2014: The Election That Changed India (11 page)

The CNN-IBN Indian of the Year awards were held in
December that year. The prime minister was the chief guest, Rahul one of the winners. Every other
winner—be it A.R. Rahman (who was chosen as the overall Indian of the Year for his
Oscar-winning compositions in
Slumdog Millionaire
) or badminton player Saina Nehwal who won
the award for sports—was present at the ceremony. Rahul chose not to attend. For weeks before
the event, we had tried to convince him to receive the award. Several phone calls and emails went
typically unanswered. We had even asked his sister Priyanka to remind him that it would appear
inappropriate for Rahul to stay away when the prime minister was the chief guest. ‘He is very
busy, you can read out a message on his behalf,’ was the official response from Team Rahul.
The fact is, Rahul was in Delhi, but apparently did not see any reason to attend the function. A
message was read out on his behalf.

Why did Rahul choose to avoid receiving an award
from the prime minister? Priyanka claimed that Rahul didn’t believe in awards. ‘He likes
his work to do the talking,’ was her explanation. Maybe Rahul realized what some of us
hadn’t—he still hadn’t done quite enough to deserve the label of ‘politician
of the year’.

Giving Rahul the major credit for the 2009 victory
was not the only misreading of the electoral result. The Congress party believed that the win was a
triumph of their ‘inclusive’ social and economic agenda. The government’s flagship
scheme for rural jobs—the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)—had been
projected as reflecting the vision of Rahul and Sonia Gandhi. Rahul, in fact, had led a Congress
delegation to the prime minister in 2007 to have the scheme extended to the entire country. Within
two days, the government followed Rahul’s wishes at an additional cost of Rs 8000 crore. Rahul
had also fully backed the Rs 60,000 crore farm loan waiver scheme that was introduced in the
2008–09 Union budget. NREGA and farm loan waiver—Congressmen were convinced these were
the twin planks that had propelled them back to power.

The truth is, the Congress
actually performed much better in urban, rather than rural, India in the 2009 elections. The UPA
alliance swept to power in every major metropolis, except Bangalore. The alliance won around 130 of
the 200 seats which could be seen to have an ‘urban character’. It was the urban middle
class which was the backbone of the UPA’s electoral growth, yet Congress strategists convinced
themselves that their rise was in the countryside.

Rahul Gandhi, too, was convinced of the
Congress’s rediscovery of rural India. In October 2009, he again met some of us (again, need I
say, an interaction that was off the record) to expand on his political theories. Invoking his
grandmother, he said, ‘Indiraji taught us this in the 1970s with her
Garibi Hatao
slogan. The core Congress vote lies amongst the poor and marginalized, among farmers, Dalits and
tribals. That vote is our strength. We need to preserve it and then get an incremental vote amongst
other sections. Once we do that, we will be unbeatable.’

There was a second argument he made that day.
‘All of you see this as a victory of an alliance. I see it differently. I believe that the
Congress party has to strengthen itself. Our future is not in alliances, it is in making the
Congress party the dominant force of Indian politics once again,’ he said emphatically. I
tried to point out how the Congress was still in no position to call the shots without allies in key
states like Bihar, UP, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. ‘The problem with political
journalists is that you think short term. I prefer to have a long-term vision!’ was his sharp
response. We realized it wasn’t easy winning an argument with a leader who didn’t have
to deal with too many dissenting voices. And who, frankly, liked to talk more than listen.

In the next five years leading up to the 2014
elections, Rahul’s ‘twin vision’ shaped his and the Congress party’s
strategy. ‘Inclusiveness’ was the new mantra chanted almost routinely while debating
economic policy. ‘Congress first’ became the dominant political philosophy in place of
coalition dharma and the idea of a common minimum programme of UPA-I.

In the next two years, Rahul tried to consciously
project himself
as the
aam aadmi ka sipahi
(common man’s
soldier)—his heart, we were told, did not lie in the bright lights of the big cities. When he
went to Mumbai, he travelled by a local suburban train as if to suggest to the daily commuters that
he shared their concerns. When the British foreign secretary David Miliband visited India, Rahul
took him for another night stay in a Dalit home in a UP village, and to Amethi to introduce him to
the women’s self-help groups he had set up there. Critics saw many of Rahul’s efforts as
tokenism; his image-makers saw it as defining Brand Rahul as a leader of the aam aadmi.

Perhaps the best example of what Rahul was
attempting was his intervention in the contentious debate over mining and environment rights in
Niyamgiri in Odisha’s Kalahandi district. At the heart of the debate was whether the local
Dongeria Kondh tribals had rights over their land which had been acquired by the Vedanta group for
setting up a $1.7 billion aluminium refinery. The Niyamgiri hills were flush with bauxite deposits
but were also part of a rich biodiversity zone. Moreover, the local tribals believed the hill to be
sacred and an abode of their deity, Niyam Raja.

Visiting Niyamgiri in March 2008, Rahul grandly
announced,
‘Kalahandi ka aur Adivasiyon ka Delhi mein ek sipahi hai aur uska naam hai
Rahul Gandhi’
(Kalahandi and the tribals have one soldier in Delhi, and his name is Rahul
Gandhi). At a press conference in Bhubaneshwar, Rahul underlined his stand. ‘I am not against
industrialization per se. What I am for is fairness. My personal view is that doing mining there
will destroy the environment. It will destroy the water supply of thousands of people. It will
destroy their culture. And I am against that personally.’

On 24 August 2010, more than two years after Rahul
had spoken out, the environment ministry refused to grant clearances to Vedanta’s proposed
bauxite mine. The environment minister at the time was Jairam Ramesh, a nominee of Sonia and Rahul
Gandhi to the Union Cabinet. An IIT graduate, the silver-haired Ramesh is erudite and intellectual,
rare qualities for a Congressman. He is not a traditional politician and has never contested a Lok
Sabha election. A
man of ideas and policy, not of the masses, he likes to see
himself as an old-style Nehruvian liberal. His critics see him as an opportunist. He had worked as a
back-room boy in the governments of V.P. Singh, Narasimha Rao, the United Front and even served as
an economic adviser to Chandrababu Naidu. His big move up came when he strategized the
Congress’s 2004 election campaign successfully. He was credited with fashioning the winning
slogan—‘
Congress Ka Haath, Aam Aadmi Ke Saath
’. During UPA-I, Ramesh was
the key member of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council—a clutch of NGOs and public
intellectuals who shared a left-of-centre ideology. In UPA-II, Ramesh was given independent charge
of the environment and forests ministry.

Tech-savvy, policy-driven, English-speaking, a
left-leaning liberal—Jairam perhaps was attractive to a Rahul with similar inclinations. I
asked Jairam of his equation with Rahul, and whether he had helped shape his economic and social
vision. ‘I was not his adviser. Whenever he needed inputs I was there for him. But his ideas
were his own in the end,’ he says.

One such idea led to the successful setting up of
women’s self-help groups in Amethi. ‘Early on in his political career, I took him to
Andhra Pradesh. He met and saw the work being done by self-help groups. Till then, he was sold on
microfinance but that visit changed him. So, he was ready to learn all the time,’ says Ramesh.
A similar experience with the milk cooperative movement in Gujarat saw the setting up of similar
milk producing centres in UP.

Ramesh claims that Rahul was driven by a desire to
root for the underdog and provide justice to the marginalized. ‘All the agitations he
supported were driven by the idea that the world needed to be a fairer place, be it in Niyamgiri,
Bhatta Parsaul, or in Mahuva, Gujarat, against a Nirma cement plant,’ points out Ramesh.

Land acquisition in each of these instances had
pitted tribals, Dalits and farmers versus big corporates. Rahul saw this as part of a greater Bharat
versus India battle—he wanted to be seen on the side of the ‘small guy’. He was
labelled a ‘jholawallah’, more comfortable in the company of activists than corporate
leaders.

Mamata Banerjee, too, had
taken a similar anti-corporate stance in Bengal—her land agitations in Singur and Nandigram
revived her political career. Mamata was a natural streetfighter. Rahul was, in the end, part of the
ruling establishment. His agitational mode, therefore, lacked credibility and consistency. He almost
seemed to flit in and out of a movement without actually taking a confrontational path that would
reap political benefit. ‘He felt a little trapped,’ admits a senior Congressman.
‘It wasn’t easy to be seen as an activist and a powerful ruling party politician at the
same time.’

Rahul’s ‘Bharat versus India’
world view was perhaps shaped in his Cambridge years where he studied development economics as one
of his ‘core’ papers. He also met and had dinner there with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen
who was then Master at Trinity College. Sen later claimed that he was impressed with Rahul.
‘He seemed deeply concerned about deprivation in India and wanting to make a change in
that,’ he told
Outlook
magazine in an interview. Interestingly, while looking back at
his Cambridge years, Rahul told
Varsity
magazine, ‘I’m a lot less left wing now
than I was.’ But in the Indian context, Rahul was firmly placed on the political left. While
the Manmohan Singh government spoke of growth and market reforms, Rahul’s language was one of
rights and entitlements. It only created a certain fuzziness in policy approach at a time when the
country needed clarity.

If Ramesh was seen as Rahul’s economic
fellow-traveller, then his early political guru was Digvijaya Singh. A former Madhya Pradesh chief
minister, Singh had rather dramatically claimed after an electoral defeat in 2003 that he was taking
‘sanyas’ from political office for ten years. Submitting to political sanyas did not
stop him, however, from becoming a Congress general secretary, entrusted with the task of reviving
the Congress in the key state of Uttar Pradesh. Singh was an old-style Congressman—a firm
believer in social engineering and in a vision of secular politics that gave the minorities a
special status. He was strongly anti-RSS, but was also deeply religious and ritualistic; a proud
Thakur who flaunted his Hindu identity but routinely attacked ‘communal’ forces; a
public-school alumnus from Daly College, Indore, who was just as comfortable in
a five-star hotel as he was in a village panchayat. As Madhya Pradesh chief minister, he had built a
strong equation with NGO groups and was seen to occupy the ‘secular’ space within the
Congress once occupied by his political guru and another former Madhya Pradesh chief minister, Arjun
Singh.

Rahul turned to him because he needed a strong
political ‘face’ from the Hindi heartland to guide him through the maze of caste and
community politics. For Singh, proximity to Rahul became the source of an independent power base at
a time when his political career was staring at a dark tunnel. He promised to ‘deliver’
UP—the key prize that had eluded the Congress for two decades—to Rahul. The strategy was
premised on reconstructing the Congress’s traditional electoral alliance—upper castes,
Muslims and Dalits.

Singh took up the case of Muslim youth arrested in
terror cases, questioning the role of the police in the 2008 Batla House encounter in Delhi, in
which two suspected terrorists and a senior police officer were killed. The accused were from
Azamgarh in UP, and Singh promised to deliver justice to them. He targeted the Sangh Parivar,
accusing them of promoting ‘saffron terror’. He also reached out through a back channel
to Hindu and Muslim religious leaders in an effort to break the Ayodhya deadlock.

This was politics from an earlier era—of vote
banks, appeasement and allurements. Only that the space Singh was attempting to recapture was
already firmly with parties like the BSP and SP. The politics of north India had changed, perhaps
irreversibly, with the political rise of OBC and Dalit politicians through the 1980s and 1990s.
Singh, though, remained confident that his strategy was working. On the eve of the 2012 UP
elections, he had a dinner bet with me that our opinion poll predicting an SP victory would be
proven horribly wrong. ‘We will win a minimum of 100 seats, if not 150,’ was his brave
prediction. When the Congress barely squeaked past the twenty-five-seat mark, he was honest enough
to admit his failure. And he kept his promise and bought me dinner!

For Rahul, though, there was
no such consolation. The dependence on the Digvijaya Singh brand of politics had brought him no
political return. Instead, he had been exposed as amateurish in his attempt to revive the Congress
in the Hindi heartland. Take, for example, a speech he made in Phulpur during the UP election
campaign in 2012 while claiming that UP-ites had been forced by failed governments to go and beg in
Mumbai.
‘Aapko Mumbai jaakar bheek mangna padta hai. Kab tak bheek mangte
rahoge?’
(You have to go and beg in Mumbai. How long will you do so?), he asked the
audience. No one likes to be called a beggar. Least of all an economic migrant looking for a better
future in the big city. The defeat in UP in 2012 was a hammer blow.

In 2010, Rahul had suffered a similar debacle in
neighbouring Bihar. He had made Bihar the test case for his ‘
ekla chalo re
’ (go
it alone) political belief—no alliances, the Congress would fight the elections on its own.
Lalu Prasad had wanted to revive his Rashtriya Janata Dal’s (RJD) alliance with the Congress.
Rahul did not want one. He had spurned Lalu before the 2009 elections as well.
‘Lagta hai
ladke ko mera chehra achha nahi lagta!’
(Looks like the boy doesn’t like my face),
Lalu told me at the time.