2014: The Election That Changed India (31 page)

I later learnt that Kejriwal came to the party meeting and, without consulting his colleagues, went ahead and resigned before the waiting media. ‘This lack of consultation bothered some of us. The high command culture had entered AAP too, where decisions were taken by an individual on a whim,’ says one senior AAP member. Kejriwal
denies this, insisting that the party had been taken into confidence. ‘We all thought that the Jan Lokpal was part of our core belief system. We should not be sticking to a chair if we could not get it passed. It was a matter of principle for us,’ he later claimed to me.

I was less sure of the principle involved in resigning over a legislation which needed oversight from the Central government. It seemed to me that Kejriwal, after just seven weeks in power, was looking for an exit strategy. The power discoms were threatening a blackout in the summer and the AAP would have to bear the brunt of public anger. A snap poll was perhaps the best way out.

Though he denies it, my view (with which many others would concur) is that Kejriwal was aware the countdown had begun for the general elections, and he wanted to offer himself as a national alternative. Carried away by his Delhi success, his impetuosity got the better of him. The AAP, with no national organization, suddenly announced it would contest more than 400 seats. ‘We thought this was the best time to make an impact. Even if we could get thirty to forty seats, we could become the third largest party in the country,’ a Kejriwal aide told me. The resignation was to prove a big blunder, driven as much by hubris as naivety.

Weeks later, Kejriwal would admit to me in an interview that resigning as Delhi chief minister was a ‘mistake’, but he called it a failure to communicate to the people the reasons for the resignation. Maybe he had slowly realized that politics is a game of patience. Maybe he had finally recognized the changing public mood. I certainly could sense it. We were recording an election programme in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, and in a number of middle-class colonies, the typical response we got was, ‘
Kejriwal, arre voh toh bhagoda hai!’
(Kejriwal is a politician who runs away.)

I continue to believe that if Kejriwal had remained in office, focusing the energies of his administration into making Delhi a corruption-free city, he would have forged an administrative track record for his party and a possible ‘Delhi model of governance’ to offer to a future electorate, just as in this election Modi had so successfully held up his Gujarat model. Kejriwal’s rise, like that
of Modi, had been the direct fallout of the wave of public anger against the Congress-led UPA government. India was looking for leaders who could shake up the system and challenge the ruling establishment, but do it through effective governance, not just through rhetoric.

The AAP’s abdication from governmental responsibility caused widespread disillusionment. The March election tracker we did showed a drastic fall in Kejriwal’s popularity in Delhi and beyond. The poll also showed AAP would get less than ten seats in the general elections. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah could afford to breathe easily again. It was almost as if the fall of the AAP gave a fresh momentum to the NaMo wave. But there were others, just as powerful, who were still feeling the heat.

On 11 February, just three days before resigning, Kejriwal ordered FIRs to be filed against India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, the present and former petroleum ministers, Veerappa Moily and Murli Deora, and senior government officials, accusing them of wrongfully increasing natural gas prices in the country. In a press conference, which was carried live across the media, he claimed that the Centre’s decision to raise gas prices had led to a windfall profit of Rs 54,000 crores for Reliance Industries Limited.

This was not the first time that Kejriwal had openly targeted the Ambanis. In late 2012, Kejriwal had addressed two press conferences accusing Mukesh Ambani of holding black money in Swiss bank accounts and artificially lowering production in its gas wells in the Krishna–Godavari basin to blackmail the government into raising gas prices.

A central figure in those press meets and in the attack on the Ambanis was Prashant Bhushan, a Supreme Court lawyer and senior member of the AAP. A fierce activist, Bhushan was a pugnacious lawyer, always itching for a fight. He was known to pick up seemingly unpopular causes. He had appeared in defence of Naxal
sympathizers, Kashmiri separatists and anti-Narmada Dam activists. He had even been physically assaulted by fringe Hindu right-wing groups for his remarks calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir. He also seemed to have an almost pathological dislike for big business, which he was convinced was steeped in cronyism and corruption. It was Bhushan who had taken up the gas price issue against the Ambanis in a PIL that had been filed in the court. Now, wearing his AAP cap, Bhushan was preparing to convert the legal battle into a political war. ‘The attack on the Ambanis was originally Prashant’s idea,’ claims a senior AAP member.

The move suited Kejriwal perfectly. Clearly eyeing the general elections, he was looking for a headline-grabbing issue that would position him as an alternative to both the Congress and the BJP. Kejriwal wanted to show that the Congress and the BJP were two sides of the same coin in the war on corruption. The Ambanis and gas prices became his entry point into the 2014 Lok Sabha battle. ‘Why are Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi silent on gas prices?’ asked Kejriwal.

When the allegations were first made in 2012, the Ambanis were rattled. All the channels which telecast the press conference live received legal notices for defamation. Many channels blacked out the AAP, fearing the wrath of Reliance. At Network 18, a meeting was called and we decided to refrain from going ‘live’ with a press conference or speech where personal allegations were being made, without getting a proper response from the other side.

We had reason to be cautious. In January 2012, Reliance Industries had made a large investment in Network 18. To be fair, Reliance had not interfered in the editorial content of the channels. They were truly, as our promoter Raghav Bahl kept reassuring us, being kept at arm’s-length.

The build-up to campaign 2014 changed all that. In every public meeting, Kejriwal would single out the Ambanis as his prime target. Raghav asked me to look to my ‘conscience’ and exercise due diligence. ‘Why do we need to show everything Kejriwal does in such detail?’ he asked me. I promised to be careful in not giving
disproportionate coverage, but made it clear that any boycott of Kejriwal in an election year was journalistically unsound.

In April, we did a Google+ Hangout with Kejriwal, one amongst several we had planned with top politicians. About an hour before the programme was to be recorded, we got a restraint notice from Reliance’s lawyers, warning us not to go ahead with the interview. Our in-house legal team was flustered by the notice. ‘Can we please drop the programme? Why do we need to pick a fight with Reliance?’ they asked. I refused. ‘Look, we are not taking a
panga
with anyone, just doing a professional job.’ We had been promoting the interview since the morning on the channel and withdrawing it at the last moment was just not an option. Google backed our stand. ‘Look, we are aware of the sensibilities involved here and will not allow anything to be aired that is potentially defamatory,’ I assured our legal team. A few minutes before the programme went on air, I got another mail from the Reliance lawyers, urging us to back off. We went ahead and aired the programme that night but ensured we edited out any personal attacks.

A few days later, a well-networked banker friend called up from Mumbai. ‘Mukeshbhai is very angry with you. Why are you guys giving this Kejriwal any airtime at all?’ he asked. The unfriendly tone of the conversation surprised me. I had met Mukeshbhai on a few occasions in connection with an annual event,
Real Heroes
, which we did in partnership with Reliance. The event showcased stories of hope and courage shown by anonymous Indians and had become a big success. We had built a reasonable personal equation, or so I presumed. Whenever we met, he was always sharply insightful about India’s problems, bubbling with ideas and spoke with an almost obsessive vision of ‘Brand India’ and how he wanted to contribute to the India growth story.

I tried to explain to my banker friend that we had done almost a dozen Google+ Hangouts with BJP and Congress politicians. Kejriwal was just one more voice. ‘It’s your call, Rajdeep, but be prepared for a rough time from Reliance from now on,’ was the parting shot. Little did I know then that the moment the elections
were over, Reliance would formally take over Network 18, a move that would eventually spur my resignation from the channels I had helped create.

The Ambanis’ disquiet with Kejriwal may have been driven by the sharply accusatory nature of the AAP leader’s campaign, but it was also symptomatic of a growing belief within corporate India that they were now under siege. In any social gathering, it was almost routine to hear an industrialist take off on the policies of the Manmohan Singh government. Jairam Ramesh, in his avatar as environment minister, was often singled out by the captains of industry. ‘He is responsible for at least a 1 or 2 per cent dip in our GDP,’ one of them told me. ‘Because of him so many of our projects are stuck.’

Jairam was equally strident. ‘There are three types of environment ministers. Those who just give a stamp to every project without even looking at it; those who are ATM ministers and want money for each approval; and those who implement the laws of the land. Business houses don’t like me because I reminded them of their environment violations,’ he told me in response to these accusations.

Jairam’s successor as environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, proved equally controversial. If Jairam would strike down projects, Jayanthi was accused of sitting on files. Her detracto in the power corridors alleged that she was a ‘rent-seeking’ minister who had to be bribed for clearances, with her OSD (officer on special duty) Gayatri Devi being the supposed go-between (Modi in a campaign speech would later refer to a ‘Jayanthi tax’). When I asked her for a response to the charges on a television programme, she had angrily dismissed it as ‘a tissue of lies’.

On 21 December 2013, hours before Rahul Gandhi was to address a FICCI audience, Jayanthi was removed as the environment minister. Publicly, the fourth-generation Congresswoman from Tamil Nadu (her grandfather had been chief minister) kept silent on her removal. Privately, she was seething. Interestingly, Jayanthi had been close to Rajiv Gandhi. She had been in Sriperumbudur when the former prime minister was assassinated. But with Rahul, the equation was different. She was once pulled up by a Rahul aide and
asked to change her Kanjivaram sari on a TV programme because it had a lotus symbol along the border!

Jairam and Jayanthi, though, were sideshows. Corporate India’s greater disenchantment was with the prime minister himself. Manmohan Singh, after all, had always been much admired by India Inc. since his path-breaking budget of 1991. They had once been his biggest cheerleaders. Now, they wanted him out. And soon. ‘Our financial bottom lines were bleeding and yet the government was happy to keep announcing large-scale subsidies. Manmohanomics was over, and we were dealing with Sonianomics,’ said one corporate leader to me. Another lamented, ‘Surely, when Pranab Mukherjee brought in the retrospective tax in the 2012 budget, the prime minister knew it would send the wrong signal to business. Yet, he just kept quiet.’

The retrospective tax, in particular, was seen to symbolize corporate India’s discomfiture with the UPA government. It had been introduced in the 2012 budget to virtually force the UK-based telecom giant Vodafone to pay Rs 11,000 crore in tax for acquiring the India business of another telecom company, Hutchison, in 2007. The Supreme Court had ruled that Vodafone was not liable to pay the tax but now the government was seeking to amend tax laws retrospectively to bring Vodafone-like deals in the tax net. When an industry delegation met the prime minister to raise the issue, Dr Singh seemed helpless. ‘I will try and speak to Pranabda and see what is possible,’ was the weak assurance. Delayed land clearances, contentious tax amendments, FIRs against leading industrialists, high expenditure on social welfare programmes in a period of low growth—bombarded with such negatives, corporate India was desperately looking for their white knight. When Modi began speaking of less government, more governance, it was just what they wanted to hear. ‘He speaks our language. Five more years of the UPA and the India story is finished,’ is how a corporate leader explained his unstinted support for Modi.

Businessmen are usually careful in articulating their political preferences. At any post-budget show, the men in suits tend to
give the finance minister eight or nine out of ten. But ahead of the elections, the reticence was slowly disappearing. At a closed-door meeting in Mumbai called by a prominent business leader to garner support for Modi in early 2014, there was virtually a full house.

The one industrialist who was seen to be firmly in the Modi camp was Gujarat-based entrepreneur Gautam Adani. Like Ambani, Adani, too, had been in the cross hairs of the AAP attack. AAP leaders had questioned Modi’s proximity to Adani and accused the Gujarat chief minister of ‘gifting’ him land at the Mundra port site at well below market rates and by disregarding environment norms.