2014: The Election That Changed India (43 page)

There was even a small research team at the BJP party headquarters which would monitor all the media to check on what the Opposition was saying about Modi and ensure that their leader could respond quickly if required. ‘We created a system of instant feedback, apart from providing all the background of a constituency Modi was visiting,’ says Naqvi. The information would then be sent to the chief minister’s office where it was filtered by Prateek Doshi, an OSD to the chief minister, who had originally joined the Modi secretariat as an intern on a fellowship programme. As with so many members of Team Modi, Prateek was young, bright and professional (he had done a management degree from Singapore).

But the real heavy lifting was done by Modi himself. Starting his day at 5 a.m., he would go to bed well past by midnight. Meditation, a light breakfast, a pre-fixed interview. By 8.30 a.m. (sometimes even earlier, if he was flying to the north-east), Modi would be ready to take off. Travelling with him was his ever-faithful personal assistant, O.P. Singh, while two others, Dinesh Thakur and Tanmay Mehta, would hold the fort at the chief minister’s office. All three had been drawn through the RSS pool.

As he criss-crossed the country giving one speech after another,
he would drink warm water to protect his throat. He kept his food simple—dal, roti and
sabzi
that the local rally organizers would prepare. ‘We only told them to put less oil and salt, and keep it very basic,’ a Modi aide told me. On long flights, he would catch a little sleep but mostly worked on his speeches and Gujarat government files. He would almost always come back to Gandhinagar every night, primarily because he didn’t want to bear the additional parking costs of the private plane hired from the Adanis, he said.

He was inexhaustible. ‘Earlier, the aim was to just target winning areas, but by the end, almost every candidate wanted Modiji to address at least one rally in their area,’ Naqvi told me later. North, central and western India had been the BJP’s primary catchment area for Mission 272-plus, and this is where Modi’s original travel plan had been focused. But carried away by the large crowds, Team Modi was now seeing the possibility of extra seats in non-traditional areas like Bengal and Odisha. ‘
Odisha aur Bengal mein to chamatkar ho sakta hai’
(There could be a miracle in Odisha and Bengal), Modi told me once, excitedly. He even ventured into small states like Arunachal and Manipur. ‘Every seat counts,’ was his mantra.

I asked Modi in one phone conversation what kept him going. ‘
Yeh toh ab ek mission hai, ek junoon hai. Mehnat karne se aadmi kabhi nahi thakta!’
(This is now a mission, a craze. No one gets tired from doing hard work). I sensed that the early years of discipline in the shakha as an RSS pracharak were now an asset for life.

Much has been said about Modi’s oratorical flourish. A close aide told me that their leader had a knack of being able to deliver a speech with minimal preparation. ‘All we did was provide him a few bullet points detailing some local issues—the rest was all his mind.’ One of his great skills was to convert an abstract idea into popular idiom. So, when some of his strategists in the last phase of the campaign suggested that the BJP should push for a stable government, Modi went to Himachal and delivered a simple slogan,
‘Yeh Dil Maange More!’
, referring to the famous words of Param Vir Chakra winner and Kargil hero, Captain Vikram Batra. When the Congress challenged his ‘idea of India’, Modi countered by
unveiling his
indradhanush
(rainbow) of ideas by quoting from the Upanishads and the Rig Veda.

Vajpayee had been the BJP’s supreme political orator. I remember Advani once almost enviously confessing, ‘We used to be awestruck just listening to Atalji speak.’ Vajpayee’s style was that of the poet-politician—lyrical and emotional, he could sway an audience with the
jadoo
(magic) of the Hindi language. Even his long pauses were redolent with meaning. He could leave you teary-eyed as he did me when I heard him speak during the 1999 Lahore bus yatra. Modi is different. His style is that of the pugnacious streetfighter, full of machismo. He can captivate you with his energetic presence and rapid-fire one-liners, but he doesn’t tug at your heart.

Modi’s speeches at the rallies had a set pattern. He would begin by applauding the audience while slowly raising the pitch. A few words in the local language would enthuse the crowds. While raising a local issue, he would often contrast the situation in that state with what he claimed was ‘development’ in the BJP-ruled states. And then would come the final promise. ‘Give me sixty months, I will bring change!’ Interestingly, Team Modi had ensured that trained cadres would mix with the crowds, both to gauge the response and to try and enthuse the crowd at the right moments.

I attended one Modi rally during the campaign. It was in Meerut in February 2014, a rally that was taking place against the backdrop of the riots in the neighbouring district of Muzaffarnagar. The crowds were massive. People from the entire western UP belt had come by the truckloads to listen to Modi; some had even climbed up electric poles. For at least sixty seconds before he spoke, the crowds kept chanting his name and blowing conch shells (the rally had been branded Vijay Shanknad Rally). When Modi contrasted a ‘powerless’ UP with a fully electrified Gujarat, there were wild cheers.

Sonia Gandhi had just attacked Modi for sowing what she described as ‘
zehar ki kheti
’ (fields of poison). Modi now hit back, accusing the Congress of spreading the poison of communal division. Rahul had always been dismissively referred to as ‘shehzada’ by Modi. Sonia was usually given a little more respect, though in the
2002 campaign he had dubbed her the ‘lady from Italy’. Now, the gloves were off again as Modi called for a ‘
Congress Mukt Bharat
’. ‘The poison of vote bank politics has been spread by the Congress and a family which has ruled the country for most of the years since independence,’ he said, rousing the crowd into a frenzy.

The direct attack on the Gandhis was deliberate. Good governance was the overarching theme of Modi’s campaign, with the idea of drawing in new voters to the BJP; but Modi was also keen to make ‘dynasty’ an issue—it was ‘us’ versus ‘them’, son-of-the-soil karyakarta versus the born-to-rule First Family. Non-Congress leaders have often been accused of being a little intimidated by the Nehru–Gandhis; now, Modi was actually calling for dismantling the edifice of the Congress party.

When Modi first called Rahul a shehzada, I had asked him about it, suggesting that the tone and words sounded politically incorrect. Modi was characteristically defiant.
‘Kya galat kaha hai? Woh to shehzada hi toh hai’
(What is wrong, he is a prince). Other BJP leaders admitted to me privately that Modi’s language could at times be coarse, but as one of them reminded me, ‘Elections aren’t a place for politeness!’

Sniffing victory, Modi became even more belligerent. He would fine-tune his speech to suit the location. In Bihar and UP, the thrust remained on governance and the Gujarat model, but in Assam and Bengal, he did raise the more communally charged issue of Bangladeshi migrants. ‘You don’t expect him to talk of bullet trains in Assam,’ said one BJP leader to me sarcastically. It was classic
rajneeti
(politics).

Earlier, he had been careful about attacking regional leaders. Now in this final phase of campaigning, it was ‘Modi versus all’. In Bengal, he attacked Mamata Banerjee for her alleged role in the chit fund scam and even questioned the sale of her paintings. In Odisha, Naveen Patnaik was upbraided for underdevelopment; in Maharashtra, it was the Pawars who were targeted. Even his old friend Jayalalithaa was not spared. ‘These are my political adversaries, not my enemies,’ he would say later.

The Modi offensive rattled his opponents. Mamata said she would have put the BJP leader in jail if she was in power in Delhi. Her spokesperson Derek O’Brien went a step further by tweeting, ‘The butcher of Gujarat who could not take care of his own wife, how will he take care of the nation.’ This was, by all accounts, a low blow. Appearing on my programme that night, Derek, a TV quiz host-turned-politician, was unrepentant. ‘Read my lips, Rajdeep, Modi is the butcher of Gujarat!’ he said with a showman-like elan. As those words echoed on TV I felt quite sure that while the Trinamool seemed to be pandering to its Muslim vote in Bengal, a few more fence-sitter votes might just have been lost nationally.

The story of Modi’s wife, Jasodhaben, which Derek raked up, is worth reflecting upon. That Modi had a child marriage and a wife tucked away in the village was one of the worst kept secrets of Gujarat politics. I had tried to meet Jasodhaben once during the 2007 Gujarat assembly elections, only to be advised by a local friend to avoid bringing up the issue. ‘Modi is very sensitive about it. Best not to interview her and only worsen relations with the chief minister,’ was the advice I was given. I took the hint, choosing not to pursue it as it seemed like a private matter between two individuals.

But was it really a ‘private’ issue? Modi acknowledged Jasodhaben for the first time only while filing his nomination from the Vadodara seat for the 2014 elections. Till then, he had kept his marital status column blank because Election Commission rules do not make it mandatory to reveal it. But did it require a statutory change in election documents for Modi to publicly accept that he had a wife?

Yes, it may have been a forced marriage for the teenager who had left home soon after to join the RSS. Yes, it should not have any impact on his credentials as an able administrator. But should he not have at least acknowledged Jasodhaben’s existence, or else annulled the marriage and given her ‘freedom’? In an interview in the
Indian Express
, Jasodhaben hinted at her long years of loneliness as a schoolteacher who had never remarried, living in her brother’s home. While Modi worked towards political glory, did he ever spare a thought for the girl he married when they were adolescents?

It’s a question I would have ideally liked to ask Modi, but never did. Or dared to, even in private conversation. I don’t think he would have answered it. Perhaps, like the chaiwallah story, the single-man image was designed to dress up his politics—the ideal
brahmachari
(bachelor) politician who had devoted his life to nation building was also part of the Modi myth-making factory. The ‘bachelor’ CM’s appeal among Gujarati women voters was well known and his identity as the family-less
karmayogi
was subliminally projected in all advertising and political campaigns. Jasodhaben’s identity was, tragically, almost expendable.

And yet, the shrillness of the attack on Modi by some of his critics was equally jarring. One of the worst offenders was the SP leader Azam Khan. In one rally, he said, ‘Modi’s hands are coloured with the blood of innocents’; in another, he spoke of how ‘Kargil’s peaks were conquered by Muslim, not Hindu, soldiers’. This was spiteful hate speech, designed to divide communities, the kind that deserved more than just an Election Commission ban.

Frankly, I was not surprised with Azam Khan’s behaviour. I had a run-in with Khan first in 2006 when we had done an exposé on his alleged land-grabbing in his bastion of Rampur.
‘Main aapko jail mein daaloonga’
(I’ll put you in jail), he had threatened then. A year later, as UP Speaker, he wanted me to appear before the state assembly for doing a sting operation that showed UP’s politicians ready to trade in drugs for cash. He could speak flowery Urdu but could also be abusive. He represented that breed of dangerous politicians who saw themselves in pure religious terms, a politician who was a ‘defender of the faith’.

Khan’s anti-Modi rhetoric was predictable. The Congress, by contrast, seemed rather confused. When Modi’s ascent first began in 2013, some Congressmen were unwilling to see him as an equal to their leadership. ‘He is only another chief minister—why give him so much importance,’ was the official party line. Others, though, could not stop taking him on. Kapil Sibal challenged Modi to a face-to-face debate. Salman Khurshid called him a ‘frog’, Jairam
Ramesh referred to him as a fascist and Bhasmasur (a mythological character who had destroyed his creator).

That muddled approach seemed to influence Rahul too. He had avoided direct references to Modi in many of his public interactions. But in election season, he suddenly stepped up the heat. Modi was now Hitler, and worse. I attended a Rahul rally in Ghaziabad where he lashed out at his BJP rival. The Congress candidate here was the charismatic actor-politician Raj Babbar. If, at Modi’s Meerut rally, the crowd had a desi rock concert feel to it, here there seemed to be an almost surreal silence. The noisy excitement, such an integral part of a festive occasion like an Indian election, was missing. It was almost as if the audience couldn’t relate to what the leader was saying.

Rahul spoke of Modi’s ‘toffee model’ of development. He claimed that the BJP leader had sold valuable land at just Re 1 to the Adanis, while farmers and the poor were neglected. ‘Where once there was a partnership between Vajpayee and Advani, now Modi and Adani are business partners,’ was Rahul’s charge. There were a few, almost forced, handclaps.

Kejriwal had already challenged Modi’s business links—Rahul looked like a copycat. If Rahul had wanted to seriously interrogate Modi’s Gujarat model, then he should have done it much earlier. The 2012 Gujarat assembly elections would have perhaps been a good time. A Team Modi member admitted to me, ‘We were far more vulnerable then. That was the big missed opportunity for the Congress.’ Now, it seemed almost like an afterthought. In the decade after 2002, the Congress’s principal attack on Modi had been his handling of the riots. He was for the party, as Sonia Gandhi had described him, a ‘
maut ka saudagar
’. The gambit hadn’t worked. The trenchant criticism only allowed Modi to play victim. Where the Congress failed to challenge the Modi narrative was in his claims to be solely responsible for the Gujarat growth story. ‘Modi makes Gujarat seem like a land of milk and honey and he as the only development-oriented leader. We never did enough to puncture holes in his storyline,’ a Congress strategist confessed later.