2014: The Election That Changed India (47 page)

Like Shahrukh, Modi once again revealed himself as a master of the TV moment, never short of a memorable sound bite or a bit of political theatre. Having filed his nomination, he provided yet another quotable quote.
‘Mera mann kehta hai mein aya nahi hoon, mujhe bheja bhi nahi hai. Mujhe Ma Ganga ne bulaya hai!’
(My mind tells me I have not come, nor been sent, Ma Ganga has called me here.)

But the final punchline of the day was reserved for the less voluble Shah. ‘The Modi wave has now become a tsunami,’ he told the throng of journalists. The Congress hit back, pointing out that the tsunami which hit the Tamil Nadu coast in December 2004 had only brought death, destruction and grief. But this could no longer be a debate over semantics. The fact is, the political earth of India had begun to shake and there was a tectonic shift taking place on the ground. The Modi nomination had been another masterful act of political choreography, but this was no longer just a manufactured ‘wave’. The spontaneous upsurge of support was unmissable. The camera was not lying.

What explains this craze for Modi? He was, after all, at the start of 2013 just another chief minister, that too from a state with a relatively small pool of MPs. Within eighteen months, he was the most sought-after national figure. No state leader has ever been able to make the transition so quickly and effectively. Yes, there was a
leadership vacuum in Delhi, and the invisibility of the prime minister and Rahul’s immaturity had led to a desperate longing for change. The economy was in a downward spiral and big-ticket corruption had alienated the middle class. The UPA’s demise was certain.

But why was Modi preferred to any other prime ministerial aspirant? My belief is Modi’s USP was his staunch promise to shatter the status quo—his undiluted aggression appealed to a new India. In the 1970s, Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man persona was suited to a film-going public tiring of chocolate-box heroes. In 2014, Modi’s image as a robust ‘man of action’ gave him a decisive edge with voters who were sick and tired of being told by a slow-moving government that ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. As the man who had travelled six hours by bus to see Modi in Varanasi told our reporter,
‘Modiji toh desh ko bachane aaye hain!’
(Modi is here to save the country.) He could well have been echoing a dialogue from a Bachchan film.

I arrived in Varanasi in the first week of May to shoot a ground report. The campaign was at its peak. BJP leaders and workers were everywhere. In the hotel where I was staying, I bumped into Gordhan Zadaphia, the Gujarat politician who had once rebelled against Modi but had now quietly returned to the fold. I asked him what he was doing in Varanasi. ‘I have been assigned the task of reaching out to Gujarati voters in the city,’ he told me. The reality was that every BJP leader, big or small, needed to put in an obligatory face show before the all-powerful Modi–Shah duo. ‘We had so many leaders assembled in one place, we didn’t know what work to give them!’ one of the BJP’s campaign coordinators admitted to me later.

On the streets, the BJP’s war cry, ‘
Har Har Modi, Ghar Ghar Modi
’, was proving contentious. The Dwarka Shankaracharya had objected, claiming that the chanting amounted to deification of Modi and was against Hindu religion. Modi had even tweeted
asking his supporters not to use the slogan. And yet, when we were filming with BJP–RSS workers out canvassing on a door-to-door campaign, we heard the chant repeatedly. The moment I raised the issue with the party workers, they quickly changed the slogan. ‘Har Har Modi’ was dropped, ‘Ghar Ghar Modi’ remained in place! I am sure when our camera team left the site, the original chant would have returned. As an overenthusiastic worker told me: ‘You can say what you want, Modi
hamare liye Bhagwaan barabar hai
!’ (Modi is like God for us.)

An entire floor in the Surya Hotel in the heart of Varanasi had been booked by the BJP and converted into a media centre. No party is as proficient at courting the media as the BJP. The organization was near faultless. Dozens of computers, endless cups of chai and samosas, a room for interviews to be conducted—keeping the large media contingent in good humour came easy to the BJP. I must confess I was a little surprised, though, to see how even veteran journalists were fawning over Shah. ‘Should I get you some extra ketchup, sir?’ one of them asked, while the famished campaign manager cleaned up a plate of cheese sandwiches.

Shah was taking no chances even after the spectacular success of the nomination roadshow. He had made Varanasi his base for managing the entire eastern UP campaign in the last stretch. One day, he received reports that the party workers had become complacent about victory and weren’t working hard enough. At 10 p.m. all local leaders were called and warned, ‘From tomorrow, I want to see all of you out on the road, no excuses.’ Shah is a great believer in the power of a door-to-door campaign in true RSS volunteer-style. Each leader was told to ensure that no house in their area was missed.

Kejriwal, by contrast, did not have the money power—certainly nothing to match the BJP election machine. Nor, this time, the media support. He had arrived in Varanasi by train in mid-April and set about trying to climb the steepest mountain of his political career. Just before arriving in Varanasi, Kejriwal had also travelled to Gujarat, where in a show of political bravado, he had marched almost up to Modi’s residence in Gandhinagar, apparently to seek
an appointment. Clashes with BJP workers, detentions and acts of stoning had met him in Gujarat, where armed with a notepad he was seen jotting down the number of dysfunctional schools and badly staffed clinics to arrive at his conclusion of a non-existent Gujarat model of development. Kejriwal’s Gujarat trip may not have yielded political gain on the ground but was a symbolic show of strength—he was unafraid to enter the lion’s den.

In Varanasi, Kejriwal did manage to create a stir initially—with his campaign gaining some visibility after his supporters took on the BJP on the streets—but it was soon obvious that Varanasi was not Delhi. Many of his volunteers had come from other states. They were simply not familiar with the narrow by-lanes of this city where every alley has a different character. ‘I think we underestimated the scale of what we were up against,’ confessed an AAP leader.

The one group which seemed taken up by the AAP white topi were the Muslim weavers. Travelling through the weaver bastis, I was confronted by the sense of hopelessness that stared at the Indian Muslim in this election. The local artisans could spin magical saris, but their lives were caught in a cycle of neglect and relative poverty. A superior quality Banarasi sari could range from Rs 30,000 to Rs 50,000 but the artisan would be lucky to earn Rs 5000 for his month-long effort while working out of a cramped little room. It was a terribly unequal world.

That sense of inequality had seeped down to political choices as well. The Congress, the weavers felt, had let them down. A number of promises and packages had been announced, but little had trickled down to them. The SP and the BSP exploited them as a vote bank with no obvious reward. A Modi-led BJP frightened them.
‘Woh toh danga karvatein hain’
(He stages riots). The AAP was a more enticing prospect. Wearing an AAP badge and cap, one weaver told me,
‘Kejriwalji hamari bhasha bol rahe hain, BJP ko wahi ek takkar de sakte hain’
(Kejriwal is speaking our language, only he can give a fight to the BJP). Yet Kejriwal’s dilemma was that if he became a Muslim-focused party, the AAP would alienate the Hindus. The message of the public transport-using, sleeping-on-the-footpath
common man up against a business-class Modi with his powerful corporate backers was far more politically expedient.

I accompanied Kejriwal on his campaign into the villages around Varanasi. In searingly hot temperatures, he seemed to be up for the challenge. ‘Modi is a
hawai
neta, he comes in and out on choppers. I am a
zameeni
neta, on the ground,’ he told me. His election rhetoric had a familiar ring:
‘Modi Adani–Ambani ke saath juda hua hain, woh paisa banayenge, aapko koi phayda nahi hoga’
(Modi is in partnership with Adani and Ambani. They will make money, you will get no benefit). But in rural Varanasi, this line of attack was misplaced and just did not resonate. No one I spoke to in the village had heard of Ambani or Adani.

I asked Kejriwal later whether he felt he had erred in contesting from Varanasi. After all, his presence meant that the entire AAP volunteer machine had been diverted to this single constituency. ‘No, I don’t agree. We had to fight Varanasi to send out a message—we wanted to show we were not scared of Modi,’ he countered.

The BJP, too, wanted to prove a point. Worried by the AAP factor at the start of the year, they now wanted to teach him a lesson. ‘The real battle in Varanasi was always as to who would come second and who would lose their deposit. We wanted Kejriwal to lose his deposit, that was our goal,’ the BJP’s Kohli told me later.

Modi was never going to lose Varanasi. The big question was what would be the margin of the win. I remember meeting a few Delhi-based social activists who were campaigning against Modi. ‘He can be defeated—you media people have all been bought over by him,’ one vociferous lady told me angrily. I protested the accusation but realized I was never going to win this debate. Wearing ideological blinkers, I fear, can lead even rational people to think irrationally at election time.

A more logical explanation for the Modi wave in Varanasi was provided to me by the owner of Keshav Paan Bhandar, the city’s most famous paan shop. As he lovingly prepared a
meetha
paan for me, I asked him why he was voting for Modi. ‘
Bhaisaab, agar woh pradhan mantri bante hain, toh Varanasi ka kuch to bhala hoga’

(If Modi becomes PM, Varanasi will at least benefit in some way).

Like many other parts of India, Varanasi, too, was living on hope. In the land of Bismillah Khan and its ‘Ganga–Jamuni
tehzeeb
’, as they would say in Urdu, ‘
Ummeed par duniya kaayam hai!’
(The world lives on hope.)

The election in Amethi took place on 7 May. Varanasi was scheduled for the 12th. Only forty-one of the 543 seats were now left in what had been an agonizingly long nine-phase election. It was into this last stretch that the BJP now poured its entire might. ‘This was now carpet-bombing in a multiple of ten,’ is how one BJP leader summed up the last week of the campaign.

Modi was now addressing as many as six rallies a day, focused on the three remaining states of UP, Bihar and Bengal. The advertising campaign was intensified, with the frequency of the ads being increased. Every few minutes, a TV screen in one of the poll-bound states would have Modi staring at the camera, touching his heart emblazoned with a BJP badge, and saying,
‘Aapka diya gaya vote seedhe mujhe ayega’
(Your vote will come directly to me). ‘We wanted to make the candidates irrelevant—this was now only about Modi for PM,’ is how a BJP strategist described the presidential-style campaign thrust.

To try and ensure that their leader touched almost every battleground constituency, Team Modi played their final
Brahmastra
—Modi in 3D. The idea had originated in the 2012 Gujarat assembly election campaign. That election, like so much else in Team Modi’s 2014 strategy, served as a laboratory for innovative ideas. The 3D technology had been patented by a UK-based company, Musion. The India rights were acquired and a team of 200 foreign and Indian technicians worked for almost six months to perfect the broadcast. It was first attempted in December 2012 when Modi’s fifty-five-minute speech made from his political base in Gandhinagar was broadcast in fifty-three locations across twenty-six cities. ‘We
were able to cover lakhs of people across thousands of kilometres in one go. It had a terrific impact,’ says Prashant Kishore of CAG who headed the team which planned the concept.

I watched one of the 3D shows during the 2012 Gujarat elections from just outside Vadodara. Gujaratis, like most Indians, love their cinema. This was like a political movie being played out in front of them, with Modi as the star. Just the technology which showed Modi appearing with a glow around him was enough to make the crowd feel this was ‘paisa
vasool
’. Some members in the audience would move towards the screen, trying to touch Modi, and then scream excitedly when they realized this was only a cinematic image of their leader.