2014: The Election That Changed India (49 page)

They certainly weren’t haunting Shah. The politician who had first predicted that the Modi wave was becoming a tsunami was ready to have the last laugh.

Within hours of the exit poll results being announced, all roads led to Gandhinagar. Fellow politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists and well-wishers were all keen to have a word with the man who was set to become the country’s next prime minister. But, as was typical
of him, Modi met very few visitors. He had always kept a sparse house—it’s a home with minimal furniture—and he didn’t want to be flooded with bouquets and garlands. At least, not yet.

Among the first to call on him had been Gadkari who had flown down from Delhi for what was being described as a ‘courtesy call’. Within the BJP, the joke was that the former BJP president wanted to just mark his presence ahead of the Cabinet formation. ‘Everyone was already eyeing meaty portfolios,’ a BJP leader claimed later. Modi, as always, wasn’t revealing too much. He instead suggested that a wider consultation could begin on the road ahead. ‘I can come down to Delhi if you want,’ he had indicated to Gadkari. Gadkari had got the message. Forty-eight hours later, he along with party president Rajnath Singh and senior leader Arun Jaitley were winging their way to Gandhinagar. Significantly, Sushma Swaraj wasn’t present, while Advani had been ignored altogether. The balance of power within the party was now firmly ensconced in and around Modi. He didn’t need to come to Delhi—Delhi would come to his doorstep.

The four leaders held a preliminary discussion on government formation and what would be a possible calendar of events in the next fortnight. ‘We didn’t discuss who would be getting what portfolio, but we did look at the larger political picture that would emerge after the verdict. And yes, the assumption was that we were winning the elections,’ Jaitley later told me. If the BJP was eyeing power after ten years, the Congress was slowly reconciling itself to defeat. The party was now clutching at straws. ‘Do you really think we will get less than 100 seats?’ one minister asked me anxiously.

On 14 May, two days before the verdict, Sonia Gandhi threw a farewell dinner for Dr Singh and his wife. The prime minister had announced his retirement in January and this was an opportunity for the party to simply say thank you. It was a thoughtful gesture by Sonia and almost all the Union ministers and CWC members were there. A lavish spread had been prepared (one minister told me the kebabs were excellent). Dr Singh was presented with a silver plaque and a citation signed by all his Cabinet colleagues and there was a shawl for Gursharan Kaur. The Congress released a two-
minute video thanking Dr Singh for ten years of leadership. If there had been any recrimination over things that had gone wrong, it appeared that at least for this one evening, they had been forgotten.

And yet, what should have been a special moment for the Congress party and Dr Singh was hijacked by the news that Rahul Gandhi was absent from the function. ‘Where is Rahul?’ was the media chorus outside 10, Janpath. Trying to avoid the forest of cameras, the Congress, it seemed, had no answer. An hour later, the AICC issued a press statement saying that Rahul, after a hectic three-month campaign, had taken a short break and was ‘out of town’. He had reportedly already met the prime minister over the previous weekend and expressed his gratitude in person.

The damage had been done. The Twitter-friendly Omar Abdullah was among the first to react. ‘If you knew he was not attending the dinner and he had explained his absence to the PM earlier, please put out a statement before the news breaks.’ So, where, indeed, was Rahul? As usual, the Congress wouldn’t divulge his whereabouts. Dubai was one guess. ‘Far East’ was another surmise (apparently, in a yoga camp in Myanmar, we were told by one CWC member). It all seemed rather strange. It was bad enough that Rahul was never in town on his birthday while Congress workers lined up to greet him; now, he had chosen to skip a dinner which the Congress party, of which he was vice president, was hosting for their prime minister. It was not just poor form; to the outside world, it smacked of plain and simple bad manners. Sonia, I was later told, was angry at Rahul’s no-show but could do little about it. ‘The fact is, the one person in the Congress she had no control over was her son—he could overrule her,’ a senior Congress MP told me later.

In an election season where so much had gone wrong for the Congress party, this was one final embarrassment they could have done without.

The 16th of May was like any other excruciatingly hot summer day. Life, though, was easier for me since I was to be in an air-conditioned studio for the 6 a.m. live coverage. Driving to the studio in the early hours of the morning, my mind was transported to the first election I had done on television. The 1996 general elections marked my television debut—then we were doing the elections for Doordarshan. If counting day now was a bit like a T20 match, then it was like a five-day Test match.

We had Dr Roy and Vinod Dua—a unique and stellar English–Hindi combination—holding forth in the studio. Private news television networks had still not taken off, so we had a virtual monopoly over viewership. The nation was, literally, watching us. It was also a pre-electronic voting machine era—the results would come through very slowly and the entire exercise went on for three days, like a slowly unfolding Hindi film drama. In fact, to keep the audiences engaged, Doordarshan would break the election coverage with old movies.

I was reporting out of the Congress headquarters for those seventy-two hours; among my colleagues in the field were Arnab and Barkha. One episode sticks in my mind of that time. On day three of the coverage I got a call from Kamal Nath, the senior Congress leader. Nath had been denied a Congress ticket after his name surfaced in the Jain hawala scam. He was convinced that the hawala charges had been a conspiracy by then prime minister Narasimha Rao to edge out all his political rivals. As the results were coming in, it was apparent that Rao was on his way out. Nath wanted his revenge.

Around 8 in the evening, he called me and said he wanted to do a live interview with me from the Congress headquarters. I warned him that the party viewed him as a persona non grata, and might not allow him to enter the premises. ‘Don’t worry, Narasimha Rao is history, my friend. Today I will expose him before the nation,’ he told me. Sounds like a scoop, I thought, and invited him to join the telecast.

An hour later, a slightly inebriated Nath arrived at the venue. We did a live interview where he, as promised, lambasted the Rao
government. There was only one hitch—this was Doordarshan and Rao was still technically prime minister of India. A few minutes into the interview, I was getting frantic signals to cut the live telecast. Nath, though, was on a roll. ‘History has taught Rao a well-deserved lesson. Thank God the country is rid of him!’ It is perhaps the one and only occasion when the prime minister has been spoken about in this manner on Doordarshan!

That was, of course, eighteen years ago. Now, we were into another general election in the age of private television where dozens of news channels were in frenetic competition. At CNN-IBN, we genuinely believed we had assembled what we liked to call ‘the best team in politics’.

There was Swapan Dasgupta as the premier right-wing voice and someone who had an inside track to Modi; the liberal historian and public intellectual Ramachandra Guha was among the rare breed who spoke as well as he wrote; Manini Chatterjee of the
Telegraph
offered a punchy counterpoint to Swapan’s Modinama; P. Sainath, a Magsaysay award-winning journalist, had documented rural India better than anyone else; Kumar Ketkar offered a robust old-style Nehruvian perspective; and just in case the right wing felt outgunned, we had the straight-talking political economist, Surjit Bhalla, who I would often term as being ‘on the right of Atilla the Hun!’ Our number crunching was done by Prof. Karandikar while the political inputs were handled by Dr Sandeep Shastri of the Lokniti team, whose enthusiasm would usually lift my spirits. The only member of our original election panel we were missing that morning was Prof. Dipankar Gupta, the leading political sociologist who had the great skill of making his point forcefully without raising his voice.

The panel had come prepared to stay in the studio for several hours. ‘Don’t worry, we have lots of food and drink organized to keep you going,’ I assured them. In the end, it was all over in the first three hours. The first round of leads that come on a television programme are usually from postal ballots, so one can be easily misled by the initial numbers. But within half an hour of the counting having started, a clear trend had begun to emerge.

The BJP was well ahead in most seats in north and west India from where leads were now coming thick and fast. At around 9 a.m., we had a flash saying Rahul was trailing. My first instinctive response was—could Smriti Irani be the Raj Narain of 2014 (the socialist leader had defeated Indira Gandhi in Rae Bareli in 1977)? Then, we had another news flash—Supriya Sule, Sharad Pawar’s daughter, was trailing in Baramati. Surely not, I muttered to myself, the Pawars had been winning the seat for four decades now. From Thiruvananthapuram came the news that Shashi Tharoor was also lagging behind. Would the BJP actually break its duck in Kerala? Every Congress minister, except Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia, seemed to be losing in the first round of counting.

But the big story was undoubtedly coming from UP. By 9.30 a.m., we had trends for almost fifty seats from the state. Except two (Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareli and Mulayam Singh in Mainpuri), the BJP was ahead in all the rest. Shah was right, I said on air, this could really be a political tsunami.

At 9.32 a.m., I asked my producers to flash the big breaking news on the video wall—NDA set to win the 2014 elections; Narendra Modi poised to be India’s next prime minister. News television works like a herd on major news days. Within minutes of us putting out the flash, every news channel in the country had followed.

A few hours later, the noise had settled a bit. Rahul Gandhi had recovered and was now leading in Amethi. He would eventually win by just over a lakh of votes, unlike 2009 when he had won by an impressive 3.70 lakh votes. Supriya Sule had edged ahead as well, as had Shashi Tharoor, but both their victory margins had been drastically reduced. There were no comebacks, though, for a majority of the Congress ministers. The only important BJP leader to bite the dust was Arun Jaitley in Amritsar, defeated because he had miscalculated the depth of anger against the Akalis.

There was little of interest left elsewhere. In Andhra Pradesh, the other key battleground, it was Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra and Chandrasekhar Rao in Telangana. ‘You must come for the swearing-in,’ Naidu’s assistant SMS-ed me within minutes of the results being
announced. KTR, son of Telangana’s first chief minister, would send me a similar invite a few days later. I, as always, preferred to stay at home.

Meanwhile, there was another battle within a battle—Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalithaa were engaged in their own private duel about who would finish third. Eventually, Jaya would nose ahead, but neither Amma nor Didi were in any position to change the course of events in Delhi. The other potential prime ministerial pretenders had been almost wiped out. Mayawati, quite astonishingly, had drawn a blank. Mulayam Singh had won just five seats, all won by family members. Sharad Pawar’s NCP was down to just five seats, Nitish won just two, Kejriwal’s AAP bagged only four seats, all of which came from Punjab.

The biggest defeat was of the Congress. The mighty party of the freedom movement was down to just forty-four seats, its worst ever performance. Not even the 1977 post-Emergency debacle had been this terrible. In all the states where there was a direct fight with the BJP, the Congress was demolished. An SMS joke doing the rounds suggested that if you travelled along the highway up north from Mumbai, the first Congress constituency you would touch was Amritsar!

The BJP, on the other hand, had quite remarkably won 282 seats on its own, the first instance of single-party majority since 1984. UP had been swept—a quite astonishing seventy-three of the eighty seats were in the BJP–Apna Dal kitty. The party won all the seats in Rajasthan and Gujarat, its alliance won forty-two of the forty-eight seats in Maharashtra and thirty-one of the forty in Bihar. Of the seventy seats where the polling percentage had gone up by more than 15 per cent, the BJP and its allies won as many as sixty-seven. On our map in the studio, north, west and central India had only one colour—and it was saffron.