkar. Raj loved play-acting before the camera. He would be warm and friendly in conversation, but the moment the camera was switched on, he would become openly hostile. In an interview we did during the elections, he kept asking me to ‘keep quiet’, ‘sit back’ and ‘behave yourself’. The moment the interview was over, he laughed, ‘Arre, Rajdeep, did you like my style,
maza aya
? I am sure you will get huge TRPs for this interview!’ It was, as they would say in Mumbai, ‘full-on drama’.

That every seat mattered for the BJP was confirmed when the
party decided to allow its former Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa to return to the fold. For months, Yeddyurappa, who had been tangled in corruption charges, had been kept waiting. Advani was against allowing him back into the BJP. Modi had no such compunctions. ‘If Yeddyurappa can get us even one or two extra seats in Karnataka, it’s worth it,’ was the verdict. He was, after all, still the party’s most powerful Lingayat face and mass leader.

Yeddyurappa, his forehead perpetually adorned with sandalwood and fingers crowded with rings, like so many Indian politicians, is a great believer in astrologers and gurus. During one meeting, he introduced me to a gent who looked a bit like one of the less pleasant creatures from Tolkein’s
Lord of the Rings
. ‘This man can predict your future,’ he assured me. It was a bit surreal. I had gone to interview a powerful politician but was instead given a discourse in palmistry and planetary perambulations.

Perhaps the political stars were with Modi in 2014 and the netas could foresee the future. Smaller parties from the north-east also joined the NDA. But the big prize came from Andhra Pradesh when Chandrababu Naidu, another former chief minister, formally shook hands with the BJP. This alliance had been in the making for months. Naidu, we were told, was desperate because he was running out of cash in a state where money plays a major role at election time. His great rival, Jagan Reddy, by contrast, was flush with funds. Naidu needed Modi for his political survival.

The journey of Naidu reflects how no one can be written off in Indian politics easily. Between 1999 and 2004, Naidu, the bearded, trim, industry-friendly, tech-savvy creator of ‘cyber’ Hyderabad, was one of the most powerful politicians in the country and a crucial ally for the Vajpayee-led NDA. The business dailies gushed over him as the CEO of Andhra Pradesh, a man who was driving Hyderabad’s IT superpower dream. He had virtually forced the NDA to call an early election in 2004, a move that proved fatal for him. The moment he lost the election, the world suddenly turned against him. When he was in power, we would all queue up to interview him; out of power, he was ignored. Whenever he’d call to say, ‘Let’s meet,’ I,
too, found myself making excuses. Political Delhi is a ruthless city and an out-of-office Naidu just didn’t make news.

But I did meet him in early 2014 while he was negotiating an alliance with the BJP. ‘Modi is a very far-sighted leader,’ he told me. ‘We need to come together to defeat the Congress which has divided my state.’ I asked him whether his claim to be a ‘secular’ politician would take a knock if he joined a Modi-led NDA. ‘At the moment, the challenge before us is to save Andhra Pradesh,’ was the response. Modi’s past was being quietly buried by his one-time political adversaries.

At one stage, Modi had hoped that Jayalalithaa, too, would join his team, but she wanted to be the captain herself. With limited options, the BJP plumped for actor-turned-politician Vijayakanth as the chief prop for an alliance in Tamil Nadu. Vijayakanth’s Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK) was a typical example of a New Age small regional party, available, we were told, to the highest bidder. These parties are often one-person shows with small but well-defined pockets of influence that enable them to bargain with larger parties from a position of relative strength. Vijayakanth, for example, had won around 10 per cent votes in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, enough to make him a potential ‘swing’ factor. ‘He will negotiate with everyone and then will go with whoever gives him the best money deal,’ is how one Tamil journalist explained Vijayakanth’s politics.

The BJP was a minor force in Tamil Nadu. It had won just seven seats from the state in fifteen previous Lok Sabha elections. But that didn’t stop Modi from addressing major rallies in Chennai. Or from meeting Tamil superstar Rajinikanth in April 2014, just ahead of polling in the state. The meeting was projected as a courtesy call but was obviously much more than that. Rajinikanth described Modi as a ‘strong leader’ and a ‘good friend’. ‘The Rajini–Modi photo op may not have given us extra votes in Tamil Nadu, but we were able to send out a message across the country that even the most popular face of south India was effectively endorsing him,’ claims a BJP strategist.

The pan-India appeal was what Modi was constantly seeking. Speaking to him a few days after the Tamil Nadu alliance was sealed, I sensed that he saw an enlarged NDA as crucial to his self-image as a genuine ‘national’ leader.
‘Yeh political punditon ko lagta tha ki koi hamein join nahin karega . . . ki Modi untouchable hai. Ab yeh kya kahenge?’
(Political pundits thought no one would join us, that Modi is an untouchable. Now, what will they say?), he said to me on one of our calls. Modi will not concede it, but he had been anguished by his years of political ‘isolation’; now, he finally felt politically ‘acceptable’ and his rehabilitation was tinged with pique.

This search for wider acceptability even led Modi to reach out to Muslims. Our election surveys were consistently showing that Muslims still remained very wary of the BJP prime ministerial candidate. Zafar Sareshwala, Modi’s gnome-like, media-friendly Muslim face from Gujarat, was assigned the task. Zafar has a strong bond with Hindi film writer Salim Khan and his actor son Salman. Salim had been in touch with Modi since 2009 and the two had struck a friendship. Salman, Hindi cinema’s box office king, was more wary. ‘I am not politically inclined at all,’ the actor had once told me. We had double-dated together once in college; while I had grown old and grey, the six-pack star remained the eternal eighteen-year-old.

It was Salim who persuaded Salman to make the trip to Ahmedabad. Salman’s film
Jai Ho
was releasing on 24 January and the actor was on a punishing promotional campaign. Modi suggested 14 January, the date of Gujarat’s famous Uttarayan kite-flying festival, for a meeting. The moment he arrived in Gujarat, Salman was treated like an honoured state guest. The astute political salesman, ever alert for a headline-grabbing opportunity, Modi took Salman on a kite-flying outing. Salman in a Being Human T-shirt flying a kite next to Modi—it was the ideal photo op the BJP leader craved for, even if Salman stopped short of endorsing him as prime minister. ‘To have a popular icon like Salman standing next to Modi helped us a lot when we were trying to convince Muslims to give Modi a chance,’ claims Sareshwala. The kite-flying happened in a
Hindu-dominated area of Ghatlodia (no Muslim comes here, claimed Zafar). The photo op was now being projected as a momentary breaking of the infamous invisible ‘borders’ that divide many of Gujarat’s towns between Hindu and Muslim quarters.