2014: The Election That Changed India (21 page)

Bhagwat, a Maharashtrian Brahmin like many of his predecessors, was a third-generation RSS leader. With his walrus-like white moustache and wrestler-like physique (he was once the RSS’s chief of physical training), he was not the kind of leader who would tolerate indiscipline. He became RSS chief in March 2009, just three
months before the general elections, at the relatively young age of fifty-nine. The BJP was in disarray and Bhagwat was determined to correct it. ‘He was angry and frustrated. He told us that either we change or it is all over for us. It is now or never!’ says a BJP leader who attended an RSS–BJP meet.

One of his first tasks after taking over was to look for a new BJP president. Bhagwat wanted to bring in someone from outside Delhi for the post to reduce the friction. His first choice was Modi, but Modi wanted to focus on the 2012 Gujarat elections. He even considered Manohar Parrikar, but he, too, preferred to stay put in his home state of Goa. In the end, the mantle fell on Gadkari, the ‘local’ boy from Nagpur, the RSS’s home turf. Gadkari had a warm relationship with Bhagwat—they sometimes dined together—and the explicit instruction was to unite the party. Voluble and expansive in more ways than one, Gadkari had tried and failed, like so many Maharashtra politicians before him, in taming north India. His business dealings came under the scanner as well—he is a businessman first, a politician much later, was a criticism within the party. The portly Gadkari is an interesting combination of bon vivant and
swayamsevak
. He’d invite you to lunch, declare he was on a diet and end up polishing off most of the meal! He also had a bagful of expletives, thrown at anyone who’d care to listen; he was the kind of individual who could abuse with a smile.

When the BJP lost badly in the UP elections in early 2012, Bhagwat knew time was running out for the party’s revival. They needed someone who would galvanize the team, and do it quickly. When Modi scored a hat-trick in Gujarat in December that year, Bhagwat was assured that the quest for such a forceful leader had ended.

Bhagwat hadn’t always been an admirer of Modi’s style of functioning. In 2006, some BJP well-wishers had met the RSS leader and expressed their concern that the party wasn’t using Modi effectively. Bhagwat heard them out and then expressed his reservations. ‘The problem with Modi is that he argues all the time and you can never win an argument with him. Besides, once he
becomes a national leader, he will want to be the sarsanghchalak next!’

That was then. Now, though, the situation was different. The BJP was in a crisis, Modi was just the man the party needed. A meeting was held in Nagpur in April 2013 where Modi was present along with the entire RSS hierarchy, including Bhaiyyaji Joshi and Suresh Soni, both key point persons for the Sangh in Delhi. The message was unambiguous—the Sangh would fully back Modi for prime ministership. There was no time to waste in organizing and mobilizing. As someone who had attended an RSS
shakha
at the age of eight, Modi knew the Sangh’s commitment to the cause was complete. In the months ahead, RSS cadres would play an important role in door-to-door campaigns, especially in north India.

In November 2013, I got a chance to have a long and candid conversation with Bhagwat at Hedgewar Bhavan, the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. The meeting was organized by Nagpur’s vibrant Rotarians. I had been putting off a visit for two years to address them. Finally I agreed, provided they arranged a meeting for me with the RSS chief, which they dutifully managed.

In a small room with limited furniture, and over chai,
chiwda
and
peda
s (most RSS leaders, I find, have a noticeable sweet tooth), we discussed the emerging political situation. I asked Bhagwat why the RSS, which claimed to be against a personality cult in politics, had chosen to put all its eggs in the Modi basket. ‘It is not the RSS, it is the BJP workers and the people of the country who want a strong leader. It is the people who want Modi—why should we deny them what they desire,’ was his response.

But what of the Sangh’s ideological agenda? Article 370, common civil code, Ram mandir—had that been diluted in the pursuit of power? ‘First, let us get a clear majority, then we can talk of implementing our agenda,’ said Bhagwat, with a twinkle in his light eyes.

I also asked him why he had sidelined Advani, the seniormost leader in the BJP. Bhagwat then related a story he would later amplify while releasing a book on Advani’s blogs in Delhi (which was
reproduced in the
Indian Express
). ‘In a village, once a housewife spat betel juice into a
havan kund
, only to discover that the spit had turned into a gold nugget. When her husband returned home, she narrated the episode. He told her not to let anyone else know. But word soon spread through the village, and everyone began spitting into havan kunds to find gold. All prospered except the woman and her husband. A year later, when they still had no gold, the unhappy woman told her husband that they should leave the village. He dithered but when she threatened to kill herself, he agreed. They left the village and soon reached a hillock. When they turned around, they saw the village burning and heard people screaming.’

The message, said Bhagwat, was clear—the party and the Parivar needed Advani to stay and guide them so that their ‘village’ did not burn. Advani was being asked to play a Bhishma-like role by the RSS because the lead actor for the Arjun-like hero had already been found.

By August 2013, it was apparent that it was only a matter of time before Narendra Modi was formally chosen the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. Modi’s town hall meetings continued to attract a huge response. We had begun a series of ‘election tracker’ polls on CNN-IBN in partnership with Lokniti, the political research team at the CSDS. Our first tracker at the end of July was revealing—Narendra Modi was the preferred prime ministerial choice of 19 per cent of the respondents, Rahul Gandhi of 12 per cent. No other BJP leader was in double digits—L.K. Advani was preferred by just 2 per cent.

Modi, though, didn’t want to take any chances. He wanted the announcement to be made as soon as possible and was looking for an occasion to drive home the point. In June, he had tried to use the Uttarakhand floods to make a pitch as the ideal crisis manager, parking himself in Dehradun for three days. A local BJP spokesperson had suggested that Modi had played a pivotal role in ‘rescuing’ as
many as 15,000 stranded Gujaratis. The
Times of India
went a step further, likening Modi to Rambo, the all-powerful cinematic character. At a time when the nation was grieving, when the security forces were working round the clock on rescue missions, the self-publicity backfired. Modi was the butt of Rambo jokes.

Modi blamed the media for the controversy. While the Rambo remark was perhaps a typical journalistic exaggeration, my sources in the BJP said that the original ‘great rescue’ theme had been pushed by the chief minister’s publicists. When I spoke to Modi about it, his response was predictably combative.
‘Lagta hai aaj kal tum logon ko koi aur news nahi hai!’
(Looks like you people have no other news these days.)

Now Modi was looking for another big national event to boost his PM credentials. The 15th of August, Independence Day, provided Modi with just that special moment. The prime minister’s Red Fort address is an Independence Day ritual. The country’s VIPs gather to show off their privileges. The rest of us are meant to listen to the prime minister listing out his achievements and plans for the future. On a cloudy August morning, Dr Singh was delivering his tenth, and possibly final, Independence Day speech. The economist PM was, self-admittedly, not a great public speaker. He was, in fact, a pretty poor one. The 2013 speech was no different. Dr Singh droned on monotonously for about forty minutes about the UPA’s track record over a decade in government—from RTI to NREGA to the proposed food security bill, he pressed all the usual buttons in a rather perfunctory manner. By 8.45 a.m., the speech was over; the VIPs began to disperse, and the news desk still struggled for a headline. We didn’t have to wait long.

A day before, addressing a gathering of students in Bhuj in Kutch, Narendra Modi had boasted, ‘Tomorrow the country will compare my speech with that of the prime minister. When we unfurl the tricolour, the message will also go to Lal Qila. The nation will want to know what was said there and what is said here.’ Modi had thrown an unprecedented challenge. He may only have been the chief minister of Gujarat, he still hadn’t been formally made the
BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, but he was already acting and talking like one. It was typical Modi—cocky and arrogant, but also self-confident and daring.

Next morning, he lived up to his promise. A little after 9 a.m., soon after the prime minister’s speech was over, Modi got up to speak in Bhuj. For almost an hour, he spoke almost as if he was participating in a public debate with the prime minister and the Government of India. This wasn’t just an Independence Day address—this was an election speech. The audience wasn’t Gujarat but the people of the country. He even had a mock Red Fort erected on the podium.

If the prime minister had sounded a bit mournful, like the Delhi weather that day, Modi exuded aggression in a direct attack on the Congress leadership. Sample this: ‘You unfurled the tricolour so many times, Mr Prime Minister, but you raise the same issues that Pandit Nehru raised sixty years ago!’; ‘You are so caught up in the bhakti of one family, you have forgotten all other issues’; ‘The nation must be freed from nepotism, from the arrogance of those in power’; ‘The country is in poverty and fed up of corruption. People want a new
soch
[thinking].’ A police officer standing next to Modi fainted in the heat while the speech was on, but the chief minister just rolled on. Again, with no prepared text or notes.

India had never seen anything quite like it—a ceremonial Independence Day occasion, which is meant to exchange pleasantries, had been converted into an open, hostile bid for power. Predictably, the Congress was livid. Their spokespersons were all over television channels, accusing Modi of betraying the spirit and traditions of 15 August.

I telephoned Modi a few days later and asked him whether he had any regrets over confronting the prime minister on Independence Day. His response was typically unapologetic. ‘
Lagta hai een Congresswalon ko dar hai ki unki dukan bandh hone wali hai!’
(Looks like the Congress is upset that their shop is going to shut down.)

The strategy was clear—Modi was not here to play by the rules set by someone else; he wanted to create what Congress leader
Jairam Ramesh later described as his own version of bodyline where unconventional attack was the best form of defence. If that meant disrupting an institutionalized practice and using even an Independence Day ceremony for political benefit, then so be it. Modi had positioned himself as the anti-establishment challenger to the old order. He wanted to assert his prime ministerial qualification and use his oratory as a weapon.

The contrast between the soft-spoken, monosyllabic Manmohan Singh and the punchline-a-minute, hard-hitting Modi was unmistakable. A bit like a Pujara vs Gayle battle in a T20 match. As a Modi aide remarked, ‘We were convinced that day that if we made this a presidential battle between a weak and a tough leader, then there could only be one winner.’ Modi was still not the BJP’s de jure prime ministerial candidate, but on 15 August, he became the de facto prime minister of his party, if not the country.

Modi was formally announced as the BJP’s prime ministerial nominee for the 2014 elections on 13 September 2013 amidst garlands and crackers at the party headquarters in Delhi. Typically, the announcement was accompanied by more drama and controversy. Advani refused to attend the parliamentary board meeting where the decision was taken. Instead, he chose to dash off another letter to Rajnath Singh, expressing his ‘anguish’ over the party president’s ‘style of functioning’. At the board meeting, Sushma Swaraj expressed her note of dissent, saying she was accepting the decision ‘under protest’.

The Advani–Sushma duo had a new rationale for their ‘rebellion’. Assembly elections in four crucial states of north India were due in a few months and it would be best to hold off any announcement till the elections were over, was their argument. ‘Why the hurry? Why mix issues before the assembly elections? Why take a risk at this stage?’ Advani asked BJP leaders who met him. He tossed up another googly by suggesting that Modi was not the only ‘successful’ BJP
chief minister. ‘Look at Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Raman Singh. They, too, have been chief ministers for a decade—should their credentials as leaders be totally ignored?’ was the question he raised.