2014: The Election That Changed India (28 page)

That was the problem with the modern-day Samajwadi
Party—socialist values were reduced to cut-outs and lip service. Dandavate would have
preferred to travel by train all his life; today’s SP has
got caught up
in what can be best described as the
hawai jahaaz
(airline) culture.

It started, perhaps, with Amar Singh, a
businessman-politician who was once Mulayam’s Sancho Panza and who Akhilesh referred to
politely as ‘uncle’. Uncle Amar Singh was the de facto king of the Samajwadi Party till
he was unceremoniously shown the door in 2010 over what was described as a ‘family
fight’.

Amar Singh is a fascinating political character. He
is a neta by day, a party animal by night, a safari suit-clad friend of millionaires and film stars
in a party of craggy, rural Lohiaites, who scoffs at being called a political ‘fixer’.
‘Boss, you can call me crony capitalist—my party sees me as socialist!’ he once
laughingly told me.

Amar Singh could have breakfast with corporate
leaders like Anil Ambani, lunch with Mulayam and then dinner with the Bachchans. I once filmed him
on the campaign trail in UP. We spent the day in the boondocks of Sonbhadra in eastern UP where he
addressed a ‘Thakur Sabha’. I told him I wanted to see the ‘other side’ of
him by night. Within a few hours, he had organized a party at home. The guest list included actor
Sridevi and husband Boney, industrialists and models. ‘All my friends, they will do anything
for me,’ he said, his body oozing the latest perfume.

The Amar Singh culture of wheeling and dealing came
to haunt the SP. Mulayam Singh had always been ‘Netaji’ to his colleagues, a political
and real-life wrestler, born in a small village, who had started life as a schoolteacher. Amar Singh
gave him a taste of the high life and he didn’t want to let go.
‘Party badal gayi,
Netaji badal gaye, sabko paise ki lalach ho gayi’
(The party changed, Mulayam changed,
everyone wanted to make money), said a veteran SP MP.

But the real decline in the SP’s work culture
was not catalysed by Amar Singh but by Mulayam’s own family. Almost every relative was given a
position within the party structure. Akhilesh’s wife was an MP, an uncle was a minister,
another uncle was a Rajya Sabha MP.
‘Samajwaad parivarwaad ban gaya!’
(Socialism has become family raj), is how a senior UP journalist described it to me.

Family power can breed
arrogance. No one was more arrogant than Shivpal Yadav, Mulayam’s younger brother. The
rough-talking Shivpal had acquired notoriety as a PWD minister who apparently had a ‘rate
card’ for handing over government contracts. ‘You want any work done in UP, you need to
go to Shivpalji,’ is what a UP bureaucrat told me once.

It was this work culture, then, that Akhilesh was
inheriting, one which he needed to discard to be successful. I remember asking Akhilesh on the
campaign trail how he would deal with his uncles once he became chief minister.
‘Koi
problem nahi hoga, hum saath kaam karenge!’
(No problem, we will all work together.)

His confidence was horribly misplaced. When the
government came to power, the old order took over. Akhilesh for them was a
bachcha
(kid).
UP’s thriving transfer-posting business was back, as was a common practice by which Yadavs
were given preference in government jobs. ‘If you are a Yadav, you could get a police station
of your choice,’ is what a senior UP police officer told me.

Also marking a return was UP’s ‘goonda
raj’ in sharp contrast to Mayawati’s tough-on-law-and-order image. Our office was in
Noida in UP. When Mulayam Singh was chief minister in 2006, cars would routinely be stolen from
outside the office premises. We complained but got no response. When Mayawati took charge a year
later, we complained again. A police booth was set up just outside the office. The car thefts
stopped.

Just as worrying was the fragile social peace. In
the first year of Akhilesh’s government, there were more than a hundred large and small
communal riots. Akhilesh insisted that the riots were the brainchild of the BJP–VHP combine.
‘Phayda to unhi ko hota hai dangon se’
(The BJP–VHP are the ones who
benefit from riots), he claimed. The pattern of the riots was suspicious—any small incident
could trigger a bandh call from saffron groups and spark off tension and violence. Local Sangh
Parivar leaders, it seems, were spoiling for a fight.

And yet, the fact is the SP was also playing the
politics of religious polarization. During the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1990,
Mulayam had ordered police firing on kar sevaks on their way to Ayodhya, to prevent them from
reaching the disputed site. It was a controversial decision, but one that earned him the loyalty of
the UP Muslims. It was the Muslim–Yadav base that had since sustained his politics.

But what started off as an attempt to maintain law
and order eventually became a rather blatant policy of Muslim appeasement. From job reservations to
promises to withdraw cases against Muslim youth accused of terror, the SP government became almost
totally identified with the politics of the minorities. Matters reached a stage where the joke in
UP’s power circles was that if any politician with a topi and
dadhi
met Mulayam, he
would be given ministerial rank and a lal-batti car. ‘It had gone out of control, there was
bound to be a backlash,’ says senior Lucknow-based journalist Sharat Pradhan.

The Muzaffarnagar riots only exposed the fault lines
further. In December 2013, I visited Muzaffarnagar along with an NGO to help in the relief and
rehabilitation efforts. Many of the riot displaced were still living in tents in the bitter winter
cold, too frightened to go back to their homes. Religious organizations and local madrasas had more
or less taken over the relief camp, providing blankets and firewood. I had brought cricket kits for
the children and we played a match. Adolescents who had seen their parents attacked or killed joined
the game with an eager gaiety and free-spiritedness that brought tears to my eyes. ‘I think
this is the first time I have seen the children smile in weeks,’ one of the NGO activists told
me.

Just a week later, Mulayam Singh, who had not even
visited Muzaffarnagar once since the riots broke out, termed those in the relief camps as
‘agents of the Opposition parties’. Another SP leader said, ‘Those in the relief
camps are like professional beggars found in every community.’

A month later, even as the riot victims were still
battling compensation claims and slow-moving FIRs, the Yadav clan held their traditional Saifai
Mahotsav in their village. Images of film stars dancing in front of the ruling Yadavs were
contrasted with those who
were spending their nights in camps in an
unforgiving UP winter. The news outrage industry was having a field day. I remember questioning
Shivpal Yadav on the 9 p.m. news on the need for a grand celebration in Saifai so soon after the
riots. He shouted at me, and then walked out. It was another dramatic ‘TV moment’ that
only mirrored the moral and political decline of the Akhilesh government.

Akhilesh had clearly betrayed the mandate of 2012.
Everywhere I travelled in UP during the elections, one encountered an overwhelming sense of
frustration. ‘
Akhilesh sarkar nahi chala sakte’
(Akhilesh can’t run the
government), was a familiar cry of anguish. It was a sullen anger waiting for an outlet to gush out.
Modi provided the voter that escape route—he promised them deliverance from doom and gloom.
The discredited Yadavs versus Modi’s promise of ‘hope’—it was a no-contest.
I remember meeting a young Yadav student leader in Meerut who said he was voting for Modi.
‘Akhilesh has given us a laptop, but no bijli,’ he told me.
‘Modi aayenge,
bijli layenge!’
(Modi will bring electricity.) UP’s youth were ready to cross the
caste Rubicon. If even the Yadavs were looking to vote for Modi, then UP’s political earth was
truly beginning to shake.

The erosion in support for Akhilesh’s
government was good news for Amit Shah. His UP strategy was working perfectly. SP down and out,
Mayawati making no real headway, Rahul missing in action and his party in
disarray—Shah’s political rehabilitation seemed complete. Well, almost.

In the middle of November, while the country was
mourning the retirement of Sachin Tendulkar, ‘Snoopgate’ hit the headlines. A scandal
had broken out, with two websites, Cobrapost.com and Gulail.com, releasing audio tapes with
telephone conversations that purportedly had Shah directing the illegal surveillance of a young
woman at the behest of his ‘saheb’. I was in Mumbai tracking the Sachin mania when the
story broke. That evening, I got a call from Shah. His voice was as soft as ever but the message was
less comfiting:

‘Yeh kya headline
story aap chala rahe ho. Thoda zara dekh lo na, hata do usko’
(What is this story you are
running, please do see and remove it).

I was used to politicians occasionally ringing up,
asking for negative stories to be edited out. My standard approach was to say I didn’t know
what was airing on the channel and that I wasn’t in the studio. The hope was always that the
politician would forget about it and the sheer pace of a 24/7 news wheel would prevent anyone from
trying to put pressure to censor content. Shah, though, seemed pretty insistent, but I wasn’t
going to be bullied easily. ‘Don’t worry, sir, you give your version too, story
ko
to chalana padega
[I have to run the story],’
I said, while asking our news team
to be careful with the facts.

By next morning, the story had acquired a momentum
of its own. The Congress had found a new stick with which to beat the Shah–Modi duo, this time
one that they were hopeful would actually land a decisive political blow. The party’s women
MPs were summoned to Delhi by Rahul Gandhi’s office and asked to hold a special press
conference. Women’s organizations were particularly irate and demanded Modi’s
resignation and Shah’s prosecution. ‘Why doesn’t Amit Shah tell us who the
“saheb” is on whose behalf he was snooping?’ asked the National Commission for
Women chairperson, Mamata Sharma. The Central government promised to appoint a judicial inquiry but
didn’t seem to make much progress. ‘No judge was willing to take up a politically
sensitive case,’ a senior minister told me.

Worried about the fallout, the Shah–Modi duo
acted swiftly. The Gujarat government appointed its own inquiry commission to look into the case.
The young woman’s father approached the Supreme Court and asked the court to restrain the
Centre from ordering a parallel inquiry. The father even issued a statement, interestingly released
from the BJP office, saying that it was he who had asked for security for his daughter. Whether that
‘security’ included an hourly update of her movements, including who she was having
lunch with, is anybody’s guess. The woman in question and her husband were reportedly flown
out of Ahmedabad to Paris. When our reporter visited the family’s flat in Ahmedabad, he found
no one there. Later,
a BJP source admitted to me, ‘We were a little
worried initially and had to go into damage control because this issue could have really blown up in
our face.’

This wasn’t the first I had heard of
Snoopgate. In 2012, a senior police officer from Gujarat, Kuldeep Sharma, had met me for breakfast,
claiming he had information that would gravely damage Modi and Shah. ‘They have been illegally
snooping on a woman,’ he said. I asked for proof; he promised to get back.

Sharma was a decorated police officer who had now
fallen foul of the Shah–Modi duo. He had approved the Sohrabuddin fake encounter report and
had been also investigating a cooperative bank fraud in which Shah was allegedly involved. The Modi
government hit back, he says, by putting his brother Pradeep Sharma, an IAS officer, in jail.
Pradeep had been seen in the company of the woman who was now the subject of the Snoopgate
controversy. Modi had reportedly met the woman who was a landscape architect, along with the IAS
officer, while inaugurating a hill garden project in Bhuj in 2005 when Pradeep Sharma was district
collector there. In his affidavit before the Supreme Court, Sharma claimed that Modi was besotted
with the woman and had asked the home department to keep a tab on her. Gujarat government sources
claimed that it was Pradeep Sharma who was actually in love with the woman. ‘This is a
complicated story, but
daal mein zaroor kuch kaala hai
,’ was the response of a senior
Gujarat bureaucrat when I had casually mentioned my conversation with Sharma. Now, the audio tapes
had revived the story.

That the Snoopgate ‘revelations’ were
met with some scepticism perhaps reflected the credibility crisis afflicting the ruling UPA
government. In normal times, the audio tapes would have merited a detailed investigation, with tough
questions being asked. But in the build-up to the elections, it was perceived as yet another
‘hit job’ on Modi and his man Friday. Had the Snoopgate story broken a year or two
earlier, it might have resonated more strongly. The UPA had got its timing wrong—yet
again.