2014: The Election That Changed India (44 page)

The list of mistakes didn’t end just there. At a rally in Indore, Rahul claimed that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, had contacted some Muzaffarnagar Muslim families who had been affected by the riots. It gave Modi just the opening he was looking for. ‘Rahul should name the families, else apologize to all Muslim youth,’ was Modi’s riposte.

The truth is that an Intelligence Bureau (IB) report had pointed to possible ISI links in western UP. But the report, like many IB reports, was short on specifics. ‘You don’t make IB reports the subject of a political debate in this manner,’ a senior IB official told me. If Rahul was drawing attention to a national security concern, then he should have addressed it differently. By going public with a sensitive issue, he had angered local Muslims who felt they were being stereotyped as potential terrorists, and confirmed the worst fears of Hindus who were already feeling they were under siege. It was a unique role reversal. Modi was now talking the language of communal amity, Rahul of polarization.

Out of curiosity, I tried to find out who was Rahul’s speech-writer. Typically, I was given no clear answer. ‘He has a team to help him,’ I was told. So who was in this ‘team’? ‘Well, Jairam Ramesh used to be involved, now it’s Mohan Gopal; Sam Pitroda provides inputs, so do Kanishka and Sachin Rao, and so does Priyanka. It all depends on the subject at hand,’ was the best response I could get. It sounded a bit like a pig’s breakfast!

Even Jairam, who could have played the lead role in Rahul’s speech-writing team, appeared to be slowly edged out from the inner circle. I recall ringing him up and suggesting that we could do a youth-centric show with Rahul where he could take questions from IIT/IIM students. ‘Good idea, will share it with Rahul,’ Jairam told me. A few weeks later when I asked Jairam whether there was any progress, he simply shrugged his shoulders and pleaded helplessness. Rahul’s one-time political ‘guru’ Digvijaya Singh’s son-in-law, Paranjayadityasinh Parmar, scion of the royal family of Santrampur in Gujarat, who had been pushing for a ticket from Gujarat, was also struck off the final list. It was almost as if the
spectre of looming defeat had pushed Rahul into a self-imposed cocoon of aloofness where he trusted very few people. ‘We are told that leadership demands that when the going gets tough, the tough get going—here just the opposite was happening,’ is how a Congress MP summed up Rahul’s plight.

Senior journalist Coomi Kapoor relates a delightful story which perhaps exemplifies the widening gap between Rahul and the party. Apparently, Rahul had come to campaign in Devgarh Baria in the tribal-dominated Dahod constituency of southern Gujarat. The party candidate, Prabha Taviad, was prevented from sitting on the stage when Rahul was speaking by the SPG even though she tried to explain to them that she was, after all, the local Congress candidate. Rally over, Rahul shook a few hands and rushed to the helicopter. The candidate was desperate to have a word with her leader.
‘Bhaag, Mummy, bhaag!’
her children implored her. She ran after Rahul, only to find that he was already sitting in the helicopter and on his way to another rally.

As the campaign wore on, it was obvious that Team Rahul was still groping in the dark for a big idea to counter the BJP. When Modi embarked on his Chai pe Charcha, they were again forced to react in an attempt to recapture at least the ‘aam aadmi’ space. Rahul had spoken of an ‘open manifesto’, one that would be shaped by interacting with Congress workers, civil society groups and people working in the unorganized sector. Mohan Gopal was assigned the task.

Several meetings were organized with prominent NGOs as well as informal sector groups like railway porters, fisherfolk, rickshaw pullers, stonecutters, street vendors and anganwadi workers. ‘It was a unique exercise in the history of Indian politics. For the first time, a leader was engaging with those who had been marginal to decision-making. Through this one gesture, we could activate hundreds of NGOs and gain enormous goodwill,’ Gopal later told me.

In theory, he may have had a point. In reality, high inflation and low growth meant that Team Rahul’s target audience—those who were just above the poverty line and yet not quite middle class—was
also feeling the squeeze. Modi’s promise of a return to a high-growth economy was attractive to this social group. ‘We were offering them a New Deal based on legal rights; Modi was using this aspirational class for a fascist takeover,’ is how Gopal tries to draw a contrast between Rahul and Modi’s approach.

The fact is, the Congress needed to make a strong comeback in an election in which they were trailing. The Rahul interview had been a disaster and the party was trying to desperately reposition their leader. Every time Rahul carried out a public interaction, a hapless member of the Congress media cell would call us and plead, ‘Please cut live—it will be very interesting.’ Sadly, it wasn’t.

The interactions were somehow wooden and scripted, an attempt by Rahul to do an Aamir Khan in
Satyamev Jayate
by talking to ‘real India’, but defeated by his own self-consciousness. Aamir’s show worked because of its clever positioning as an alternative to regular television entertainment shows. The viewer had tired of soaps and reality shows, and was looking for something different. Rahul’s addas didn’t catch the eye because he was sermonizing and theorizing at a time when the nation wanted answers to the burning issues of the day—from price rise to corruption.

Yes, there was the odd lively exchange. For example, Rahul had a passionate debate with railway coolies. But it was all too brief and clearly wasn’t enough to alter the course of the political debate. Rahul’s own epiphanies about India, whether on caste identity or gender rights or decentralization of power, felt like college seminars, hardly the shooting-from-the-hip, directly communicative speeches voters could connect to.

Modi’s Chai pe Charcha had drawn attention because it was excellently packaged, even if the content was unexceptional. Rahul’s town hall-like programmes didn’t work because they had neither glossy marketing nor a well-defined message. ‘To be honest, we needed to take the battle to the enemy camp. Instead, our leader was still acting like a jholawalla engaged in the discovery of India’s poor through group discussions!’ is how one frustrated Congressman summed it up for me.

Through March and April, as I travelled around the country for a series of on-the-ground reports, I could see which way the political wind was blowing. In south Bangalore, where former Infosys posterboy Nandan Nilekani was contesting, I met a group of techies. ‘We’d love to vote for Nandan, but he is the right man in the wrong party.
Abki Baar Modi Sarkar
!’ they shouted in unison.

Already something of an icon among educated youth, Nandan had joined the government in 2009 and initiated the ambitious Aadhar citizen identification project. As a lateral entrant into politics, he offered hope to many private-sector professionals who wanted to shift to public service. In a normal election, Nandan might have had an edge over an Ananth Kumar, a five-time BJP MP accused of doing precious little for the city. But this was no longer a ‘normal’ election. At Mavalli Tiffin Room (MTR), Bangalore’s most famous south Indian eatery, I asked an old man why he was still voting for Ananth Kumar if he was a failed MP. ‘This election is about Modi, not Ananth Kumar,’ he told me as he poured the ghee over his dosa.

In south Mumbai, Milind Deora was considered a certain winner for the Congress. But I knew he was in trouble when I met an old school friend who said he was going to vote for the Shiv Sena for the first time. ‘I strongly disapprove of the Sena’s brand of politics, but I want to see Modi as our prime minister,’ he rationalized.

In Chandni Chowk, my former journalist colleague Ashutosh was contesting on an AAP ticket. There was still some goodwill for AAP, but this wasn’t a Delhi assembly election but a national referendum. The local shopkeepers verdict was emphatic—‘We tried Congress, we tried AAP, now only Modi for India!’

Ironically, the only city where I noticed a slightly divided opinion was Amritsar in Punjab where Modi confidant Arun Jaitley was contesting a Lok Sabha election for the first time, against former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh. Jaitley could have stood from a Delhi constituency but the fear of the AAP had led him to look for a ‘safe’ seat. Akali MP Naresh Gujral convinced him that Amristar, with the backing of the Badal family, was the right choice. Jaitley’s wide circle of high-powered friends had all descended from Delhi to
express solidarity with their
yaar
. It almost seemed like a
baraat
for a
shaadi
, with Jaitley as the
dulha
. While covering the constituency, I would often bump into someone from Delhi. ‘We all hope Arun wins, he’s such a nice guy,’ was a shared feeling. I wondered, though, how their presence was really helping his campaign since a number of them seemed more intent on discovering Amritsar’s best kulcha chole joints! By contrast, driving in convoy with his turbaned posse in the city of the Harmandir Sahib, Amarinder Singh looked every inch the Sikh-of-the-soil.

Indeed, on the ground in Punjab, it was apparent that the Modi wave had hit a bit of a wall. At a popular dhaba in the heart of Amritsar, I drank a cool glass of excellent lassi with a group of morning walkers. The dominant sentiment was anti-Akali more than pro-Modi. The local leaders, I was told, were disgustingly corrupt. ‘Yes, we want Modi as prime minister. Jaitley is also good, but first we need to teach the Badal government a lesson,’ was a common refrain. The Akalis were accused of promoting the worst form of family raj where their relatives monopolized all state resources. It was another telling reminder that the Indian voter cannot be taken for granted. Jaitley may have moved to Amritsar from Delhi to escape the AAP factor, but it was in Punjab that the AAP’s anti-corruption plank would resonate most tellingly—the party eventually won all its four Lok Sabha seats from Punjab.

Amritsar, though, was just one out of 543 seats in the country. The overwhelming feedback elsewhere was of a rising Modi wave. A desperate Congress was in a state of utter despair. An attempt was made to get Sonia Gandhi to campaign a bit more aggressively. Sonia had, perhaps consciously, chosen to take a backseat in the election build-up. This, after all, was supposed to be Rahul’s moment in the political sun. Her long-serving aides like Ahmed Patel and Ghulam Nabi Azad were already feeling sidelined by Team Rahul. Patel had direct access to Sonia and could virtually walk in and out of 10, Janpath. 12, Tughlaq Lane, Rahul’s office-cum-residence, was different. Here, Patel had to ask for time and was kept out of key elements of the campaign strategy. When I asked him about it, he
denied having differences with Rahul. ‘He is our leader,’ was the cryptic response. Truth is, there was an acute generation gap. Patel and Azad, both veteran crisis managers for the party, had been contemporaries of Rajiv. There was a communication issue too—one sensed that Rahul was more comfortable with the English-speaking politicians who shared his political beliefs. ‘I think he has a disdain for a particular type of Congress politician. Maybe he sees them as oily dealmakers,’ is how someone who knows Rahul well described his attitude to the party’s old guard.

Aware that Rahul was not being able to challenge Modi on his own, Sonia decided to step up her assault on the BJP leader. She probably still had more spunk left in her than her son. ‘She is the only real politician left in the party,’ is how a Sonia loyalist put it to me. One April evening, just as I was going into the 9 p.m. bulletin, my Congress correspondent Pallavi Ghosh sent me an SMS. ‘Sonia is going to make an address to the nation on TV shortly. It could be important.’ On the face of it, it seemed a bit odd—nationally televised addresses are normally made only by the prime minister or the president of India, not by the Congress president. Would Sonia make a dramatic announcement that she, and not Rahul, would now lead the Congress charge in the final phase?

Our rising excitement at a potentially big news break didn’t match the end product. The Congress put up a short video on its website of Sonia addressing the country and warning that the BJP would destroy the ‘Bharatiyata’, the ‘Hindustaniyat’ of the country if it came to power. Looking a little weary and speaking in halting Hindi, Sonia with this short intervention was never going to be enough to halt Modi’s march.

The Gandhi family brand had plummeted in recent months. With her accented Hindi increasingly met with howls of derision, Sonia’s weak harking to the Congress version of Bharatiyata sounded only like the wail of a rotten old order, far removed from the restless dynamism of the times. Just days before her Bharatiyata statement, Sonia had secretly met Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid. The Shahi Imam had appealed to Muslim voters to stand
with the Congress and stay away from the ‘communal’ Modi. That a discredited cleric was being used to woo the minorities only reflected the bankruptcy of the Congress’s tattered secular vision. The country had moved well beyond the fear that a Modi-led government would create a divided India. Her instinctive aversion to Hindutva politics notwithstanding, Sonia appeared to be caught in a time warp. This election was being fought on who offered a better governance vision and, importantly, on who could revive the economy, not by stirring past memories of a Hindu–Muslim conflict.

To this day, I maintain that the Congress just failed to understand the Modi phenomenon, failed to grasp that he had presented himself as perhaps India’s first true post-liberalization politician. The social changes set in motion after the great economic transformation of 1991 (ironically, kick-started by the Congress) created generations of Indians for whom wealth creation and upward mobility became the fundamental markers of the good life, even as their licence-permit era parents’ and grandparents’ ambitions may have centred on government jobs and academic qualifications. A new India had bounded into existence—restless, aspirational, with access to the information superhighway, the silicon economies, multinationals and global opportunities. The explosion of purchasing power, the shopping mall culture, the booming service industry, new industries in leisure and tourism . . . all contributed to a society where the consumer marched one step ahead of the citizen. This new Indian wanted efficiency, good services and the ability to get rich fast (and yes, a nice smartphone!).