2014: The Election That Changed India (42 page)

In February, Sareshwala organized a trade exhibition to showcase Muslim-owned businesses in Gujarat where Modi was the star attraction. ‘You must come and see what Modi is doing for the Muslims. You can even sit next to him on stage as a special invitee,’ he told me. I attended the function but preferred not to be on stage. In his brief speech, Modi spoke glowingly of Gujarat’s Kutch Muslim artisans and the community’s work ethos. ‘My government is here for you,’ he claimed. The audience, though, was dominated by wealthy property developers, restaurant owners and car dealers. The average Muslim, it seems, still saw Modi through the prism of 2002. He would clearly need to do much more than well-crafted photo ops to win their trust.

Modi, though, wasn’t too concerned that his pitch to the Muslim community had made only a limited headway. With small and large parties by his side, he was now heading a robust twenty-party-plus NDA alliance. The Congress, by contrast, was in danger of either gaining no new friends, or, in some instances, losing even its sitting MPs.

Jagdambika Pal, its senior UP MP and spokesperson, quit on the eve of the elections. The off-record reason he gave some journalists on the Congress beat for switching sides reflected poorly on the party. Apparently, he had been seeking an appointment with Rahul for weeks. ‘Every time I tried, some operator in his office would keep me waiting on the phone. I finally got tired of waiting!’ he claimed. He, like many Congress MPs, did not have direct access to Rahul nor his mobile number. But the truth is, Jagdambika, like so many others, just wanted to be on the winning side. The saying in UP, after all, is
‘Ugta suraj ko sab namaksar karte hain’
(All salute the rising sun).

The only new ally the Congress got was Lalu Prasad in Bihar, and even that was not without controversy. Rahul did not like Lalu. The RJD leader, he felt, represented an old-style politics of caste and
corruption that discomfited him. When he had spoken out against the ordinance that provided a reprieve to convicted MPs, it was leaders like Lalu who had been Rahul’s target. In the 2009 Lok Sabha and 2012 assembly elections in Bihar, Rahul had resisted a Congress–RJD tie-up. This time, too, he kept Lalu waiting.

Meeting Lalu at his Delhi residence as he waited for a nod from the Congress, I could sense his growing frustration. I said I wanted to interview him.
‘Arre, interview toh theek hai, par pehle bolne ko kuch hona chahiye’
(I can do an interview, but at least I should have something to say). I asked him what the problem was.
‘Arre, hamein kyon poochte ho, Rahul Gandhiji se poochiye’
(Why ask me, go and ask Rahul Gandhi). Lalu eventually waited for almost a month to seal the deal when he should have been out in the battlefield of Bihar.

The uneasy Rahul–Lalu equation summed up the Congress leader’s limited world view. For Rahul, Lalu was the village idiot, not a potential ally to do business with. Rahul failed to realize that under the cloak of the clown ticked a very sharp political brain. I had met Lalu for the first time in the early 1990s—a meeting of an English-educated south Bombay boy with a rustic Bihari. Our interview was fixed for 11 o’clock. I arrived at 11 a.m., only to be told that Lalu had meant 11 p.m. We set up for the interview in his official residence, only to be told that it would take place not in the house but in the cowshed in order to broadcast the right ‘effect’! The spitting, bellowing cowherd’s send-up of elite politics was part reality and part highly strategic performance. Interview over, Lalu tried to teach me how to milk a cow. ‘
Tum angrezi logon ko yeh sab seekhna chahiye’
(You anglicized folk should learn how to do these things), he told me with barely concealed contempt at my failed attempts.

Lalu had built his political reputation as a saviour of the minorities by arresting Advani during the 1990 rath yatra. And the source of his political appeal lay beyond just Muslims and his fellow Yadavs. In 1995, when he scored a big win in Bihar, he invited me to a late-night celebration. The garden at the chief minister’s bungalow had been converted into a song and dance soirée—the drink, too, was flowing. Sitting in a corner was an old man in a slightly torn shirt.

I went up to him and asked him what he was doing there. ‘I am a street vendor. Laluji has given an open invitation to all of us to come and celebrate here tonight,’ he told me. Then he said, tellingly,
‘Pehle toh hum chief minister bangle ko bahar se bhi dekh nahi sakte thhe, aaj Laluji ne toh hamein izzat di’
(Earlier, we couldn’t even see the chief minister’s house, now Lalu has given us respect).

Yet, Laloo’s drive for empowering backward castes quickly descended into a dark pit of corruption, criminality and family raj. I remember interviewing Rabri Devi the day she was sworn in as chief minister, with Lalu constantly prompting her from the sidelines. One sensed his time was up and the revolution he once championed had devoured him. And yet, one couldn’t help but admire his principled stand against majoritarian communalism through good times and bad. Call it my fondness for the underdog (or lovable crook), but Lalu for me was sui generis.

Rahul obviously didn’t share my affection for Lalu. But while he dithered on even this one alliance, Modi and the BJP pushed ahead with the ticket distribution. In a meeting with RSS leaders, the BJP strategists had made it clear—this time, winnability was the defining criteria, emotions had to be set aside. Predictably, the old order in the BJP made one last attempt to have its way. L.K. Advani, for example, wanted to move from his Gandhinagar seat and contest from Bhopal instead. He was worried, he told friends, that Modi would sabotage him in Gujarat, and preferred the ‘safety’ of Madhya Pradesh. The new BJP leadership held firm, calling it a bogus argument. ‘Advaniji was again trying to create a false conflict between Modi and Shivraj Chauhan—we would have none of it, ‘ a senior BJP leader told me. Advani had to stay put in Gandhinagar.

Another veteran BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, had even less luck. He was keen to contest from his hometown of Barmer in Rajasthan. The party had reluctantly agreed but Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje put her foot down. ‘His wife once filed an FIR against me, he has spoken ill of me. He cannot be given the ticket,’ she insisted.

Jaswant was always a bit of an odd man out in the BJP. A
former armyman who loved his Scotch and literature, he was a reminder—with his clipped British major accent delivered in his fruity baritone—almost a caricature, of a bygone colonial era. He had been forced out of the BJP in 2009 after writing a book which suggested that Jinnah, the founder of modern Pakistan, had been unfairly demonized. Even after he returned to the party, he had few friends left in the BJP. His only real ally, Vajpayee, was now too infirm to help him. At seventy-six, he was now part of the BJP’s past; Vasundhara was its present. His ticket was denied, which led him to leave the party. In the midst of his revolt, Jaswant gave me a notable sound bite, worthy of a redoubtable Rajput. ‘They think I am a fossil, but I am a proud fossil!’

‘If he had stayed in the party, we could have considered him for governor or even as ambassador to the US,’ a senior BJP leader later told me. The Jaswant episode highlights that, contrary to speculation, it wasn’t Modi who was unilaterally taking decisions on ticket distribution. In a collective exercise, state leaders were given a much greater say. But there were a few seats, especially in Gujarat, where Modi had veto power. One such seat was Ahmedabad east. A seven-time MP, the silver-tongued Harin Pathak represented one of the safest BJP seats in the country. But Modi was convinced that Pathak, who was close to Advani, was part of a group in Gujarat that had tried to undermine his authority. ‘I have given my life for this party when we were nothing in Gujarat, but you know how Modi is. He can be very vindictive,’ Pathak later told me ruefully. The seat was given instead to film star Paresh Rawal, whose dialogue delivery, many said, had a striking resemblance to that of Modi.

While the BJP had a surfeit of ticket aspirants, the Congress had a very different problem—in some states like Bengal, it wasn’t even finding enough candidates to contest. ‘If you know anyone who speaks good Bengali, let us know!’ one Congress leader told me jokingly. Worse, some of its sitting MPs, including Union ministers like Manish Tewari, didn’t even want to contest. While the tickets were being decided, Tewari was admitted to hospital complaining of chest pain. The official reason he gave us was, ‘I don’t think I can
stand up to the pace of an election campaign.’ While his health was a concern, Manish was also upset that the party hadn’t allowed him to contest from his preferred Chandigarh seat. With the Congress left with no allies in Tamil Nadu, finance minister Chidambaram also dropped out, pitching for his son to contest instead. ‘Mr Chidambaram isn’t sacrificing his seat—he is sacrificing his son instead,’ was the joke in the Congress headquarters.

Rahul, meanwhile, had pitched his own ‘novel’ idea to the party at its AICC session—a system of US-style primaries to select candidates in fifteen specific constituencies. ‘We must empower our grass-roots workers. Give them a say in who they want as their candidates,’ he told the AICC. In principle, it seemed like a bold innovation, designed to ‘open up’ the political system. In practice, it was a disaster—some sitting MPs objected to their constituencies being chosen for this, and there were familiar charges of bogus voting and infighting. ‘Of all the daft things we did, this was one of the stupidest. Instead of fighting an election, we were fighting amongst ourselves,’ a senior Congress leader later told me. He was right. India is not the US, and if a political experiment is to be attempted, it can’t be done on the eve of a crucial national election. The primaries were held in February and March even as the campaign was kicking off. Not even one out of the fifteen candidates chosen through the primary system won their election—the naivety of Rahul’s team was cruelly exposed yet again.

The ‘primary’ concept also exposed the widening gulf between Rahul and the old guard in the Congress. Ticket distribution in the Congress is a complex exercise aimed at faction management—the party distributes the tickets to various groups based on a traditional patron–client system. It was perhaps an archaic way of functioning, but many Congressmen felt it was the only system which worked. ‘In previous elections, Ahmedbhai [Ahmed Patel, Sonia’s political secretary] managed it all and we had clarity. But with Rahul, we were always second-guessing what he was planning to do next,’ a senior Congressman told me. Another veteran Congressman was more caustic. ‘When you fight an election, you give tickets based
on “winnability”—Rahul seemed to be handing out character certificates.’ Even here, there was no consistency. Ashok Chavan was given a ticket even though he hadn’t recovered from the Adarsh scam taint but Suresh Kalmadi was frozen out.

A senior political commentator met Rahul in early February while he was preparing for the election campaign. He came out of the two-hour-long meeting convinced that Rahul was ‘totally out of it’. ‘It was just one long crib session. He kept telling me how he is just a cog in the wheel, and how difficult the UPA-II government had made life for the Congress, how he was having difficulty finding the right people for the party,’ the analyst recalls. Rahul apparently even felt that ‘inflation’ wouldn’t hurt the Congress chances because only the rich complained about price rise, the poor had food security. ‘I really don’t know which planet Rahul is living on,’ the analyst told me.

Interestingly, Rahul had spoken a very different language after the party’s debacle in the December 2013 assembly elections. Then, he had strode defiantly to the Congress headquarters and told the waiting media, ‘I am going to transform the Congress organization and I will do it in ways you cannot even imagine.’ Now, just two months later, he was claiming to be just a ‘cog in the wheel’. Far from being transformed, the Congress and its leadership was already looking battle weary.

When we broadcast our final election tracker towards the end of March, the NDA figure was pushing towards the 260-seat mark—272-plus was now firmly in sight. The Congress was in total disarray, slipping further to under eighty seats. Aware that this election was theirs to be won, the BJP decided to go for the kill. The perfume of victory was in the air.

After offering prayers at the Vaishno Devi shrine, Narendra Modi began his final march towards Delhi with a Bharat Vijay rally in Jammu on 26 March. Modi had already addressed more than 200 rallies since becoming BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in September.

Now, with the first voting day less than two weeks away, Modi decided to take his campaign to another level. Over the next seven weeks, he would address as many as 185 rallies spread across 295 constituencies, often doing four, at times even six, in a single day. An
India Today
report claimed that by the end, Modi would have travelled 300,000 kilometres, or seven times the Earth’s equatorial circumference.

Organizing the logistics for the rallies was a team of about fifty people at the party’s headquarters in Delhi, led by party MP Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. It was a gargantuan exercise, ensuring, for example, that the BJP’s privately hired multi-camera teams were present at each major location to uplink a feed that could be carried by all news channels. The camera teams were told to ensure plenty of close-ups of Modi and crowd shots that would effectively project the vastness of the rally.