2014: The Election That Changed India
Read 2014: The Election That Changed India Online
Authors: Rajdeep Sardesai
Tags: #Literary Collections, #Essays, #Political Science, #General
The Election That Changed India
1. Narendrabhai, the Man from Gujarat
2. Prisoner of a Family Legacy
4. I Want to Be Prime Minister
6. Kings, Queens and X Factors
To Sagarika, for keeping the faith
On a hot, steamy day on the campaign trail in Varanasi, I was given another reminder of the enduring attraction of an Indian election. Stopping for a cool drink at the city’s famous Pehelwan Lassi shop, we asked the owner whom he was going to vote for. Twirling his luxuriant moustache, Pehelwan Chacha looked at us.
‘Jo Baba Jagannath aur dil kahe!’
(Whatever God and my heart tell me.) I tried to press him further—Narendra Modi or Arvind Kejriwal? As he lovingly laced the lassi with sinful dollops of
rabri
, he shot back,
‘Dekhiye, sir, vote hamara hai, aap ko kyon batayein?’
(The vote is mine, why should I tell you?)
For more than five decades now, millions of Indians like Pehelwan Chacha have lined up across the country to exercise their franchise with hope and resolve. It is the one day when the gap between the
khaas aadmi
and the
aam aadmi
, between the
lal-batti
car and the auto rickshaw, between a Forbes billionaire and a BPL family, dissolves. We all stand in line waiting to have our fingers inked. If someone tries to break the queue—as actor-MP Chiranjeevi tried to in Hyderabad this time—you can find your voice and ask them to get back in line.
It is a truism that the higher income groups in India tend to vote less than the poor—the quest for equality is a constant motivator for the have-nots. Georgina from north Bengal, mainstay of our household for two decades, had never voted in her life and didn’t
have a voter card for the Delhi assembly elections. When we finally managed to get her one before the 2014 elections she was overjoyed. On voting day, she just couldn’t stop smiling, showing her finger to anyone who would care to see. Her twinkling eyes reflected a sense of feeling genuinely empowered.
‘Sir, hamne bhi vote daala’
(I voted too), she reported to me triumphantly.
In
India After Gandhi
, historian Ramachandra Guha suggests that the first election in 1952 was an ‘article of faith’ for our Constitution makers. The first election commissioner, Sukumar Sen, described it as the ‘biggest experiment in democracy in human history’. A Chennai editor was less kind: ‘a very large majority will exercise their votes for the first time; not many know what the vote is, why they should vote and for whom they should vote; no wonder the whole adventure is rated as the biggest gamble in history’.
Sixty-two years later, we can proudly say the faith has triumphed; the experiment has succeeded; the gamble was well worth it. The 2014 elections, in a sense, were a reaffirmation of the process that started in 1952. More than 550 million Indians voted in these elections, larger than the entire population of the world’s oldest democracy, the United States. I shall never forget what a Pakistani friend once told me. ‘In Pakistan, when we want to change the government, we bring in the army; in India, you just use the ballot box.’ Indeed, we do.
Each of the sixteen general elections in this country has been special, though some are more significant than others. The first election was obviously a landmark one—a leap in the dark for a country that many western commentators were convinced would rapidly disintegrate. Nineteen seventy-seven was a historic election as well—in the aftermath of the Emergency, it restored public confidence in democracy and was a resounding rejection of creeping dictatorship. I was just twelve years old at the time, but I do remember reading the bold headlines: ‘Indira Gandhi is defeated by the people of India’. I am sure it must have been a remarkable election to track as a journalist—just imagine profiling Raj Narain after he had defeated Indira.
I would rank 2014 in the same league as 1952 and 1977. Having had a privileged ringside view of Indian elections as a journalist since 1989, I do believe that the sixteenth general elections mark a tectonic shift in Indian politics. It has been, and I use the word judiciously, a political tsunami (or ‘tsuNamo’). It’s a term that was first used by the key BJP strategist Amit Shah to suggest that this was more than just a ‘wave’ election—it was something bigger, much bigger.
Tsunami in India is associated with the terrible disaster that hit the southern coast of the country in December 2004, spreading death and destruction. This election did not result in deaths, but it did destroy certain rigidly held beliefs about politics in this country. It was the death in a way of long-held orthodoxies about voting patterns. The death of a conventional rural–urban divide, of traditional caste and regional loyalties, of family ties, of paternalistic governance, maybe even of the Nehruvian consensus that had dominated Indian politics for decades. To quote Guha from a column written a day after the verdict: ‘The sometimes noble, sometimes ignoble, “structure of renown” erected by Motilal Nehru and his descendants is now merely a heap of rubble.’ Stereotypes of which social groups voted for the Congress, which for the Bharatiya Janata Party and which for caste-based parties have been demolished. The political earth of India shook, moving the centre of gravity of an Indian election from identity politics to aspirational politics. It’s a new ‘plus’ factor that now gets you the crucial additional support, beyond narrow appeals to caste and community vote banks.
Election 2014 saw a shift in outcomes, processes and personalities. The outcome itself was staggering. The BJP became the first non-Congress party to win a clear majority on its own (the Janata Party in 1977 was a collection of several parties). In its original avatar as the Jana Sangh, the party had won just three seats and 3.1 per cent of the vote in the 1952 election. Now, it has won 282 seats and 31 per cent of the national vote—astonishing figures when you consider that the BJP’s catchment area of winnable seats was less than 350 seats. The lotus has truly bloomed and come a very long way from the time when it was pigeonholed as a Brahmin–Bania party.
In six states, the BJP won each and every seat on offer. Its strike rate across north and west India was over 80 per cent, with the party winning more than four of every five seats it contested in this belt. It is in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—two states that we believed were locked into an enduring caste matrix—that the BJP achieved some of its more dramatic results. Almost every community, except the Muslims, voted overwhelmingly for the BJP. Not only was there strong upper-caste consolidation, even Other Backward Castes (OBCs), Dalits and tribals voted for the BJP in large numbers. The BJP was, at least in 2014, the new rainbow coalition.
In contrast, the 129-year-old Congress party, with its roots in the freedom movement, has been decimated, its monopoly over power challenged like never before. Even in the 1977 elections, the party at least managed to save face south of the Vindhyas. This time, Kerala is the only state where the Congress won more than ten seats. Its final tally of forty-four seats and just 19.3 per cent of the vote—the first time its percentage slipped below 20—represents a critical inflexion point in its history. The Congress performance has also been the subject of rather cruel jokes. Returning on a flight to Delhi in June, my co-passenger said, ‘Looks like the national capital’s temperature will soon be more than the seats the Congress has in the Lok Sabha!’
But it’s not just the final result that made this 2014 election so distinctive. The election has unleashed a chain of processes—latent and overt—that could change the way elections are fought in the future. Never before has so much money been spent in fighting an Indian election—inflation doesn’t just affect the price of tomatoes, it also influences the cost of an election. The BJP, bolstered by unflinching corporate support, easily outspent its rivals, but the more worrisome aspect is just the quantum of money that is now needed by every member of Parliament to win an election. Because, with every rupee donated, the IOUs need to be encashed post-election.
A candidate in Andhra Pradesh admitted to me that he needed ‘at least Rs 15 to 20 crore to just stay in the fight’. The massive inflow of cash suggests that a level playing field is simply not possible any longer. It is practically impossible to win an Indian election unless
you are a
crorepati
several times over, or have funders to back you. The case for state funding could not be stronger.
The brazen use of money power imperils democracy and shrinks the basket of choices before the voter. Not that every Indian voter is complaining. In Mumbai, I met a fisherwoman at the Sassoon Docks who said she had been offered Rs 1000 by the Congress and Rs 1500 by the BJP candidate for her vote. ‘I will take money from both and then decide whom to vote for!’ she laughed.
If money is a threat, technology is not. In the first election, the ballot boxes stuffed with votes were carried by camels across deserts and by horses over mountains. The counting went on for weeks. Now, in the age of the electronic voting machines (EVMs), the process is faster, surer and cleaner. Yes, there are still complaints of malfunctioning EVMs, of names missing from rolls, of occasional intimidation. But the
bahubalis
(musclemen) have less of a role to play in an Indian election. The musclemen have been replaced in 2014 by the machine men—technology whiz-kids who are able to plot every constituency down to the last booth. The level of micro messaging in this election, with the aid of technology, is unprecedented. Never before has an SMS got a political party as many volunteers as it did for the BJP this time.
Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects for me while researching this book was meeting several young men and women who designed the BJP’s strategy using technology solutions. Many of them were alumni from top institutes—IITs and IIMs—who had given up lucrative jobs to be part of the election planning. It was almost as if you were in a business school and were being asked to assist in a corporate management plan. Certainly, there is enough reason to believe that the BJP’s ‘Mission 272’ was the first time an Indian election was strategized like a business venture. Even caste arithmetic has now been given a professional edge. One of the young men I met had each caste voting in a booth mapped out on an Excel sheet with precise detailing on which household voted for whom in the previous elections.
The emergence of technology as an electoral weapon has been
accompanied by the almost irresistible rise of media power. There were times in the 2014 elections when it seemed as though the locus of the electoral battle had shifted from the heat and dust of the maidan to the air-conditioned comfort of a multi-media universe. It is no longer enough to hold a massive rally; the rally must play in a 360-degree spin across media platforms—live television, Internet, social media, mobile applications.
We aren’t yet a tele-democracy in the American style. Nor is media spin enough to turn an election. Indian elections are still won and lost on a complex interplay of local-level allegiances and a robust organizational machinery on the ground. But while your debating skills on prime time won’t prove decisive, they are a useful weapon to possess on the electoral battlefield. News television can set the agenda—it may be awfully noisy, but it is heard.
Many years ago, a veteran Congress politician, the late V.N. Gadgil, had lamented that he no longer felt suited to be a party spokesperson. ‘I speak for thirty minutes—you reduce it to a thirty-second sound bite,’ he told me. We are becoming a sound-bite society—short, sharp quotes are preferred to any long-winded manifesto. I sometimes wonder if anyone these days reads party manifestos before they go to vote.
It’s not just the sound-bite age—it is the era of marketing. The year 2014 marks a coming-of-age moment for political advertising. Yes, we’ve had ad campaigns—most notably in the 1984 elections—that did create a flutter, but the kind of sustained hype we’ve witnessed this time is unmatched. Hoardings, billboards, news and entertainment channels, newspapers, radio—if you spent eight weeks in India between March and May, you’d think politics was the only ‘product’ on sale. Like television, advertising won’t make or break an election verdict, but like the rest of the media, it can help create the ‘surround sound’, the election
mahaul
(atmosphere). The BJP’s ad line—‘
Achhe Din Aanewale Hain
’ (Good Days Are Coming)—has now stuck in public consciousness. When India won a Test match at Lords in July 2014, the Hindi commentator was ecstatic. ‘
Achhe din aa gaye,’
he exulted.
But elections, above all else, are made by personalities, or, as in the 2014 elections, by a clash of personalities. Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi—the
pracharak
versus the prince, the ‘outsider’ versus the ‘insider’, the meritocrat versus the dynast, the small-town tea boy versus the child of elite privilege. We love a Hindi film where two sharply contrasted individuals are pitted against each other (Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh in
Namak Haraam
, for example); or a tennis contest that offers similar variety (Federer versus Nadal). Politics is no different—conflicting chemistries make for a great election battle.
Sure, there were other subplots playing right through this election—the sudden rise of the Aam Aadmi Party and its doughty leader Arvind Kejriwal; the power plays of regional supremos like Mamata, Naveen Patnaik and Jayalalithaa; the break-up of Andhra Pradesh; the antics of feisty caste leaders of the north; the Nitish Kumar ideological challenge. But these were sideshows—the principal narrative remained Modi versus Rahul.
Many political experts reject the idea that a parliamentary-style democracy is actually presidential in nature. A senior Congress leader accused me on a television show of failing to understand the logic of an Indian election. ‘Five hundred and forty-three constituencies and you are obsessing about two individuals,’ was his angry comment. Truth is, that’s how Indian general elections have always played out. The 1952 election in the end was about the overwhelming charisma of Jawaharlal Nehru. In the 1970s, it was Indira Gandhi’s dominant image that set the terms of the political debate. In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi offered himself as the fresh-faced hope for the future. In 1989, it was V.P. Singh who was projected as ‘Mr Clean’. In the 1990s, the BJP coined the slogan ‘
Abki Baari Atal Bihari
’. Why, even the silent bureaucrat-politician Dr Manmohan Singh was transformed into ‘Singh is King’ ahead of the 2009 elections.