2014: The Election That Changed India (33 page)

Ironically, in February 2014, Mamata and Anna addressed a press conference together where Anna promised to support the Trinamool leader in the general elections. ‘She is an honest politician, I like her simplicity,’ gushed Anna. ‘Annaji is like a father figure to us,’ Mamata said with equal feeling. Obviously, Taj Palace, December 2011, had been forgotten!

The ‘alliance’ between the ‘simple woman’ and the Gandhian lasted less than a month. A rally at Ramlila Maidan, hyped as Mamata’s grand entry onto the national stage, was a flop show, attracting only a few thousand people. Anna himself stayed away, citing ill health. When I went to see him in Maharashtra Sadan, he
claimed to be on a soup diet. A few minutes earlier, former army chief, General V.K. Singh, who had just joined the BJP, had met him. The buzz was that Singh had gently ‘persuaded’ Anna to keep away from the Mamata rally.

The fiasco with Anna virtually ended Mamata’s 2014 dream of playing a greater role in Delhi. She, like many regional leaders, had been hoping to forge a post-election ‘Federal Front’, a coalition of non-Congress, non-BJP chief ministers. My own view is that Mamata, a shrewd politician, knew that a broader, national-level third front was always going to prove difficult. Her real concern was that the enemy number one—the left—was trying to cement a similar national alliance of its own. ‘The left will be left out,’ is how she once put it to me.

Mamata hated the left. It was a visceral hatred that stemmed from years of fighting a lonely battle as the Opposition in Bengal. She could do business with anyone but them. It appeared a limited political world view. She didn’t really care beyond a point who became prime minister as long as the bhadralok of Kolkata’s Alimuddin Street were kept at bay. ‘You don’t know, Rajdeepji, these leftists want to kill me,’ she told me once.

To isolate the left further, Mamata even reached out to Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa and spoke to her about future alignments. If Mamata was mercurial, then Jayalalithaa could be fire on ice. While Mamata would display her tantrums in public, Jayalalithaa maintained a steely demeanour at all official engagements. If Mamata was the quintessential streetfighter, Jayalalithaa was imperious in her style. ‘She just had to look at you without saying a word and you would be intimidated,’ is how a bureaucrat explained Jaya power to me once.

I had met Jayalalithaa once in Chennai, soon after her remarkable comeback win in Tamil Nadu in 2011. I had taken a Ruskin Bond book as a gift because I was told he was one of her favourite authors. She was polite and gracious, thanked me for the book, and then said, ‘I will now have very little time to read. The DMK has left behind a mess, I will have to clean it up.’ With her perfect convent-school
English accent, she sounded as though she meant every word. I didn’t dare counter-question her.

In fact, taking on Jayalalithaa in any form could be a hazardous business. I experienced it first-hand when we got a criminal defamation notice from her office for our highly popular weekly comic programme,
The Week That Wasn’t
. Stand-up comedians Cyrus Broacha and Kunal Vijayakar would every week lampoon political figures—Sonia, Rahul, Modi, Mamata. No one was spared (except Bal Thackeray because we feared the Shiv Sena would then attack our Mumbai office!).

Then we made the mistake of showing a Jayalalithaa-like character, with a fun gag on her wealth and relationship with onetime close friend Sasikala. It was all meant to be good-humoured, but Jayalalithaa clearly didn’t see the funny side. We had a legal battle on our hands. I asked a Chennai-based lawyer to help. ‘Whatever you do, never mess with Jayalalithaa,’ was his friendly advice (incidentally, the case is still being fought in a Chennai court with our efforts at an out-of-court settlement not having succeeded).

It’s a lesson many politicians and even well-wishers of the AIADMK leader have learnt over the years. Cho Ramaswamy, the satirist and editor, was among the few who had some access to Jayalalithaa. But when I visited him at the office of his magazine
Tughlaq
in February 2014, he claimed Jayalalithaa wasn’t meeting him any longer. ‘She is angry with me because I am supporting Modi for prime minister. She wants me to support her instead!’ he said with an exasperated look.

Mamata had never claimed she wanted to be prime minister. Her heart and head were firmly located in the by-lanes of Kolkata. Not so Jayalalithaa. She did have a lurking ambition to be prime minister one day. Ironically, while Mamata spoke out openly against Modi, Jayalalithaa actually was one of the few state leaders who shared a special equation with the Gujarat chief minister. She had even attended his swearing-in as chief minister in 2012. But two years later, she wasn’t willing to endorse Modi for prime minister. Instead, the AIADMK ‘supremo’ wanted to be the Supreme Leader
herself, and her party had made a public declaration of the intent.

I asked Cho if he felt Jayalalithaa was really serious about moving to Delhi. ‘I think she feels she has the capability to be the prime minister. And that Modi must also accept her leadership!’ he said. My own understanding was that Jayalalithaa’s prime ministerial ambition in this election was a smokescreen. Of course, she wanted to be prime minister, but she wasn’t going to be a roadblock for Modi. She only wanted to tap into Tamil regional pride by playing the ‘Jaya for PM’ card. If she could maximize her seats in Tamil Nadu, then she would be a national player. The DMK had been in every central government since 1999 and had extracted a heavy price for their support. Jayalalithaa was hoping for a similar deal. If she could win thirty seats in Tamil Nadu, then in a hung Parliament she would have a decisive role to play in any ruling dispensation in Delhi. It was, therefore, a limited election strategy, not any long-term battle plan for the future.

Political expediency was guiding Mayawati as well. Like Jayalalithaa, she nurtures dreams of occupying 7, Race Course Road one day. But she probably knew that 2014 was not her moment. The BSP leader had been routed in the 2012 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and hadn’t fully recovered from the defeat. She was also tangled in a string of corruption cases that were still being heard in the Supreme Court. She needed to regroup and stay a little under the radar.

I had first met Mayawati around 1994. I had just moved to Delhi and had been researching the writings of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar. Kanshi Ram, the founder of the BSP, was a great admirer of the Dalit icon. We’d spent many afternoons together sharing thoughts on Ambedkar’s legacy. Dressed in a loose, white bush shirt, towel wrapped around his neck, and ill-fitting trousers, Kanshi Ram was a straight-talking politician. ‘Ambedkar has been reduced to a statue in Maharashtra—it is we in UP who are taking his legacy forward,’ he once told me.

Serving us tea at their Humayun Road residence would be Mayawati, already the leader of the party in UP but playing hostess
to Kanshi Ram in Delhi. I never asked Kanshi Ram about his relationship with her, but it was apparent that he saw her as his obvious successor. ‘She is much stronger than me.
Woh ek din raaj karengi!
’ (One day she will rule.)

He was bang on. I was in Lucknow when Mayawati was sworn in as the country’s first Dalit woman chief minister in June 1995. It was a news event I shall not forget. Just a day earlier, Mayawati, who had withdrawn support to the Mulayam Singh government, had been attacked by SP workers in what was infamously described as the ‘state guest house’ incident. We didn’t have a twenty-four-hour news network at the time, but the images were frightening—MLAs of the Samajwadi Party chasing Mayawati and her men through the corridors of the building while the police remained mute spectators. Fearing for her life, Mayawati had to lock herself in a room. I interviewed her a few days later and she claimed that the incident had changed her forever.
‘Yeh mera murder karna chahte thhe. Inko mein kabhi nahin chodoongi, inko sabak seekhana padega’
(They wanted to kill me, I will teach them all a lesson).

Over the next two decades, Mayawati did teach her opponents a fearsome lesson. Her politics was ruthlessly unforgiving. making and breaking governments. It was her style to keep her political opponents guessing, a lesson she had learnt from Kanshi Ram who believed that political power was the ‘master key’ that would eventually open the door to Dalit liberation. She was tough on law and order, but was also accused, like Jayalalithaa, of massive corruption. A UP businessman once told me, ‘It’s a straight deal in UP. Pay Mayawati money, get your work done. No middlemen needed.’

Like Jayalalithaa, she, too, could be a daunting presence. She would rarely meet the media, but I did meet her once in her rather opulent residence in Lucknow. A few weeks earlier, BSP supporters had broken our OB van and almost bashed up the driver over a story we had done on Mayawati’s undeclared wealth. She offered me Limca and a plate of cashews, and then proceeded to lash out at the media.
‘Aap logon ko sharam aani chahiye, kuch bhi dikhate ho!’
(You people should be ashamed, you telecast anything you
want.) There wasn’t even a hint of apology for the havoc her cadres had caused. Through our meeting, the fearful senior bureaucrats remained standing, none of them even daring to catch her eye.

Mayawati had clearly come a long way from the quiet hostess serving us tea at Kanshi Ram’s house. Every day on my way to office in Noida, I would pass the Ambedkar Park, dotted with large statues of Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram and Mayawati herself, and think of Kanshi Ram’s furious indictment of the ‘statue culture’. A party that had initiated robust Dalit political empowerment was now in danger of becoming a caricature of the very politics it had once despised.

In January 2014, Mayawati’s past seemed to catch up with her again. The Supreme Court decided to revive the disproportionate assets case against her. The case filed by the CBI in 2002 investigated Mayawati’s vast riches. Her 2012 election affidavit placed her assets at Rs 111 crore and she had many properties in Delhi. Mayawati claimed the money had come in the form of gifts from her supporters. ‘That case petrified her,’ a Mayawati aide told me. ‘She was worried that one day she would go to jail.’ There were reports that the BSP leader was negotiating a deal with the Congress in return for protection from the CBI. Some Congressmen claim that it was Rahul Gandhi who nixed any attempt at a BSP–Congress alliance. What was clear, though, was that both sides were desperate—one for political survival, the other for personal immunity from the law. The deal eventually never happened as Mayawati perhaps realized that the Congress was a sinking ship.

During the election campaign, Amit Shah told me that Mayawati had dropped out of the race in the final stretch.
‘Iss baar BSP baith gayi hai, chunav ladh hi nahi rahi’
(BSP is not really fighting the elections this time). He was right. In the twenty years of tracking the BSP, I hadn’t seen such a listless campaign by the party. No logical explanation has been offered for Mayawati’s relative silence in the run-up to the 2014 elections. She had started early by announcing several candidates in 2013 itself. But gradually, she began to witness the erosion of her
sarvajan
social engineering experiment that had successfully brought together Dalits, Muslims and upper castes on
one platform in the 2007 assembly elections. This time, a Dalit–Muslim conflict in places like Muzaffarnagar made her position precarious. The Brahmins in any case had returned to a Modi-led BJP and the Dalit vote had splintered as well. As a result, she was left rudderless, an anomalous situation for a party with the most entrenched vote bank.

With defeat staring her in the face, by the end of the campaign it almost seemed as if Mayawati had decided to save her war chest for the UP assembly elections of 2017. Maybe, at fifty-eight, she felt she still had time on her side to fight another election.

Time was certainly not what another prime ministerial hopeful had in 2014. At seventy-four and a cancer survivor, Sharad Pawar knew his moment had perhaps come and gone. Every interview with the Maharashtra leader included a question about his prime ministerial aspirations. Pawar’s answer was equally routine. ‘How can I think of becoming prime minister when I have hardly ten MPs. I am a practical man, I have no such dream.’

The truth is, Pawar has lived the prime ministerial dream for years, having first become Maharashtra chief minister at the age of just thirty-eight. He even blamed me once for preventing him from becoming prime minister. It’s a story that goes back to 1991. I was a young Mumbai-based journalist in the
Times of India
. Rajiv Gandhi had just been assassinated in the midst of the general election campaign and speculation was mounting about who would succeed him as the leader of the Congress. Sitting in faraway Mumbai, we could only guess what was happening in the Delhi durbar.

Then, on a Saturday morning, a few days after Rajiv’s death, we went to see Vilasrao Deshmukh, then a state minister, later to become Maharashtra chief minister. Deshmukh told my
Maharashtra Times
colleague Prakash Akolkar and myself how Pawar, with the backing of a few senior Congress leaders, planned to make a bid for the top
job. Apparently, a meeting had been held in a south Delhi hotel where Pawar had promised to financially support potential Congress MPs in their election campaign in return for endorsing him as the party’s prime ministerial candidate. ‘The strategy is all in place. Pawar is ready for the final push,’ Deshmukh said.