2014: The Election That Changed India (46 page)

Modi’s speech in Amethi was probably his fiercest attack ever on the Gandhi parivar. Each line dripped with anger and sarcasm. ‘For forty years, one family has destroyed the dreams of three generations of Indians. I will ensure your dreams are fulfilled’; ‘I can go back to selling tea if I don’t become PM, what will Rahul do?’; ‘My
choti behen
Smriti can give you the names of 100 villages of Amethi, the Gandhis won’t be able to give the names of more than ten.’ Never before had any politician dared to take on the Gandhis with such a frontal assault, that too in their family fortress. A BJP leader summed it up for me rather well. ‘It was a bit like Sehwag hitting Shoaib for a six in Pakistan!’’

The Modi onslaught forced Priyanka to react. She accused Modi of dragging her late father Rajiv Gandhi into the election battle and claimed the BJP leader was engaging in ‘
neech
rajniti’ (low-level politics). It was an unfortunate expression to use, especially in a part of UP where the word ‘neech’ was a derogatory reference to the lower castes. Priyanka to be fair hadn’t made the reference in caste terms, but it was enough for Modi to seize upon. Affirming his OBC status, Modi accused Priyanka of insulting his caste identity. This was typical Modi-style ‘rajniti’—ingenious spin doctoring, seizing the words of the opponent to turn the tables on them and capture the political advantage in a flash. For Priyanka, it may have been a wake-up call.

Before leaving Amethi on the last day of the campaign, Priyanka thanked the journalists who had been chasing her for a fortnight for their support. Most of them had been swayed by her charm and candour. For one last time she was asked if she would take the political leap. She replied, ‘I have to drop my son off to school.

Doon has strict rules. When you come from a family like mine that has seen personal loss, your priorities are different. Your family is everything.’

Perhaps, that one remark signifies the dilemma of the new generation of Nehru–Gandhis. For Motilal and Jawaharlal, the freedom movement was a magnet that pulled them away from the luxury of Anand Bhawan towards street agitations. Indira Gandhi learnt her politics by the side of her father, even if her style may have been dramatically different. Sonia, too, to some extent benefitted from constantly observing her mother-in-law.

Priyanka and Rahul, by contrast, had lived a sheltered existence—family tragedy and perhaps personal choices had made them wary of the daily hardships of politics. Priyanka, for example, was married at twenty-five and became a mother two years later. Politics in the twenty-first century demands a near-complete blurring of the lines between your private and political life. The need for privacy is an obstruction for an individual seeking to win the unrelenting battle to capture hearts and minds, and in the end family concerns invariably give way to political ambition. Modi, Mamata, Mayawati, Jayalalithaa, Naveen, Nitish are all good examples of the modern neta—single men and women for whom politics is all-consuming.

While Priyanka focused on her children, the BJP’s priorities were very different. The party had achieved what it had set out to do—send out a message that no seat anywhere in UP, not even Amethi, was unwinnable in 2014. But there was one even bigger battle that the Modi–Shah duo had their eyes firmly focused on—the battle for Varanasi.

Varanasi, Kashi, Banaras—many names for one of the most ancient and complex cities in the world, nestled on the banks of the great river Ganga. A city of poets and pandits; of sages and mafia; of philosophers and politicians. Ancient Hindu texts describe Varanasi
as heaven on earth; a modern-day traveller is more likely to associate this corner of eastern UP with the idea of a living hell.

The Ganga feels holy at dawn, by dusk it resembles a sewer. Banarasi saris look gorgeous at weddings, but the weavers who make them work out of tiny, powerless tenements. You feel a sense of tranquillity at the ghats during the Ganga
aarti
, but your stress levels will rise while dodging the city’s outrageous traffic. The Banaras Hindu University (BHU) once produced scholar-statesmen; now it is trapped in sloth and decay. You can live here in awe of the city’s intellect but also in fear of the gun-toting gangs. And yes, you can worship the cow, but how do you deal with the piles of dung on the streets?

A city of a million stories, in 2014 Varanasi was preparing to script an epic political battle. Narendra Modi had been named the BJP candidate from here, a decision that had spurred the AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal to also announce his candidature from the city. The Congress had put up a local strongman (
bahubali
as they call them in eastern UP) and a sitting MLA, Ajay Rai (a section of the UP Congress was hoping Priyanka would stand from Varanasi, but she had no such intention). It was billed as the ‘mother of all battles’.

The decision to field Modi from Varanasi was taken as far back as August 2013 even before he was formally made the party’s prime ministerial candidate. In a meeting with the RSS, Amit Shah had suggested that Varanasi was the ideal location for Modi to make a pitch as a true national leader. ‘Modiji will of course contest from Gujarat, but contesting from Varanasi is even more important,’ Shah told the RSS leaders.

The Sangh readily embraced the idea. Varanasi, after all, was the ultimate repository of Hindu civilization. As Diana Eck says in her classic account of Varanasi,
Banaras: City of Lights
, ‘Here all the Hindu gods have emerged from the shadows into bold relief, as people have come to understand them, have seen their faces and created their multi-form images.’ If Modi was indeed a Hindu Hriday Samrat, then Varanasi was a natural choice as the capital of his kingdom.

Shah had another, more pragmatic political reason for the decision. In his analysis of UP, it was Purvanchal or eastern UP that worried him the most. Of the twenty-five seats in the region, the BJP had won just four in 2009. The SP and BSP had become the dominant forces here. If Mission 272-plus was to be achieved, a dramatic shift was needed in Purvanchal and the adjoining Bhojpur belt in Bihar. What better way than to get the BJP’s mascot to contest from the region? ‘I was convinced this would enthuse our workers and send out a strong message to the voter,’ Shah later told me.

Kejriwal, too, saw political benefit in contesting from Varanasi. Having suddenly, and mistakenly, resigned as Delhi chief minister in mid-February, the AAP leader was in danger of isolating himself. His decision to contest over 450 Lok Sabha seats hadn’t really taken off and AAP workers appeared to be in a state of drift. Kejriwal was looking to position himself as the principal challenger to Modi; he also needed to seize the media mindspace once again. Varanasi was the place to do so. This would be another David versus Goliath fight—Kejriwal was convinced he had nothing to lose.

Kejriwal’s entry upset Shah’s calculations once again. He had been hoping for an easy ride for Modi; now Varanasi was becoming a more complicated seat than originally anticipated. Shah’s first problem was within the party. The sitting Varanasi MP was Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, the veteran BJP leader who saw himself next only to Vajpayee and Advani in the party hierarchy. Dr Joshi’s loyalists would often tell me, ‘He has all the credentials to be the party’s prime ministerial candidate. You people must project him better.’

Few others within the BJP, though, seemed to share Dr Joshi’s opinion of his own capabilities. His self-image may have been of a scholarly voice with a doctorate in nuclear physics from Allahabad University, but on the ground, he had no real support base. In Varanasi, where he had won the 2009 elections by just 17,000 votes, the anger against Dr Joshi was palpable. ‘He should spend less time talking about WTO and more time here in Varanasi dealing with our local problems,’ they told me. When Dr Joshi was denied re-
election from Varanasi, he initially sulked but then realized he was better off in moving to Kanpur.

Shah’s other difficulty in Varanasi lay in the sheer demographics of the constituency. With a population of nearly 3 lakhs, Muslims comprised nearly 15 per cent of the voters. OBCs and Dalits made up sizeable chunks too. The upper castes were the backbone of the BJP, but Shah needed to make a dent in the other social groups to offset the likely Muslim consolidation. A tie-up with the local Kurmi-dominated Apna Dal, which has a strong base in and around Varanasi, was only the first step (see chapter 5). But Shah knew he needed something bigger to set the Ganga on fire. It was time for a Big Bang event.

The nomination filing process in an Indian election is a customary show of strength. Candidates rustle up their supporters, hire jeeps and crowds, and move in a cavalcade to the collector’s office amidst a shower of garlands and petals. The
mahaul
(climate) of victory has to be created is the underlying assumption. But what happened in Varanasi on 24 April was not just any other roadshow—it was the mightiest ever display of political power during any nomination journey in Indian elections.

The planning for Modi’s nomination began almost a week to ten days before D-Day. ‘We had a series of meetings and did several trial runs to ensure absolute perfection,’ says Nalin Kohli, who was the BJP’s media coordinator in Varanasi. High-end platforms were set up at vantage points along the road for the large media contingent to use. A mobile van equipped with cameras and satellite equipment would be placed in front of Modi’s open truck so that frontal images of the leader waving to the crowds could be constantly beamed live. All local BJP leaders were told to ensure that their supporters congregated in large numbers. The entire journey was mapped to ensure both maximum crowds and maximum security.

In an effort to give the event an ‘inclusive’ appeal, the BJP
even tried to get Varanasi’s Bharat Ratna, shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan’s son, Zamin Hussain Bismillah, as one of the proposers for Modi’s nomination. He refused. ‘We have been a Congress family for years. Besides, my father’s music was always above politics,’ he told me later. It was perhaps the only misstep in the BJP’s preparations.

Even the chosen date appeared to have been carefully calculated. The 24th of April happened to be the sixth phase of polling, with 117 seats at stake across twelve states and union territories. Central UP, too, was polling that day, apart from the whole of Tamil Nadu, Mumbai and parts of Rajasthan, MP and Bihar. ‘We knew that if we created a mega television event, the cameras would focus on Modi and we could capture eyeballs even while the voting was on,’ confessed a senior BJP leader to me. The other reason, of course, was to make sure that eastern UP knew that Varanasi was now the new political capital of the country. And Modi its putative emperor.

Modi landed at Varanasi’s Lal Bahadur Shastri airport a little before 11 a.m. He was taken by chopper to the BHU campus, then driven to the statue of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Varanasi’s most revered freedom fighter. After the garlanding of the statue, the chopper took him to the Kashi Vidyapeeth where he garlanded a statue of Sardar Patel, and then set off in an open truck towards the collector’s office. On a normal day, the journey would not have taken more than half an hour. That day, it took almost four hours. BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad, who was accompanying Modi in the truck with Shah, says it brought back memories of the anti-Indira JP andolan in the 1970s. ‘I had never seen this kind of frenzied enthusiasm during an election, never,’ he later told me.

My colleague Bhupendra Chaubey was on the ground while I was in the studio. In the studio, we were a little sceptical—we thought the crowds may have been hired. But Bhupendra had a different take. ‘This was not a paid janata. The atmosphere was festive, people had come because they just wanted to catch a glimpse of Modi. I met someone who had taken a six-hour bus journey from Bihar just so that he could take a photo of Modi!’ he said in astonishment.

Rose petals were showered on the truck, youngsters sported saffron caps and Modi T-shirts and masks, thousands lined every street corner. It was a political Maha Kumbh. And it was being played out live on television. The news agency ANI had as many as seven 3G satellite units along the route just to ensure that no image was missed. In the studio, my producer kept asking me if we should move away and show pictures of voting taking place in other parts of India that day. ‘Shahrukh Khan has come to vote in Mumbai—should we cut to him?’ she asked. I thought about it for a moment, and then sighed, ‘I guess the real Bollywood show is being played out in Varanasi today with a star who has become even bigger than Shahrukh!’