2014: The Election That Changed India (26 page)

There is no doubt, though, that he’s someone
who relishes a political fight. Maybe it was this dogged determination to prove himself that made
Shah the ideal person to take on the tough UP challenge. Within days of being made campaign
committee chief in June 2013, Modi ensured that Shah was fully empowered as general secretary in
charge of UP. The right-hand man who had been his ‘eyes and ears’ in Gujarat was now
being asked to be his brain in the most crucial battle of 2014. UP offered the biggest prize of
eighty seats. Most observers reckoned the BJP needed to win at least forty to fifty seats to have
any chance of achieving Mission 272-plus. The odds were stacked against the man from Sarkhej. But
they had also been against him when he had spent two months in Sabarmati jail. Now was redemption
time.

When Shah arrived at the BJP office in Lucknow on 12
June 2013, he was aware of the magnitude of the task facing him. The state BJP
unit was totally demoralized—the party had been out of power in UP for seventeen years
with little hope of a comeback. Its leadership was ageing and warring with each other. Some of the
old guards saw Shah as an ‘outsider’ who was being thrust on them. UP politicians tend
to have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and believe that no one knows their state like they
do. ‘
Gujarat aur UP mein bahut fark hai, Amitji’
(There’s a huge
difference between Gujarat and UP), one of them openly told Shah. One of the new general
secretary’s first acts was to call day-long meetings, in small groups, of all the party MPs
and MLAs who had won and lost elections. ‘It’s important to know why we were losing
elections, why our voters had deserted us,’ was his reasoning.

The legislators could not bluff Shah easily. He had
already got detailed constituency-wise profiles of the state done and had used the Sangh Parivar
network to identify just who were the MLAs, MPs and local leaders who were actually working on the
ground. Interestingly, in the two years when he was forced to live in Delhi because of his bail
conditions, he would travel to different parts of UP on weekends to familiarize himself with the
environment. ‘I think much before 2013, he had been given a sense that he was going to have to
manage the UP elections for the BJP and was fully prepared for it,’ says Sheela Bhatt, a
senior journalist who has interviewed Shah on several occasions.

By contrast, Madhusudhan Mistry, the
Congress’s general secretary for Uttar Pradesh, who was also from Gujarat, did not even
recognize some of the party’s twenty-eight MLAs from the state. ‘One of our MLAs once
told Mistry in a party meeting that if you don’t know who I am, how will you fight an
election!’ a senior Congress member told me. Mistry, with his jhola and faded kurtas, had been
hand-picked by Rahul. Pitted against the dynamic Shah, neither he nor his party had a chance.

Shah knew that the key to success was in
re-energizing the party workers. This is where his close ties with the RSS worked hugely in his
favour. A core team of RSS pracharaks was deputed to work with him. From the moment he took charge
in Lucknow, Shah
tirelessly criss-crossed the state by road and rail, staying
at the homes of party workers, often having simple meals of
saunf khichdi
and
chaas
(fennel rice and buttermilk) with them. By the beginning of 2014, he had already
covered around seventy of UP’s eighty Lok Sabha constituencies. By the time the elections were
over in May, Shah had touched all eighty constituencies, spent 142 nights over a span of eight
months in UP’s villages and towns, and travelled more than 90,000 kilometres across the vast
state. ‘The idea was to awaken the dormant party worker, to make them realize that this was a
do-or-die election battle,’ says an aide.

Where Modi could easily relate to young
English-speaking technocrats, Shah preferred to deal with loyal Sangh activists. Sunil Bansal, a
forty-four-year-old ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad, the RSS’s student wing) organizing
secretary, was hand-picked by Shah to assist him in the UP campaign. The Hindi-speaking Bansal was
from Rajasthan, did not have a foreign degree, but he had the common touch—he helped Shah set
up a network of volunteers in Lucknow and every district headquarters. ‘Amitbhai is very
organized. He likes to ensure everything is planned in advance,’ Bansal later told me.

A team of about 120 volunteers was ready by January
2014 to operate out of the party’s Lucknow head office. These volunteers helped set up and
coordinate with the booth-level committees that are so critical to any election. Some of the
volunteers were IITians, lawyers, management professionals, but a majority of them were drawn from
the RSS–ABVP ranks. These volunteers coordinated with anywhere between 80,000 and one lakh
swayamsevaks engaged in a massive door-to-door campaign. ‘Forget the technology, forget the
media blitz, the 2014 election was ultimately a triumph of our foot soldiers who worked relentlessly
on the ground in UP,’ is how a BJP strategist captured the party’s success story.

The RSS involvement was deep and intense. Each
swayamsevak was referred to as a
panna pramukh
and made in charge of one page of a voter
list (which has roughly around fifteen registered voters). Each booth has around 1200 votes, so
eighty to ninety swayamsevaks
were engaged in the campaign at every booth
level. In a state with more than one lakh booths, this was election micromanagement being taken to a
whole new level. ‘Our mission statement was every vote counts. We believed in the power of
one,’ is how Bansal described the booth-centric approach.

The RSS campaign was divided into three phases. In
the first phase, between Vijayadashmi in October 2013 and Republic Day in January 2014, the focus
was on voter registration. In the second phase in February and March, the objective shifted to a
door-to-door campaign aimed at around 6500 to 7000 villages in key districts. In the final stretch
in April and May, the sole goal was to maximize voter turnout. ‘I don’t think that the
RSS cadres have ever participated with such enthusiasm in any election since 1977. Even the Ayodhya
election of 1991 was an emotional appeal to Hindutva. This time, we saw it as a fight to the finish.
Ek junoon tha worker mein
’ (The workers were driven), is how a senior RSS leader from
UP described the Sangh’s involvement in the 2014 election.

The fact is, parties like the Congress simply
don’t have anything remotely matching the dedicated swayamsevak cadres. The Congress’s
frontal organizations like the Seva Dal have an antique look about them. Even the left has struggled
to sustain its grass-roots network beyond Bengal and Kerala. Regional forces like the BSP and the
Trinamool have been a shade more successful, but they, too, operate within a limited geography. To
win elections, you need an organizational machine. And the RSS with its 45,000 shakhas and 5 million
swayamsevaks across India provides the BJP with the feet on the ground, a cutting-edge advantage at
election time.

Shah also turned his attention to the VHP which had
been feeling isolated, convinced that their dream of a Ram mandir in Ayodhya would never be
fulfilled. The VHP’s sants and sadhus had already endorsed Modi at the Kumbh Mela in January
2013, hoping that he would revive their dwindling fortunes. In July, just a month after taking over,
Shah paid a visit to the makeshift Ram temple in Ayodhya, offering prayers for Modi’s
raj
tilak
(coronation) and the Congress’s vanvas. ‘Ram and Ayodhya live in the hearts
of millions of
Indians. I have prayed that everyone comes together for the
building of a Ram temple,’ he told the media. The VHP was enthused—finally, a BJP leader
was speaking their language in unapologetic terms. A latent Hindu passion was being reawakened, as
had been the case in the 1990s. Many VHP sadhus were now ready to join the 2014 campaign.

Perhaps this was easier to achieve with Modi at the
helm. In the 2009 elections, the traditional Sangh Parivar workers had been disillusioned with
Advani’s attempt to recast himself as a more moderate Hindutva face. Vajpayee’s
inclusive politics didn’t suit the more fiery VHP–RSS rabble-rousers. Modi was
different. He could excite the saffron brotherhood because he was seen as one of their own.
‘Modi may have become a national politician, but he is always a swayamsevak and pracharak
first,’ is how an RSS leader described Modi’s appeal. Shah knew this, which is why it
was that much easier to crack the whip and get the organization to go back to its roots. In every
meeting, he would remind the local workers, ‘This is our big chance, we must not squander
it.’

But Shah knew that traditional Hindutva politics
could only be one weapon—the real test was in piercing through UP’s byzantine caste
arithmetic. The Yadavs were loyal to the SP, Mayawati had cornered the Dalit vote (especially her
own Jatav community’s), and the Muslims would not trust the BJP. A new election paradigm was
needed.

A massive drive was initiated to register young
volunteers from across 13,000 colleges in the state. Around 800 full-time volunteers under the age
of thirty were recruited and armed with mobiles with prepaid SIM cards; their prime target was the
young voter. ‘We felt that the young voter in UP was most likely to look beyond traditional
caste politics. The slogan of parivartan was resonating with them most effectively,’ says a
BJP leader involved in planning the strategy.

I had a first-hand experience of this when I met an
elderly Yadav in Gorakhpur who said he had been a life-long Mulayam voter but was shifting to the
BJP this time. ‘You see, my grandson in Noida is
an engineer and he
says Modi is the right person for India.
Ab pote ki baat toh sunni padegi!
’ (I will
have to listen to my grandson), he laughed.

Indeed, the demographic shift in UP’s
population—with a large and influential chunk of young voters—would eventually give the
BJP an important incremental vote. Just as interesting was the role of economic migrants. Bansal
claims that around 15,000 Purvanchalis (eastern UP-ites) based in Mumbai, Bangalore and Ahmedabad
returned to UP for the election campaign and spread the ‘Modi for PM’ message among the
locals. ‘Even migrant workers from diamond factories in Surat came home and told their
community members stories of how Gujarat was prospering under Modi,’ says Bansal.

Not that Shah wasn’t playing his own version
of caste politics. In all booths, caste-based clusters were created based on the numerical strength
of each caste, and volunteers chosen accordingly. More than eighty caste
sammelan
s
(conferences) were held, especially to attract the non-Yadav OBCs and the non-Jatav Dalits.
‘When in UP, do as UP-ites do. If caste matters, then we must play the caste game better than
others,’ was Shah’s message to the booth-level workers.

I had a first-hand experience of Shah’s caste
calculations during the BJP’s ticket distribution exercise. An office colleague came to me
with a strange request. ‘Sir, there is a friend of mine from UP. She is an MLA there and is
very keen to meet you, she needs your help.’

An hour later, an astute young politician called
Anupriya Patel, who was the sitting MLA from the Ruhaniya assembly seat of Varanasi, was in my
cabin. She was from the Kurmi-dominated Apna Dal party which had been started by her late father,
Sonelal Patel. ‘Sir, I need a favour. Could you fix an appointment for me with Mr Shah? I wish
to contest the elections in alliance with the BJP,’ she said, with refreshing candour.

I wasn’t quite sure how to react. As an
editor, I had determinedly stayed out of the murky world of political wheeling and dealing.
‘Look, I will request Amitbhai to meet you, but please understand, I am no great friend of his
and I am not going to ask him to give you a ticket!’ was my immediate response.

Hesitantly, I called up Shah.
His reaction was instant:
‘Please, aap unhe Gujarat Bhavan bhej do’
(Send her
to Gujarat Bhavan). A few days later, I got a call from Ms Patel. ‘Thank you so much, sir, my
ticket is done. Our alliance with the BJP is sealed!’ The Apna Dal was given two seats, both
of which they would eventually win. I guess in my small way, almost unintentionally, I had
contributed to the BJP success in UP!

I asked Shah later why he had decided to tie up with
the Apna Dal, a party with a limited presence in a tiny pocket of eastern Uttar Pradesh.
‘Isme chhote bade ki baat nahi hai, yahan har seat matter karti hai. Unke Kurmi samaj ka
teen–char per cent vote hai’
(It’s not a question of big or small. Every seat
matters. The Kurmis have a 3 to 4 per cent vote in these areas), he claimed. The final BJP list for
UP would include twenty-eight OBCs and seventeen non-Jatav Dalits.

Shah, with his astute planning, may have been the
mind behind the UP campaign. But he still needed the ‘face’ of Modi to guarantee
success. ‘We wanted to project Modiji as the symbol of good governance and contrast the mess
in UP with our development record in Gujarat,’ is how Shah summed it up for me later.

Modi’s mega rallies in UP were scheduled for
each major zonal headquarter across the state, starting with Kanpur in October 2013. Booth workers
were given Boleros (a status symbol in many parts of UP) and told to ensure that each rally in their
area drew maximum attendance. ‘The larger the crowd, the more the chance of creating Modi
mania,’ was the overarching philosophy.

But how was the message going to be sent out to
every village across a vast state, many of which didn’t even have proper electricity or access
to media? Team Modi deployed 400 GPS-enabled digital raths—similar to the ones that had been
used in Rajasthan in the assembly elections (see preceding chapter)—to reach out to what were
described to me as ‘media dark’ villages. As many as 93,000 villages in UP across
fifty-one gram panchayats (and around 39,000 villages in Bihar) were identified for video messaging.
Some villages were literally small
kasba
s with just fifty voters but even they were not
left out.