2014: The Election That Changed India (24 page)

Two years later, though, in June 2010, Modi did
rather knowingly provoke Nitish. On the eve of the BJP national executive meeting in Patna, posters
and hoardings were splashed across the city thanking Modi for his contribution to the Kosi flood
victims—the Gujarat government had donated a sum of Rs 5 crore. The posters had been sponsored
by local BJP leaders.

Nitish, who was travelling, had invited the BJP top
brass to his house for dinner during the executive meet. Lavish arrangements had been made, with
food being ordered from a local five-star hotel. But when Nitish returned to Patna, he was stunned
by what he saw in the papers. Full-page advertisements of the
mahadaan
(great donation) by
the Gujarat chief minister to the people of Bihar were in every major daily. The text was
accompanied by the Ludhiana photograph of Nitish and Modi holding hands.

Nitish was infuriated. Modi, he felt, had
deliberately publicized an act of charity to humiliate him. The dinner was cancelled, and the
government was pushed to the brink. ‘We can survive without them,’ Nitish told an
aide.

Modi, too, was angry. ‘Why are you letting
Nitish behave with me in this manner? We must pull out of the government,’ he told BJP
president Gadkari. ‘That was the day when the Nitish–Modi battle
took an ugly personal turn, and was no longer just about contrarian ideologies,’ says
Nitish’s biographer, journalist Sankarshan Thakur.

Having just lost the 2009 general elections, though,
the BJP chief didn’t want to lose another state government. The party went into damage-control
mode. Jaitley and Sushil Modi were once again put on the job of placating Nitish. The 2010 Bihar
elections were just a year away and the alliance had every chance of returning to power. Both sides
called a truce and in the elections that followed won by a record three-fourths majority.

By the middle of 2012, though, it was apparent that
Modi was the rising star in the BJP. Nitish was anxious. He made a public statement calling for the
BJP to declare its prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 elections by the end of the year. In an
interview to the
Economic Times
he said the prime ministerial candidate must have
‘secular’ credentials. Clearly, Nitish was determined to revive his anti-Modi agenda.
Only this time, the BJP wasn’t willing to succumb—Nitish’s deadline came and
went.

By early 2013, Modi, having won the Gujarat
elections for a third time, was being talked about as the most likely BJP candidate for the top job.
Nitish decided to meet the BJP national leadership to get clarity. Advani reportedly assured him
that no such decision had been taken. But when he went for his customary dinner to Jaitley’s
house, he sensed something amiss.
‘Maine kai baar unko poochha, par seedha jawaab nahi
mila’
(I asked the question many times, but did not get a straight answer), Nitish told
me later. He knew then that the ‘Modi for PM’ plan of the BJP was now a fait
accompli.

A few weeks later, as the BJP formally announced
Modi as its campaign committee chief, Nitish decided to break the alliance and run a single-party
government. I interviewed Nitish a few days later. On a hot summer day, Nitish seemed at peace with
the choice he had made. He said,
‘Ek vyakti ne party ko hijack kar diya hai, dictatorship
karna chahte hain. Hamare saamne koi option hi nahi tha’
(One man has hijacked the party
and is trying to be a dictator. I had no other option). Once again, he steadfastly refused to name
Modi even though I tried several times in an hour-long interview to get him
to at least acknowledge the Gujarat chief minister.

That evening, on the flight back home, I had the
‘Bihar Modi’, Sushil Kumar, as my co-passenger. I like Sushil Modi—he strikes me
as an honest, thoughtful politician. I asked him why he hadn’t tried to prevent the
BJP–JD(U) split this time. He, too, said,
‘Koi option nahi tha!’
and then
offered an anecdote to emphasize his point.

Apparently, the BJP had held a rally a few days
earlier to protest against Nitish’s decision. At the rally, a BJP worker chanted the names of
different party leaders, including Advani and Sushma. The moment he shouted names other than Modi,
the crowd began to heckle him: ‘
Bas Modi ka naam bolo!’
they said.
‘Rajdeepji, I have never seen anything like this.
Logon mein Modi ka craze ho gaya
hai!
’ (There’s a craze for Modi among the people), said Sushil Modi, almost
apologetically.

It was a ‘craze’ that the BJP was
determined to build on. From the day Nitish ended the alliance, the entire Sangh Parivar machinery
was put on alert in Bihar. Winning Bihar became a prestige issue for Team Modi. ‘If there was
one north Indian state where Modiji was taking a daily personal interest, it was Bihar. It was
almost as if he wanted to teach Nitish a lesson,’ a BJP leader told me.

Angered by Nitish’s public challenge, the
upper castes had already firmly consolidated behind the BJP. The challenge was to break into
Bihar’s complex backward-caste matrix. When I pointed this out to Ravi Shankar Prasad, the BJP
leader from Bihar, he smiled: ‘Don’t forget the biggest backward-caste leader in the
country, Narendra Modi, is with us!’ In every Bihar speech, Modi never missed an opportunity
to stress his caste background.

Local BJP and RSS leaders had already organized
caste-specific events in the state to break into the state’s complex caste matrix—a
convention for Dhanuks and Keots, a special programme for Koeris. There was a special push towards
reaching out even to Yadavs, who, it was felt, were tiring of Lalu’s brand of politics. The
party roped in Upendra Kushwaha, a backward-caste leader who was once a Nitish aide. By February
2014, they would even have Dalit leader
Ram Vilas Paswan by their side.
‘Except for Muslims, we had made inroads in all communities. You can call it a Hindu vote bank
with a strong caste flavour,’ is how one BJP leader described the party’s Bihar
strategy.

The Patna blasts only seemed to consolidate this
‘Hindu’ vote bank, with the needle of suspicion pointing at Islamic militant groups.
Nitish was isolated and already appeared to wear a slightly defeated look when I met him for dinner
in late 2013 at author-turned-JD(U) politician Pavan Varma’s residence. With reports of a Modi
mini wave blowing through Bihar and our election tracker showing him losing out, I asked him if he
regretted breaking with the BJP.
‘Kahan regret ki baat? Politics mein chunav hote rahte
hain. Atma-samman bhi koi cheez hai ya nahin?’
(Elections keep happening in politics.
Self-respect is more important), was his reply.

So, did Nitish make a mistake in making Modi’s
prime ministerial credentials a prestige issue? In pure electoral terms, he probably miscalculated.
His own Kurmi caste was simply not large enough for him to be seen as a caste leader like a Lalu
Prasad. He was hoping that the Muslims would ‘reward’ him for taking on Modi, but failed
to realize that Muslims would rather back a leader like Lalu who they believed could actually defeat
Modi. Nitish’s original extremely backward and Mahadalit coalition was also eroded by the
BJP’s aggressive campaign.

In the end, Nitish perhaps just got a bit carried
away by his own self-image as a defender of Lohiaite secularism and socialist values. Ironically,
Nitish and Modi are not too dissimilar in several ways, a point I had emphasized in a column in June
2012 when the endgame was being played out. Both men have an authoritarian streak and keep an iron
grip over their parties. Both are uncomfortable with dissent and have not allowed a second-line
leadership to emerge in Gujarat or Bihar. Both also have a reputation for personal financial
integrity.

They have similar family backgrounds. They had come
up in life the hard way from mofussil towns—one from Vadnagar, the other from Bakhtiarpur.
Both have kept their families firmly out of politics.

Modi had left his wife and
family while still a teenager, while Nitish’s late wife stayed away from him for extended periods.
Both had cut their political teeth during the anti-Emergency agitation in the 1970s, but had taken
very different ideological paths. One became an RSS pracharak and an eloquent defender of Hindu
nationalism; the other is a passionate representative of socialist beliefs. Modi had publicly
rejected Muslim headgear; Nitish was more than happy to wear an Islamic cap as a symbol of a plural
heritage. Modi’s economic model looks like a well-spun dream of market-driven growth and
prosperity; the Nitish model is driven by a series of pro-poor schemes.

In 2014, like in any election, only one model and
its leader could win. Modi, as an icon of change and hope, was that individual. Across Bihar, the
RSS cadres contrasted Bihar’s backwardness with images of Gujarat’s prosperity in their
door-to-door campaign. Perhaps in a state election where the chief ministership was at stake, Nitish
might have been more of a factor. He had, after all, worked hard for the development of one of the
most difficult states in the country to govern. His road-building projects in particular had been
universally applauded. Patna was a safer city where women could finally walk freely after dark.
‘Gujarat chalana aasan hai, Bihar ko sudharna bahut muskhil’
(It is easy to run
Gujarat, to improve Bihar is very difficult), he told me once. But the 2014 elections were not a
battle about who should rule in Patna but who was best placed to lead India. Modi in 2014 was a
declared prime ministerial candidate; Nitish’s horizons were limited by his state’s
boundaries.

‘We had three weapons for Bihar,’ a BJP
strategist told me later. ‘Modi as an OBC leader who could lead the nation, upper-caste anger
against Nitish for ditching the BJP, and the promise of fast growth and jobs.’ The strategy
worked. A cross-caste Hindu consolidation was visible across a majority of the state’s forty
seats. Bihar had been conquered, but an even bigger challenge awaited Modi in neighbouring Uttar
Pradesh.

The road to Delhi leads
through Lucknow. Or so we have been led to believe for decades. Between 1947 and 1991, all of
India’s prime ministers came from the land of Awadh. The one exception was the Mumbai-based
Gujarati Morarji Desai, whose ascent as the leader of the Janata Party government in 1977 was
fortuitous. Less than two years later, he was replaced by another UP-ite, Chaudhary Charan Singh.
Hindi–Hindu–Hindustan had defined the politics of the Jan Sangh and the BJP for years.
The only BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had been the pride of Lucknow. In a sense,
Narendra Modi was fighting history—not only had no sitting chief minister been prime minister,
no BJP leader from outside the Indo-Gangetic plain had made it to the top.

No state had also witnessed the kind of tumult in
the previous two decades as UP had. Stretching back to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1991
and the rise of Mulayam Singh and Mayawati, UP had been the cauldron in which the politics of caste
and community were playing out in their most ugly form through this period. With a population of
nearly 200 million—UP would have been the world’s sixth largest country if it had been
independent—poor, overpopulated, badly governed and riddled with socio-political conflict, it
was a microcosm of the larger crisis confronting the Indian state. In the absence of large-scale
industry and employment, politics remains UP’s biggest
udyog
(industry). Every inch
of that fertile Gangetic soil is intensely politicized.

As a journalist, I had a ringside view of politics
as raw theatre in Uttar Pradesh. I had watched mikes being thrown by MLAs in the state assembly, a
chief minister being sworn in for just a day at midnight, Mayawati being manhandled by Samajwadi
Party MLAs (she later claimed they had wanted to rape and kill her), and heard gory stories of
criminal MLAs taking
supari
s (contracts) to kill their rivals. For a political journalist,
there was no place like UP to observe the turbulence of Indian politics (well, OK, Bihar under Lalu
too!). As I would tell my school friends in distant south Mumbai, ‘If you want to understand
India and Indian politics, spend some time travelling through UP and Bihar.’

What had also become clear in
this period of flux in UP was the decline of the national parties. The Congress had struggled to
retain its relevance post-1989 when Rajiv Gandhi’s government was defeated. ‘You want to
meet a real Congressman in UP? Look for a senior citizen who has been sleeping for the last twenty
years!’ was how one journalist once described the state of the party to me.

The BJP had built its cadres in UP on the back of
the contentious Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, attempting to fill the vacuum left behind by the
shrinking Congress. It seemed to work. But only for a short while. Soon, the ‘Hindu’
vote bank that the party had tried to consolidate realized that they were being taken for one giant
ride. No mandir was going to come up in the near future. It was only an electoral ploy to garner
votes. By contrast, sharpening caste identities—as represented by Mayawati’s
Dalit-dominated Bahujan Samaj Party and Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party—appeared to have a
more enduring appeal. Mandal had outlasted mandir in the electoral battlefield.