2014: The Election That Changed India (27 page)

A sixteen-minute video with
the ‘
Modi aanewala hai
’ song and clips of Modi’s speeches would be played
on the TV screen on the rath, often taking up local issues like
bijli
and contrasting them
with the promise of twenty-four-hour power supply as in Gujarat. The BJP/RSS volunteers who
accompanied the video van would distribute Modi masks and caps to the children in the village. Every
day, the journey of each rath would be monitored by a team of around a hundred IT professionals who
would send a daily progress report to the nerve centre in Lucknow. ‘We had done it in
Rajasthan. Now we needed to scale it up in UP,’ says a Team Shah member, sounding like a
business executive.

It was becoming clearer by the day that the plump,
bearded man from Gujarat had crafted a well-oiled election machine that was ready to roll across the
banks of the Ganga. All he needed was one trigger that would sustain the early momentum. If, in
Bihar, it was a terror attack, in UP it would be a tragic riot.

Muzaffarnagar is a ramshackle, crowded town in
western UP, about 127 kilometres from the national capital. With its broken roads, unruly traffic
and scores of young men just loitering around, Muzaffarnagar typifies the gradual decline of UP. It
is also in the heart of the state’s sugar belt and is a bit like the Wild West with a thriving
business in unlicensed guns. A friend of mine who worked in a sugar company used to travel to his
Muzaffarnagar factory with armed guards. ‘You could take no chances, especially at night, in
the town,’ is what he told me.

Politically, this had been Chaudhary Charan Singh
country. The former prime minister had built a social compact between his fellow landowning Jats and
the local Muslims, many of whom were artisans and agricultural labourers. It had been a relationship
based on shared economic interest which had endured for the most part. Travelling with Ajit Singh on
the campaign trail in the 1990s, I was struck by the reverence people had for his father.
‘Chaudhary sahib sabko

saath lete hain, Jat ho
ya Muslim’
(Chaudhury sahib takes everyone along with him, Jat or Muslim), was the
near-unanimous refrain.

But in August 2013, that delicately woven social
alliance collapsed. Jats and Muslims found themselves engaged in a bloody communal riot that lasted
several days and left sixty-two persons dead, with more than 50,000 persons displaced. The riots,
worryingly, engulfed Muzaffarnagar’s villages which had been relatively immune to religious
tension. No one is quite sure what sparked off the violence. The police FIR claimed there had been a
bike accident which led to a fight in which two Hindus and one Muslim boy were killed. Others
(mainly the Hindu Jats) claimed that there was an eve-teasing incident that triggered the
conflict.

I must honestly confess that no national news
channel gave the story adequate coverage, initially. Death in the age of breaking news can often be
reduced to a statistic—three people killed in what appeared a localized clash didn’t
seem to shake the media into action. It was only in the first week of September, when the violence
showed no sign of letting up, that the news antennae were aroused.

In my case, the violence literally hit home on 7
September when I was informed that Rajesh Verma, a stringer associated with IBN 7, the Hindi news
network I was heading, had been shot dead while covering the clashes. A local photographer with him
had also been beaten to death. At Rajesh’s funeral the next day, the mood was one of sullen
anger. Despite a curfew, hundreds had come out on the streets to protest. The administration has
gone missing, was the universal complaint.

That night I rang up the UP chief minister, Akhilesh
Yadav. He sounded suitably contrite, and promised full support to Rajesh’s family.
‘Hum unke family ko job aur compensation dono denge’
(We will give the family
jobs and money), he assured me. I wasn’t convinced. ‘Akhileshji, this isn’t just
about money. People are being killed in Muzaffarnagar and your government is being blamed for
mishandling the situation.’ His answer was a classic case of passing the buck.
‘
Arre, aap media wale aur Opposition hamesha prashashan ko blame karte ho. Yeh danga to
BJP walon ne karvaya hai’
(The
media and Opposition always blame
the administration. This riot has been stage-managed by the BJP).

The next morning, the army swung into action and an
indefinite curfew was imposed. The violence slowly subsided. Not for the first time, the Indian
state had woken up a tad too late. Too late to save the lives of innocent citizens caught in the
crossfire.

The big question in the weeks and months that
followed was—did the political parties of UP, especially the BJP, stoke the communal fires to
derive political benefit? That BJP leaders were present at a ‘maha’ panchayat where a
call was made to avenge the killings and to demand justice for Jat
bahu–beti
s is
undeniable. That one of them, an MLA called Sangeet Som, put out a false video on Facebook showing
an alleged lynching of Hindu boys is also true. At a Modi rally in Agra in November, the BJP
leadership even felicitated its MLAs who had been charged with inciting violence. Two of its leaders
named in the riot FIRs were given tickets, and one of them, Sanjeev Balyan, would eventually become
a Union minister.

On the other side of the communal divide, it is a
fact that local Muslim leaders from the Congress, SP and BSP, including the BSP MP Kadir Rana, were
caught on tape delivering inflammatory speeches. Government officials who were pushing for an
impartial inquiry were transferred. SP leader Azam Khan was later found in a sting operation to have
asked the police to release the Muslims accused of rioting. To blame, therefore, only one community
or party would be to camouflage the real tragedy of Muzaffarnagar—it represented the
collective bankruptcy of a political class that was seeking votes over dead bodies.

In a way, this was the difference between the
politics of religion in the early 1990s in Uttar Pradesh and what played out on the ground in
2013–14. During the Ayodhya movement, it was clear that the BJP was making an open and
determined bid to stir the communal pot. Now, the communalization was more insidious. There was no
blatant religious issue like the Ram mandir to incite trouble. Instead, a more silent divide was
being created on the ground through a
sustained whisper campaign that branded
Muslims as untrustworthy and anti-national (
‘Sab ISI agents hai’
). The response
was an equally worrisome radicalization of Muslims, where the moderate voices in the community had
given way to the extremist rhetoric of ‘
Islam khatre mein hai
’ (Islam is in
danger). Caught in the crossfire, the so-called secularists were much too enfeebled and compromised
to be able to respond effectively.

Months later, I asked Shah about the allegations
that he had taken political advantage of the religious polarization after the riots. His defence
was, ‘
Dange humne nahi karvayen. Dange ek chhoti si ghatna se shuru huye. Agar sarkar
prompt action leti, toh dange nahi hote. Yeh dange sarkar ki vote bank ki politics ki wajah se
hue’
(We didn’t start the riots. Riots started with a small incident. If the
government had not played vote bank politics but taken prompt action instead, there would have been
no riots).

Shah had a less convincing answer as to why tickets
were given to MLAs who were charged with inciting the riots; he tamely claimed they had been
‘defamed’. I also asked him about his controversial remark ahead of polling that
UP’s voters should exact ‘revenge’. ‘I was referring to the ballot box, not
the gun. You media people are just trying to create trouble,’ he insisted.

But the subtext of Shah’s statement was
apparent. It was obvious that post-Muzaffarnagar, a certain Hindu consolidation had taken place on
the ground and Shah could reap its political advantage. In the six months after the riots, there
were several minor communal flare-ups across western UP—stone throwing, local skirmishes,
fights over loudspeakers—and with every instance, the religious divide widened. A senior UP
police officer later told me that a pattern had been established as early as May 2012, soon after
Akhilesh Yadav took over. ‘Every week, we would get reports of communal tension from some
district headquarters. It started in western UP, but spread to central and eastern UP,’ he
told me.

In October 2013, I travelled to Bareilly, a town
that had seen a month-long bandh the previous year after riots broke out during Ramzan. A year had
elapsed, but the divide on the ground was
visible. In the Muslim mohallas,
the Shah–Modi combine was seen as an ‘evil’ duo.
‘Woh toh dange
karvayenge, UP ko Gujarat banayenge!’
(They will incite riots, make UP into Gujarat),
said a Muslim schoolteacher. Interestingly, in the Hindu bastis, too, there was a feeling that UP
would become Gujarat if Modi became prime minister.
‘Dekho, sir, Gujarat ne kitni tarakki
ki hai, hum peechhe reh gaye!’
(See how Gujarat has progressed, we are left behind), a
young graduate told me. It seemed that Modi was seen as a threat by the Muslims, but represented
hope and opportunity to the Hindus.

The Muzaffarnagar riots drew the politically
influential Jats into the BJP fold. But it wasn’t just the Jats or upper castes
alone—the Sangh Parivar made a deliberate attempt to woo Dalits as well, in an effort to
cement an umbrella ‘Hindu’ identity. Mayawati was strangely muted in the aftermath of
Muzaffarnagar, and the BJP sensed an opportunity. The RSS consciously wooed non-Jatav Dalit groups
like the Pasis, even distributing pamphlets claiming that their ancestors were
rakshak
s
(protectors) of the Hindu faith. Dalit families who were affected in the riots were promised
protection. A news report suggested that in the first three months of 2014, more than 3000 Dalit
youths who were once part of the BSP switched over as full-time BJP workers. ‘We were able to
take a large chunk of Mayawati’s votes away from her in western UP,’ claims a local BJP
leader.

Just how successful the BJP was with this strategy
was confirmed when we did a television programme from a Dalit-dominated village in Noida. The voices
were vociferously pro-Modi.
‘Hum Hindu samaj mein hain, Modiji hamare neta hain, iss baar
unko hum chance denge’
(We are part of the Hindu community and Modi is our leader. We
want to give him a chance). A subdued Mayawati didn’t counter the RSS’s propaganda
machine (see chapter 6 for more).

But the even bigger political failure was that of
the ruling SP. No major riot in India has taken place without some element of administrative
complicity and/or incompetence, be it Delhi 1984 or Gujarat 2002. Muzaffarnagar 2013, in that sense,
fitted in with a
troubling pattern. As the leader of the party in power,
Akhilesh Yadav has much to answer for the partisanship of the local administration. In the winter of
2011–12, he had been UP’s great new hope; less than two years later, he was already
becoming its worst nightmare.

The 2012 UP assembly elections was a
‘wave’ election—the Samajwadi Party was swept to power by an overwhelming
majority. The star turn was that of Akhilesh Yadav who travelled the length and breadth of the
state, often on a cycle. Though he bore an uncanny resemblance to father Mulayam, he promised a new
face for the SP. He even denied a ticket to D.P. Yadav, the powerful politician with a long criminal
record.

While travelling with Akhilesh on the campaign
trail, I must confess to being impressed with his desire to change his party’s image.
‘Aap dekh lena, hum UP kee tasveer badal denge’
(Just you wait and see, we will
change the face of UP). Young, fresh-faced, foreign educated and, importantly, with an ear to the
ground, he appeared to have all the qualifications to become a symbol of hope and change.

I should have known better. At thirty-eight,
Akhilesh was sworn in as UP’s youngest chief minister. But the party he headed was much older.
The SP had emerged from the womb of the original Socialist Party. On the wall at the residence of
Mulayam Singh in Lucknow, there are portraits of all the great socialist leaders from Ram Manohar
Lohia to George Fernandes to Madhu Limaye. Even those who disagreed with their political views could
not but admire the simplicity in the lifestyles of these netas. I remember pointing out to Akhilesh
that he should also have a picture of Madhu Dandavate, the former railway minister, on the wall.
‘Haan, haan, aap kehte hain to unka bhi photo laga denge!’
(Yes, yes, if you
say so, we will put his photo too.)