2014: The Election That Changed India (34 page)

We rushed to the office to file the story. It was a slow news day. The news editor decided to carry it as a bottom spread on the front page of the
Times of India
. Delhi’s power brokers were thrown into a tizzy when the story broke the next morning. Sitting in Mumbai, we had no idea our story would change political equations in Delhi. At midnight, I got a call from Pawar himself. ‘How could you print such a story? Do you know the damage it has caused me?’ he said angrily. And before I could calm him down, came the punchline. ‘Don’t you want to see a Maharashtrian as prime minister?!’

A few weeks later, Pawar was edged out in his attempt to be prime minister by P.V. Narasimha Rao. The Congress’s old order had united to stall Pawar’s hopes. Though the NCP leader is not the kind of politician to bear grudges for long, I don’t think he ever forgave me. It only convinced me just how desperate Pawar was to move, as one Maharashtra journalist once put it, ‘from the Sahyadris to the Himalayas’.

Pawar did try again to conquer Delhi, a task which had eluded the Marathas since the defeat in the third battle of Panipat in 1761. He took on Sonia Gandhi over her foreign origins in 1999. It was a period when Pawar as the party’s Lok Sabha leader sensed a vacuum in the Congress and was itching to take control. Sonia had been party president for less than a year and was vulnerable to an internal rebellion. Just ahead of his ‘revolt’ against Sonia, he had met a few of us and hinted that the Congress needed a new leadership. ‘We need mass-based leaders to get the Congress back on track,’ he claimed. But he had miscalculated the Congress’s loyalty quotient for the Gandhi family. Most of the top leaders in the party chose to stand by Sonia. He later claimed that he was not against Sonia as Congress president but only as a potential prime ministerial candidate. He sounded like a defeated rebel. Interestingly, when Vajpayee’s BJP government
collapsed in February 1999, Pawar had reportedly tried to strike a deal with the BJP too. ‘He wanted to be prime minister with outside support of the BJP much in the manner that the Congress had once supported Chandrashekhar as PM in 1990,’ a BJP leader who was privy to the discussions told me. Again, things had never quite worked out. Pawar appeared destined to miss out each time.

Now, in 2014, things were even more difficult. Rahul Gandhi was set to take over the Congress and Pawar had made it clear he would not serve in any government led by Rahul. ‘How can I serve under someone who is my daughter’s age?’ he confided to a friend. On record he told me that Rahul still needed to prove himself. He even decided to opt out by not contesting the Lok Sabha elections, preferring instead the Rajya Sabha route.

And yet, Pawar hasn’t entirely ‘retired’’ from politics. He has friends in all parties, including the BJP. BJP sources confirmed to me that Pawar was in touch with fellow Maharashtrian, Gadkari. If the BJP got less than 200 seats and no pre-poll alliance was in a position to form a government, then Pawar and Gadkari had reportedly agreed to try and stitch up a non-Congress government.

When I asked Pawar about any back-room deal, he rejected it outright. ‘Where do you get all this news from? You media people will speculate on anything and everything!’ Journalists were clearly not high up on Pawar’s list of favourite people. Only months earlier, Pawar’s nephew, Ajit Pawar, had been targeted in a series of exposés for his alleged role in an irrigation scam in Maharashtra. Ajit’s shockingly insensitive statement during a drought asking ‘if there is no water in dams, should we urinate to create water?’ had been ripped apart across the media. Other NCP ministers, too, had found themselves being unmasked in corruption scandals. Pawar’s name had often popped up in controversial land deals as well. Clearly, in the age of a hyperactive media, Pawar was on the wrong side of the divide. And he didn’t like it one bit. The positive takeaway, though, was that you could criticize Pawar and he would still give you an interview. Like many old-style politicians, he really did have the hide of a rhinoceros!

If Pawar was constantly looking for ways to capture power in Delhi, another regional chieftain Naveen Patnaik seemed happy in his ‘den’ in Odisha. Naveenbabu is a fascinating politician whose life can be divided into two distinct halves. Before joining politics, he had enjoyed the high life—he had partied with Jackie Kennedy and Gore Vidal, he had written books on herbs and gardens, and his plush Aurangzeb Road residence was home to many wine-and-cheese evenings. And then in 1998, the Doon School-educated Naveen suddenly plunged into politics after the death of his father, the redoubtable Biju Patnaik. In 2000, he became Odisha chief minister from the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), carrying forward a family inheritance. He could barely speak Oriya at the time and had hardly lived in Bhubaneshwar. And yet, this denizen of metropolitan India, who loved his Scotch and his caviar, transformed himself into a tough local politician. The man who would once zip in and out of London made his first foreign trip as chief minister only in 2012.

So what was his secret formula that ensured repeated electoral success? ‘Among all the senior politicians in Odisha, he stands out as honest and earnest,’ claims a BJD MP. He could be gentle in private conversation, ruthless in his political dealings—he had split with the BJP just ahead of the 2009 elections and had removed close aides who he thought were conspiring against him. Most importantly, he had stayed the course. In the 2014 elections, he told me he wanted to remain equidistant from the BJP and the Congress. ‘We will not support anyone, neither Modi nor Rahul, after the elections,’ was his public position. He would be true to his word.

Perhaps his success offers hope to Rahul and the other elite children of dynastical privilege. The lesson is simple—even ‘disconnected’ Macaulay
putra
s can triumph in politics if they are ready to actually work at it with relentless focus. If only Rahul had made Lucknow his karmabhoomi like Naveen had Bhubaneshwar, who knows, the Congress leader might actually have emerged a battle-hardened politician.

A vexed relationship with the media is common to all the political contenders described in this chapter. Kejriwal had realized, to his cost, that a movement which had received oxygen in television studios could just as easily be snuffed out by a hostile camera. Mamata and the Bengali media are often locked in bitter conflict. Jayalalithaa has almost stopped giving interviews and only issues the occasional press statement or sound bite. Mayawati treats the media with similar contempt, her press conferences totally scripted, with no questions being allowed. Pawar after his throat surgery is barely audible and, quite simply, un-telegenic. Naveen, too, prefers to keep the media at bay and has perfected the art of monosyllabic responses to any tough questions.

The two top contestants for prime minister were also a study in contrast. Rahul Gandhi still seemed hesitant to open himself to media scrutiny. In comparison, Narendra Modi was preparing to launch the biggest ever media blitz in the history of Indian elections. The divergence was glaring, and in the final analysis, would prove decisive.

Two battles were fought in the elections of 2014. One
was the traditional battle across the heat and dust of a vast country, in basti and maidan, in
street corner and chai shop; the other on a television screen near you. Election 2014 was
India’s first general election where television became the defining arena of the contest.

In 1989—the first election I covered as a
journalist—only Doordarshan was on air. In 2004, there were half a dozen major ‘national
channels’ and about a dozen regional channels. By 2014, the information and broadcasting
ministry list suggested that there were almost 400 24/7 news and current affairs channels beaming
out of India, a crazy number, way more than any other country in the world. It was a mini revolution
that was changing the way Indians consumed and communicated news. Television defined politics,
politics was played for television. The TV top story often engulfed the political class. Every
evening as channels stampeded towards the prime-time headline, netas and commentators were at hand
as the ever-ready chorus.

In the 2004 elections, when I broke the story of
Sonia Gandhi opting out of the prime ministerial race, I was, for at least a couple of hours, onto a
genuine ‘exclusive’. I was actually able to stand outside
10,
Janpath, and broadcast my report without being bothered by a forest of other cameras. By 2014, the
idea of a news ‘exclusive’ was lost. Within minutes, every channel would be onto the
story. Often, several channels would flash the same newsbreak or interview as an
‘exclusive’.

The idea of breaking news, in particular, has
‘broken down’—even a piece of trivia is now breaking news. The new newsroom mantra
is to keep the screen ‘buzzing’ at all times, almost as if it is a flight schedule
monitor at the airport. Breathless urgency is our stock-in-trade, crises and triumphs only as
durable as the thirty-minute news bulletin that rolls out every hour. When I joined television in
1994, I got a full week to do my first story for
The World This Week
. Now, a reporter is
expected to deliver a story in a couple of hours. A certain frenetic mindlessness has crept in,
driven perhaps by what I call the demands of a ‘sound bite society’.

In this manic environment, there is still the hunger
for being ‘first’ on air. In particular, who would get the first interviews with the two
main actors of the election—Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. The Rahul battle was won, fairly
and squarely, by my former colleague at NDTV and now editor in chief of Times Now, Arnab Goswami.
Arnab and I go back a fairly long way. I remember a slim, floppy-haired, bespectacled youngster
visiting my home in the early 1990s to inquire about TV opportunities. I had then been a mentor of
sorts to him. We worked together for almost a decade and had even co-anchored a show. But television
news can be maddeningly competitive, and a personal relationship based on mutual respect can easily
descend into a slightly troubled professional equation revolving around constant one-upmanship.
Arnab’s ‘nation wants to know’ rumbustious style of anchoring had won him a lot of
fans; I found it, at times, disturbingly chaotic and sensationalist.

The backstory of the Rahul interview reflects some
of the cross currents in modern-day TV journalism. Several news channels had been hounding
Rahul’s office with requests for an interview. Barkha Dutt, another star anchor and also a
former colleague at NDTV, had
been promised the first interview. She had met
Rahul and Priyanka in December 2013 and an ‘agreement’ had been reached. NDTV is seen as
occupying a politically left-liberal space—a channel that perhaps the Congress leader felt
comfortable talking to. A date, 12 January, was also fixed for the interview. The channel’s
producers even went to the location—Jawahar Bhavan, home to the Rajiv Gandhi
Foundation—and worked on the lights and camera positioning.

By now, the news had spread in the TV industry that
NDTV was poised to get the first Rahul interview. But as D-Day approached, Rahul’s office
suddenly changed their plan. The All India Congress Committee (AICC) session was on 17 January and
Rahul’s team felt that they’d rather wait till his big speech on the occasion before
giving interviews. NDTV was promised that the interview would be done on the 18th, the day after the
AICC session.

Arnab sensed an opening. He wrote a long mail to
Rahul’s office pointing out that Times Now’s TRPs were much higher than NDTV’s and
of other competition in the English news space. ‘We gave them charts with details of our
viewership and even told them how in the US presidential elections, the first interview normally
goes to the channel with the highest rating,’ Arnab later told me. The TRP system in India is
highly skewed and contentious. A few thousand television meters are expected to calculate viewership
in a country with over a hundred million cable and satellite homes. But it was also the only
available measurement to gauge a channel’s or show’s popularity.

Rahul’s office bit the bait. The NDTV
interview was again cancelled at the last minute, and Times Now was given the first interview, on 25
January. Arnab was met by Priyanka herself and Rahul’s staff before the Congress leader walked
in. It was meant to be a forty-five-minute interview. It lasted all of eighty minutes. ‘Rahul
did not ask for any questions in advance—he said he was ready to answer anything thrown at
him,’ says Arnab. Contrary to speculation, he claims neither Priyanka nor any other
Congressman was actually present in the room during the recording. An M.F. Husain painting was the
sole witness.

The interview was aired on
the 27th night at 9 p.m. after incessant promos on the channel. When it began, Rahul appeared to
show some flashes of promise, with a look of earnestness and well-meaning intent. By the end, it was
clear to any viewer who was watching that Rahul was, in fact, completely out of his depth and had no
clear answers or big idea or message. Arnab had come to the interview well prepared; Rahul, by
contrast, appeared woolly-headed, ill-informed and hopelessly unprepared for tough questioning.

He tried to appear confident, often speaking of
himself in the third person, saying things like, ‘I will give you an insight into what Rahul
Gandhi thinks.’ But when asked a direct question of whether he was ready for the Modi
challenge, Rahul would veer off and say, ‘What Rahul Gandhi wants to do is to empower the
women in this country—he wants to unleash the power of these women.’

In fact, women’s empowerment, RTI and
‘system change’ were recurring themes that were repeatedly mentioned by Rahul through
the interview, often irrespective of the question being asked. Even a specific question on the 2002
Gujarat riots led to Rahul speaking loftily of strengthening RTI, women’s empowerment and
democracy. It was as though he was speaking from another planet.

His political naivety was also exposed when Arnab
grilled him on the Congress’s role in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and contrasted it with the
party’s stand on the 2002 Gujarat riots. Rahul tried to claim, rather foolishly, that the
Congress government in 1984 had tried to stop the violence while the BJP had actively abetted them
in 2002. Strangely, rather than offer an unequivocal apology for 1984, of the kind that prime
minister Manmohan Singh had already issued, Rahul schoolboyishly pussyfooted around it, saying,
‘Firstly, I wasn’t involved in the riots. I wasn’t part of it. I was not in
operation of the Congress party.’

To blame Modi for 2002 was one thing; to absolve the
Congress of responsibility for the massacre in 1984 was quite another. All Rahul needed to do was
sound genuinely contrite, perhaps even offer a heartfelt apology, promise complete support to the
legal process and even point out that the Congress had appointed a Sikh
prime
minister subsequently. He did none of it. Not surprisingly, his prevarication provided an
opportunity for Sikh groups the very next day to protest against the Congress. The year 1984 was
back on the front pages. In the eyes of the Sikh protestors, Rahul, far from being the youth leader
promising a new era, had taken his place among the same old Congress double-talkers on 1984. Their
disillusionment burst forth in howls of rage.

The interview was a smash hit in TRPs. It also got
more than 2 million views on YouTube. But even more tellingly, it sparked off a slew of videos and
tweets that lampooned and ridiculed Rahul. For example: ‘Arnab is looking to London, Rahul is
talking to Tokyo’; ‘Arnab qs: What if aliens invade India? Rahul ans: I want to say our
government brought in RTI’; ‘Arnab qs: What is the capital of China? Rahul ans:
Women’s Empowerment!’; ‘Charlie Chaplin died again yesterday laughing in his grave
after watching the interview’; ‘After Comedy Nights with Kapil, we must now have Comedy
Nights with Rahul!’; ‘Rahul walks into a bar and lowers it!’ It just went on and
on. Amul even had a hoarding: ‘Najawab Rahul’.

Till that interview, Rahul Gandhi (or RaGa, as he is
referred to in cyberspace) was targeted by his critics as ‘pappu’, suggesting he was
just a novice, a kid in comparison to Modi (or NaMo). The Congress claimed the criticism was
unjustified and Rahul was just waiting for the right moment to prove himself as a leader of
substance. But now, the interview only confirmed the caricature of him as a babe in the political
woods. In most urban, English-speaking middle-class homes in particular, RaGa was now really a
pappu, unfit to be prime minister of the country, woefully short of the muscularity and dynamism
that the voter seemed to crave.

The next morning, I telephoned Rahul’s key
aide Kanishka Singh to remind him of my long-pending interview request. ‘Now that you’ve
done one, I’m sure you can do more,’ I pleaded. ‘Of course, we will do more and am
sure you’ll get one. By the way, how do you think the interview went?’ he asked. I
didn’t really know what to say. If I was brutally honest, I’d probably lose a chance to
interview Rahul. If I lied, I wouldn’t be professional. So, I played the diplomat,
saying, ‘It was good to see Rahul take all questions, but maybe he could
have prepared himself better.’ Kanishka assured me he would.

Sadly, he didn’t need to. The adverse fallout
of the interview meant that Rahul went back into his shell, as did his entire team. He did a couple
more interviews during the campaign in Hindi, but they were all soft focus and singularly
undistinguished. I would send mails to his office every week but did not even get the courtesy of a
response. NDTV’s plight was even worse. They were promised an interview for a third time soon
after the Times Now interview, only to have it cancelled again, at 3 the night before. ‘It was
all very unfortunate and, frankly, unprofessional, if you ask me,’ Barkha told me later.

I later asked a Congress media manager why it went
so horribly wrong. He said, ‘Well, you see we thought that if we gave an interview to a tough
interviewer like Arnab and got full coverage across the Times of India group which is the largest in
the country, then we would establish Rahul as a politician who was open to public scrutiny unlike
Modi who walked out of interviews. I guess we just didn’t know how badly Rahul would end up
looking.’

Yes, Rahul had botched up big time. When he should
have come out looking firm, candid and wise, he had ended up looking unsure and inexperienced, a bit
like a nervous batsman on his debut. As the advertisement jingle went,
‘Pappu paas nahi
hua!’
It was now time for Modi to show his young rival how it was done.

Ever since he walked out of a CNN-IBN interview in
October 2007, Modi had been very careful of his public interactions. My Gujarati journalist friends
in Ahmedabad would often complain, ‘Modi treats us like crap.
Baat hi nahi
karta!
’ (He doesn’t talk to us.) Though he did a few interviews during the 2009 and
2012 election campaigns (including the one on a bus with me), he had been circumspect in picking and
choosing his moments. He had done an interview with Reuters in July 2013, which had stirred a fresh
controversy. Asked whether he regretted the Gujarat 2002 violence, he had said it was
how one would feel if a puppy came under a car wheel. The ‘puppy’
analogy led to his critics accusing him of gross insensitivity. Modi insisted his comments had been
distorted. It made him even more wary of interviews.

The wariness stemmed from the hostile media reaction
Modi had encountered in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots. Till then, Modi had assiduously courted
the media and, as party general secretary in the 1990s, he was always willing to appear on
television debates (see chapter 1). The year 2002 changed the Modi–media equation. He now felt
hounded and chose to play ‘victim’. He would often say in private conversation,
‘Kuch logon ne mann bana liya hai ki Modi gunahgaar hai!’
(Some people have
made up their mind that I am guilty.) He especially felt this way towards the mainstream
English-language media. In his eyes, the English-language journalistic club along with civil society
NGOs were determined to malign his reputation. For Modi, the media is important yet untrustworthy,
an ally for publicity, an adversary on issues. It is his intimate enemy—he grudgingly relies
on it for feedback but scorns it when it acts as a mirror or sounding board. If he was to open up
ahead of the biggest election in his life, it would be to someone he fully trusted.