2014: The Election That Changed India (18 page)

In his final press conference, Dr Singh was a little more voluble than usual while defending himself. ‘I have served the country with utmost dedication and integrity,’ he said. ‘I do not believe that I have been a weak prime minister. I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or the Opposition in
Parliament. Given the political compulsions, I have done the best I could do. It is for history to judge what I have done or what I have not done.’

How would history judge the man with the most famous blue turban? Indians tend to be kind to their leaders. In an opinion poll CNN-IBN conducted on the sixtieth anniversary of Indian Independence, Indira Gandhi emerged as the most admired politician. It was almost as if the Emergency had never happened. Dr Singh is unlikely to be put on the same pedestal. As a self-made man who had built his career though hard work and scholarship, there is much to admire about him. The fact that neither he nor his family derived any monetary benefit from his prime ministership is not insignificant either. In an age where corruption and nepotism in politics happily coexist, Dr Singh was able to retain a certain decency and moral commitment in his private life. Outside India, global leaders saw him as a man of rare intellect.

And yet, the fact is, when asked to stand up to corruption in his own government, he chose to look the other way. There were enough opportunities for him to say ‘enough is enough’ and draw a
Lakshman-rekha
when faced with the compulsions of coalition politics. Rather than exercise prime ministerial authority, as he did with the Indo-US nuclear deal, he fell back into the safety of his original avatar—a bureaucrat happy to take orders and simply stay in office, almost by force of habit or second nature. Yes, he did offer to resign on more than one occasion, but not once did he take the more courageous option of just walking away.

He was never a mass leader or an orator. He had lost the only Lok Sabha election he had contested, and seemed to prefer the sanctuary of the Rajya Sabha after that. In happier times, it did not really matter. In the crisis-ridden second term in office, it became a cross that was too heavy for the government, party and eventually, the country, to bear. When the nation was looking for a strong, decisive leader who could take charge, Dr Singh went into silent mode. The joke that the only time he opened his mouth was when he had a dentist’s appointment may have been cruel, but it reflected
the exasperation of even his admirers who once saw him as a middle-class hero who had guided the economy through a critical period in the 1990s. Lamentably, the ‘retirement’ press conference was actually the first of its kind that he held since the onset of UPA-II.

Dr Singh’s decision to quit politics was not unexpected. But in the build-up to the sixteenth general elections, it only highlighted the Congress’s dilemma—a hapless prime minister ready to take sanyas and an untested young heir who appeared reluctant to take charge. The all-powerful
gaddi
of Delhi looked vacant. One man from Gujarat smelt his big chance.

Narendra Modi arrived in the national capital on 6 February 2013 looking every inch the muscular politician whose time had come. Delhi had seen many a conqueror aspire to its throne, and with news cameras tracking his every move, Modi gave the distinct impression he was ready to join the list. The sound of the Gujarat election triumph less than two months earlier was still resonating and Modi was keen to capitalize on the momentum. An
India Today
Mood of the Nation poll around Republic Day had suggested he was already the most preferred choice for prime minister—well ahead of the Congress troika of Rahul, Sonia and Manmohan—and he needed to capitalize on the enthusiasm.

The choice for his first public-speaking assignment was the Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC). The college was organizing a three-day business conclave and Modi was to deliver a memorial lecture as the grand finale. ‘We took a poll among the students as to who they wanted to listen to. Modi came out on top, ahead of Ratan Tata,’ says a member of SRCC’s students’ council. An invite was sent to Modi in mid-January, and his office responded in the affirmative in forty-eight hours. Interestingly, the students had also contacted half a dozen Union ministers from the Congress to come
and speak at the conclave. All of them, including young leaders like Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot, refused. Some like Anand Sharma did not even reply.

Modi’s decision to speak at SRCC was well considered. The leading college for economics and commerce in the country, SRCC boasted seemingly ridiculous cut-offs of 98 per cent. It had built an enviable reputation for attracting the best and brightest students. A number of BJP leaders from Delhi had been SRCC alumni, including Arun Jaitley, the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha and legal eagle. The topic—‘Emerging Business Models in a Global Scenario’—was perfect as well. ‘We were looking to launch Mr Modi in an environment which was not hostile and where he could speak to the young of India, not just as Gujarat chief minister but as a future CEO of India,’ a key Modi aide told me.

The ‘youth’ factor was key. Team Modi had commissioned surveys which suggested that the mood for change was highest among the young, with the fear of lack of job opportunities in a weakening economy being a prime concern. There was a feeling that it was the young urban Indian whom the BJP had failed to attract in the 2009 elections, preferring as they did the youthful promise offered by a Rahul Gandhi to the tried and tested octogenarian L.K. Advani. ‘We realized that the young voter, especially the first-time voter between eighteen and twenty-three, was waiting to be wooed. For that reason, SRCC as a college to which many young people aspired to gain admission was ideal for us,’ said a Team Modi member.

Addressing a young, post-liberalization India had another advantage. The 3000-strong audience in the college’s sports complex comprised mainly excited students who had not even entered their teens when the 2002 Gujarat riots took place. They were free, in a sense, of the images of the violence and criticism the Modi government had endured at the time. Six years earlier, Modi had come to Delhi for the
Hindustan Times
summit and found himself being asked uncomfortable questions on 2002. This time, he was taking no chances—it was a lecture where he could speak without having to take any questions. The media was present in large
numbers, but this wasn’t a press conference where they could try and corner the Gujarat chief minister. This time, they would simply have to listen, take notes and record the speech.

The event went off spectacularly well. Modi spoke for a little more than an hour, holding forth about governance, the economy and the Gujarat model of business. Speaking in Hindi without any notes or the slightest hesitation, Modi gave a masterful oration, peppered with one-liners: ‘We have got swaraj, but after sixty years, we are still looking for
suraaj
(good governance); ‘our youth are not snake charmers, they are changing the world with a mouse’; ‘our biggest national resource are our people. Made in India must become our biggest brand.’ Each statement echoed a sense of looking forward. In a climate of negativity and pessimism, it appeared to strike just the right chord for a young audience that frequently broke into applause.

There was also a fair amount of hyperbole, especially when ‘selling’ Gujarat. ‘There must be no one in the audience who has chai without
doodh
from Gujarat in it. All the milk in Delhi is from Gujarat. Milk in Singapore is from Gujarat. Okra in Europe is from Gujarat. Tomatoes in Afghanistan are from Gujarat. The bhindi you eat is from Gujarat!’ he claimed. Of course, what he conveniently did not mention was that it was a certain Dr Verghese Kurien and his Amul milk cooperative dream that ushered in Gujarat’s White Revolution and not Mr Modi. The students did not seem to mind, though. Modi’s public-speaking skills had won them over.

It wasn’t just the students—the media also lapped up Modi’s performance. All national and several regional channels carried Modi’s speech ‘live’. Next morning, every national newspaper had Modi as a front-page headline. ‘Modi takes Delhi by storm,’ declared the
Times of India
. The only paper not to carry Modi’s speech on the front page was
The Hindu
; it was also the only paper to give equal coverage to anti-Modi protests organized by left students’ groups outside SRCC. Its then editor Siddharth Varadarajan defended his decision by claiming that Modi, after all, was just another chief minister who had come to Delhi—why should it make a top headline? His was a lonely voice.

Modi and his team were thrilled by the response. They felt that the SRCC speech had not just captured the youth’s focus but had also been able to reach out to thought leaders and the urban middle class through the power of live television. ‘We realized that Modi was unbeatable in a town hall format. We had also managed to create just the right amount of buzz in the media and among opinion makers,’ said a Modi strategist.

I spoke to Modi on the phone a few days after the SRCC speech (I would usually call him up late night or on a Sunday morning when he was relatively more relaxed).
‘Kya feedback hai?’
he asked like a good politician. I confessed that his lecture had been most impressive and that he deserved a nine on ten.
‘Kyon, dus nahi doge kya!’
he exclaimed. My response was,
‘Sir, dus deta agar aap Kuriensaab ka bhi naam lete!’
(I would have given you a ten if you had mentioned Dr Kurien’s name!)

Modi’s supporters, though, had no such quibbles. A hit formula had been found—Modi speaking on governance-related issues to a captive audience, with millions watching on television. A pattern had been set which would transform Modi in the weeks and months ahead from just another chief minister into a national leader the country could relate to. In school in Vadnagar, Modi had been very fond of theatre; he loved the stage and had acted in several plays in the village. Now, in his adult life, the past training would serve him well. This was now his moment to shine as a solo performer in front of a national audience. At a time when the prime minister had slipped into a seemingly irreversible silent mode and Rahul was still a hesitant public speaker, Modi filled a vacuum in the public discourse. His skill as a natural orator made him a star attraction for an audience hankering for effective communication.

The aim was to establish Modi not just as a pan-Indian leader but, very importantly, as an urban hero. In the 2009 elections, the BJP had won just fifty of the 201 urban/semi-urban seats in the country. Team Modi’s internal poll had shown that their leader was gaining strong traction in urban areas, except among the urban poor and women in the twenty-eight to thirty-five age group
(young women reportedly found Modi’s style ‘abrasive’). ‘If we had to win the 2014 elections, we knew we had to sweep urban India, which is why Modiji’s initial focus was on the cities,’ one of his aides told me later.

Between February and July 2013, Modi addressed several select gatherings in the town hall format that showcased him not just as a politician but as a trailblazer who had evolved, or rather reinvented himself, from demagogue to statesman, from divisive figure to governance guru, from a Hindu identity politician to a problem-solving ‘ideas’ man—the kind who would appeal to an increasingly urbanizing society.

He addressed the Indian diaspora via videoconference in March where he spoke passionately of how secularism for him meant ‘India First’. At the
India Today
conclave in March, he spoke of the Gujarat model and his ‘Namo Mantra’—how he had used technology to reduce inefficiency in government, and offered solutions to issues like power crisis and water management. When a journalist tried to ask a question on Gujarat 2002, Modi looked at him sternly and avoided a direct answer, pointing out that the SIT had cleared him. ‘Looks like some people will not change,’ was the terse response when the questioner persisted.

In April, he went down south to the Sivagiri Mutt in Kerala to address religious leaders there; the same week, he was flying north to Ramdev’s Patanjali Yoga Peeth. But even while addressing the Sadhu Samaj at Ramdev’s set-up, there was no trace of the majoritarian agenda of 2002. Instead, Modi spoke with telling effect on the need to blend spirituality with science and technology. As he referred to a benign and universal Hindu identity and consciousness, he sounded more like Vivekananda than a BJP politician.

Modi switched easily from one target audience to another. He spoke to NRIs across twenty cities in the US on Gujarat Foundation Day. He used Facebook to crowdsource ideas while speaking to Pune’s Fergusson College students on the need to reform
education. He addressed a book release function of RSS activist Vinay Sahasrabuddhe at the Bombay Stock Exchange where the gathering of traders and karyakartas was lectured on the Gandhi model of trusteeship and its links to good governance. At a Google+ Hangout, he spoke on politics and technology, and gave his formula for success: IT + IT = IT (Indian Talent plus Indian Technology equals India Tomorrow). The one-liners were headline grabbing even if there was a tendency to get the facts wrong at times—for example, Modi wrongly claimed that China had spent 20 per cent of its GDP on education. Each event played out live on television and the Internet. ‘We just wanted to keep him in the news by getting him to share his ideas with different constituencies across urban India and even global audiences,’ says a Team Modi member.

His energy was boundless. On 8 April, he spoke in the forenoon at the annual conference of the FICCI Ladies Organization, addressing elegant women from business families in a five-star hotel. He narrated to them the story of Jasuben’s pizzas in Ahmedabad to make a case for women’s empowerment. Jasuben, a Gujarati housewife, had started her own version of a pizza forty years ago. Now, her business has expanded to include six branches, with an average of 600 pizzas being sold every day in Ahmedabad. He even had a dig at Rahul Gandhi and his attempt to raise the issue of Vidarbha farm widows. ‘Now, the media will think Jasuben is like Kalavati, and search for her. Let me just say that she died in Pune five years ago.’ The FICCI ladies loved the free-flowing talk. ‘He’s just the kind of leader we need,’ was the ecstatic verdict.

That same evening, Modi attended a Network 18 event which had been organized as part of a ‘Think India’ initiative of the network I worked for. The idea was a brainchild of Network 18 founder Raghav Bahl, who had already developed a fascination for Modi’s thoughts, especially on markets and the economy. ‘He is probably the only leader who is really committed to transforming the economy,’ gushed Raghav. The original name for the programme was the ‘Think Right’ summit. I explained
to Raghav that the name might send out the wrong message as we approached an election year, especially as Modi was the first speaker. Raghav was flexible—Think Right was changed to Think India. The topic for the interaction was ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’, another pet Modi mantra.

Modi spoke passionately for an hour on a variety of issues, from speedier privatization to reducing red-tapism to reforming urban bodies: ‘There is too much paperwork in government departments. Why can’t this file culture be cut down?’; ‘Open up the railways to the private sector’; ‘We need to shift decision-making from Delhi to state capitals.’ His ‘can do’ opinions were coming thick and fast. The entire interaction was telecast live on all the network channels (CNBC, CNN-IBN, IBN 7), including the ETV network that broadcast in half a dozen languages. The show was repeated at prime time, ensuring maximum eyeballs.

It was meant to be a ‘soft focus’ interaction. As it was winding down, I wanted to ask a question on crony capitalism and the charges that he was favouring select business groups. Modi saw my hand raised, politely ignored me and ended the session. Later, I was told Modi had been assured there would be no ‘inconvenient’ issues raised. He probably thought I would rewind to 2002. Clearly, there would be no 2002-related questions and no walkouts this time!

My enduring memory of that day was Modi’s entry into the Taj Palace Hotel lobby. In his signature half-sleeved white kurta, he strode in with the self-confidence of a man who believed he had truly arrived. The BJP leaders at the venue—Smriti Irani, Meenakshi Lekhi, Piyush Goyal, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Kirit Somaiya—stood to attention, almost as if they were part of an army battalion whose general had just marched in. I tried to lighten the mood by asking Somaiya, a BJP MP from Mumbai, when he was planning to expose a CAG report on Gujarat, like he had done in Maharashtra. Modi glared at him and me. When Modi had departed the waiting room for the stage, Somaiya told me worriedly,
‘Kya boss, marva daloge mujhe!’
(Boss, you will have me killed.) Modi was still not the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, but he was already acting like one. And
party members were already both in awe and fear, already convinced that their leader was headed to victory.