2014: The Election That Changed India (40 page)

I rang up the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC),
V.S. Sampath, to get an official view. He promised to get back after seeking legal opinion. A little
after 11 p.m., he rang up to say that ‘The manifesto release could be shown in all parts of
India, except those where voting was taking place.’ I pointed out that as national news
channels, our telecast was being beamed across India. ‘Well, then I leave it to your judgement
as to how to ensure the law is not violated,’ was his parting shot.

I rang up Shazi, summarizing the gist of my
conversation with the CEC. My suggestion was that, ‘Whatever decision we take should be a
collective one.’ Frankly, I didn’t want to risk being isolated on the issue.

The next morning, every news channel showed the
telecast live even
though I think we were all aware we were flirting with the
election law. Our public defence—this was a news-worthy event that had to be telecast in
viewer and national interest. Our private admission—we know it violates the law, but hey,
let’s take a chance, especially as the Election Commission hasn’t sent us anything
specific in writing.

The same philosophy applied again when Modi was
filing his nomination from Varanasi on 24 April. It was a really big polling day—117 seats
were polling across twelve states. Did a live roadshow of Modi in Varanasi while polling was on in
other places constitute an election law violation? It was an open question. Maybe it did or maybe
the law itself was outdated in a multi-phase election where every event is in any case being played
out on the Internet. The Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct over a nine-phase
election violates the Code of Common Sense, fulminated voices on Twitter.

But even if it was legal, was it morally right?
Sadly, none of us wanted to even consider raising the troubling ethical questions. Modi was on an
impressive march of victory; he was box office—the man the country wanted to see and listen
to. We were happy to simply allow the TV studio to be a loudspeaker for his voice, and almost
wilfully participate in the propaganda offensive. Cumbersome election laws be damned. Our moral
compass as journalists had shifted, almost irreversibly, in the race for TRPs.

On TV, Modi was the dramatic binary contrast to
Manmohan Singh and Rahul, the Bharatiya, even ‘Dabang’ action man, compared to the
disconnected Luytensland dynasty. Starved of drama and communication by the uncommunicative UPA and
silent Manmohan, the TV camera veered thirstily to Modi for the continuous theatrics and
hard-hitting sound bites that emanated from him. In the process did we become participants rather
than disconnected observers? Perhaps the media did become part of the Modi propaganda machine, the
camera transfixed by the unfailingly sharply dressed PM candidate (apparently, he did not repeat an
outfit through the campaign), who seemed to dash between multiple locations with not a hair out of
place.

There was no denying the
massive viewer interest every time Modi was on air, the sheer size of the rallies, the social media
popularity of Modi which became a crucial guide to TV coverage, or the cascading effect of every
outlet beaming out Modi, thus perhaps creating a self-perpetuating cycle of constant coverage. The
TV camera, I have always believed, is an amoral technology—it covers both good and bad, and it
simply goes where the action is. Nirbhaya protests or Ramdev’s rallies, Anna Hazare’s or
Kejriwal’s dharnas, in the 24/7 cycle, the camera is invariably drawn to the maximum possible
action. Modi was the man who created the action, and inevitably the camera became his constant
companion.

In the final analysis, neither sanctimoniousness or
self-flagellation is necessary. To suggest the media ‘created’ the Modi wave is to give
ourselves undeserved self-importance. And it is also disrespectful to the mandate given to Modi by
millions of Indians who have reposed faith in him. At the Mumbai Press Club debate, ad whizz Piyush
Pandey got it right—‘Media didn’t create the wave, it simply rode on
it.’

Rahul Gandhi entered what was potentially the most decisive year of his political life by being absent from the country. The young leader’s foreign trips were the subject of much speculation within the media and even the Congress party. The bazaar gossip was that he was either in Dubai or London. ‘He always spends New Year somewhere out, even Rajivji used to do it,’ is how a Congressperson put it to me, rather defensively.

The Delhi that Rahul returned to in the first week of January 2014 was in the grip of a cold wave. What was also slowly becoming apparent was that in this general election year, the Congress party could soon be left out in the cold. The party had just been swept out in the four state assembly elections in December. The CNNIBN January election tracker brought more bad news—the NDA was now crossing the 230-seat mark; more significantly, the BJP alone was winning around 210 seats. The UPA was way behind, with around 120 seats; the Congress on its own was just below the three-figure mark. Price rise was still hurting, with retail inflation hovering around the double-digit mark. It was the number one public concern, according to our poll. The voters were still very angry with the UPA. The poll even showed that a majority believed
that the prime minister had allowed, or had been unable to rein in, high-level corruption.

The other noteworthy statistic from the poll survey was the leadership battle between Rahul and Modi. When asked a straight question on who should be prime minister, 52 per cent preferred Modi, just 16 per cent wanted Rahul. The gap widened when the question was posed in north and west India. The only state where Rahul was ahead was in Kerala. The situation from a Congress perspective was grim.

Digvijaya Singh, the senior Congress leader, was a very worried man. Like many Congressmen, he could see the writing on the wall. But unlike several Congress leaders, at least he had relatively direct access to Rahul. Digvijaya had, so far, been against the idea of making this election Rahul versus Modi. Now, he felt that it was important that the young Gandhi at least send out a message to the party cadres that he was ready to lead. ‘The workers need to be energized, Rahulji, they need you to give them a sense of direction, a feeling that we can win this election. You need to lead us from the front,’ he said. Rahul nodded attentively. ‘Yes, yes, I know, Digivjayaji. When the time comes, we will be ready!’

But time was running out. The AICC session was scheduled for 17 January at Talkatora Stadium in the capital. Hundreds of party delegates from across India had gathered to listen to their leadership. Manmohan Singh, who had just announced his retirement from politics, spoke in the morning. Sonia Gandhi had also spoken before lunch. The crowd, though, was getting restive.
‘Rahul Gandhi aage badho, hum tumhare saath hai’
(Come forward, we are with you), was the predictable chant. A resolution was passed that the party would fight the 2014 elections under his leadership.

Rahul finally spoke around 3.30 p.m. A year earlier, he had addressed a similar conclave in Jaipur and delivered his famous ‘power is poison’ speech. This time, there could be no emotional message of self-renunciation. The party was looking to win an election and needed their leader to take the battle to the enemy. For once, Rahul did not let them down.

In an hour-long speech that alternated between Hindi and English, Rahul displayed an aggression which had been missing so far. He repeatedly targeted Narendra Modi, without naming him. The one-liners came thick and fast: ‘Democracy is not rule by one man; democracy is rule by the elected representatives of the people’; ‘The Opposition are very good marketeers, they sing, they dance, they can sell combs to the bald. Do not be swayed by their big talk.’

If the party had been looking to revive its fighting spirit, Rahul gave them ample reason for hope. ‘No matter how dark the night, India teaches you to fight on. We will go into this battle as warriors, with every single thing we have,’ he thundered. The audience of loyal Gandhi family supporters, for the moment at least, was electrified.

He stopped short of pronouncing himself as the party’s prime ministerial candidate, saying the Congress was a democratic party and the elected MPs would choose their leader. But there were enough hints that he had finally decided to shed his reluctance to take the plunge. ‘I am your soldier, I will do whatever you tell me,’ he said, as a rapturous audience cheered him on.

And if there was any doubt that a change in guard had been effected, it came when Rahul turned to the prime minister on the stage and almost ‘demanded’ of him, ‘Mr Prime Minister, nine subsidized LPG cylinders are not enough. This country’s women want twelve cylinders every year.’ Two weeks later, the UPA government tamely raised the quota of subsidized cooking gas cylinders from nine to twelve per household.

In the studio, we analysed the speech and felt that Rahul had finally come of age. The attack on Modi had been blistering, the kind you expect at election time. His stance and posture were of a man who saw himself as the Supreme Commander of his forces at last. Even the Hindi had noticeably improved, and was near flawless. Most analysts gave the performance eight on ten.

Had the election turned, we asked ourselves. Television likes instant judgements, and a bit of hyperbole—our verdict was that the speech could be a turning point in the fortunes of the Congress party. This, after all, was a party which was umbilically tied to one
family. Finally, their yuvraj was showing some signs of stirring and taking charge.

It didn’t take long for the bubble to burst. That very morning at the party session, Mani Shankar Aiyar had given a sound bite to the news agency ANI, lashing out at Narendra Modi. Aiyar had a visceral hatred for Modi. In our studio discussions, almost foaming at the mouth, he would liken the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate to Hitler, and the RSS to the Nazis. Now, asked for his views on Modi, Aiyar shot back, ‘He can never be the prime minister of India, never. However, if he wants, we could arrange a tea stall for him here.’

When I interviewed Mani that night, he refused to accept the charge that he had called Modi a ‘chaiwallah’. ‘You have a bad habit of distorting everything I say, Rajdeep. You and your channel are past masters at this,’ and then almost ripped off his mike.

Mani’s political journey had been full of ups and downs. A former IFS officer and a senior of Rajiv Gandhi at Doon and Cambridge, he had joined politics in the 1980s, enamoured by Rajiv’s fresh-faced zest to build a new kind of politics. The dream had died a long time ago, but Mani remained a family loyalist, a self-described Nehruvian ‘secular fundamentalist’. Labelled a sycophant by his critics, he had seen his own political career drift into near oblivion. He had made panchayati raj his calling card, but this was never going to be enough to sustain his politics, especially as he was from Tamil Nadu, a state where the Congress was a marginal player. He had been removed as petroleum minister, allegedly because he wouldn’t bend before the Ambanis; as sports minister, because he detested the Commonwealth Games chief Suresh Kalmadi. He was now a Rajya Sabha backbencher, a nominated MP, courtesy Sonia Gandhi.

His pungent humour made him an entertainer on television; his acerbic tongue meant he had few friends left in politics. At times, it seemed he had never grown out of a debating fraternity in Doon School and St Stephens College, a still too-clever-by-half septuagenarian brat. But this was not a school or college debate where you could throw punches and then share a few laughs. This was a real-life political
akhara
, the jousting being played out on live
television. You can be critical of an opponent in politics, but being disrespectful and socially contemptuous is fraught with danger.

I had seen both sides of Mani. He could be a wonderfully convivial host, generous with his food, drink and intellect. But he could also get vicious and personal in debates on TV. ‘I don’t ever want to come on your channel again—you have no clue what you are saying,’ he spat at me once during a nightly slugfest. Next morning, in Parliament, he was happily inviting me for a Track 2 dialogue with Pakistan, another pet subject of his.

Now, he was accusing me and other channels of falsifying his remarks on Modi. The fact is, we hadn’t distorted Mani’s derisive comment. The reference to the ‘tea stall’ was as direct as it could get. During his election campaign, Modi had often spoken of how he had started life as a young boy selling tea at the railway station in Vadnagar. It was his way of distinguishing himself from the privileged upbringing of the Gandhi family, and in his speeches he projected himself very much as a pulled-up-by-my-own-bootstraps achiever compared with silver spoon-sucking bungalow babies. Now, an elite Congressman, who identified himself completely with the Gandhis, was mocking his tea boy origins. This was too good a chance to miss.

Prime time on the night of Rahul’s best public speech should have been dominated by the Congress leader’s ‘coming of age’ moment. Instead, the BJP got an opportunity to hijack the debate by targeting Aiyar’s insulting remark about their leader. A new narrative snaked out to cut the ground from under Rahul’s feet—Rahul, the
shehzada
(prince) versus Modi, the
chaiwallah
(tea boy). In an aspirational, highly socially competitive India where there is growing rage against elite and entitled privilege and where sensitivities on ‘westernized’ condescension towards desi mores run high, Mani had just scored another self-goal for his beleaguered party.

‘Where did the idea of “
Chai pe Charcha
” come from?’ I asked several BJP strategists. No one gave me a clear answer. ‘Good
ideas always come from the leader,’ a Team Modi member put it diplomatically.

There was a distinct Modi touch to the concept. Right from the time I had first met him during the Ayodhya rath yatra, I could see he was a shrewd event manager. I would often joke in the office, ‘If Modi loses the election, we should hire him as our chief marketing officer!’ He fancied the idea of branding any occasion that he felt would resonate with the voter. ‘Chai pe Charcha’ was one such occasion.

‘The idea was to create a
nukkad
[street corner] Parliament,’ is how Prashant Kishore of Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) which executed the Chai pe Charcha concept describes it. A chai stall is, after all, omnipresent across the country. From a small village to a sprawling metropolis, having a cup of tea was a universal Indian experience. Now, Modi would be identified with it.

There was also another, less obvious, reason behind the idea. In early February, the Aam Aadmi Party’s popularity had peaked. The AAP was making the headlines across the country by taking its politics to the street and directly communicating with the voter. The AAP had also launched a sustained attack on Modi’s proximity to corporate India, suggesting that he was a ‘
khaas
aadmi’ who was disconnected with the ‘real India’, an attack potentially far more damaging to Modi than the Congress trotting out shopworn secularism shibboleths. ‘We were acutely aware of what the AAP was doing and needed our own bit of street theatre to combat the AAP’s communication strategy,’ says a BJP leader.

Chai pe Charcha was the perfect answer to correct any impression that Modi was not an ‘aam aadmi’. A tea stall where a potential prime minister sits with his fellow citizens drinking chai—what could be a greater equalizer? There was always, of course, the subtext of Modi having grown up in poverty that would also play out. Team Modi, it appeared, had hit upon another winning formula. Mani Shankar Aiyar’s unwise snobbery had been superbly marketed to win public sympathy for the so-called social pariah.

Ironically, on the many occasions I had chatted with Modi, I
had never heard him speak about selling tea at a railway station. In fact, in all his political campaigns as Gujarat chief minister, Modi had never referred to his early years in Vadnagar. His politics had always been fashioned around the present and the future, not about his past. A senior Gujarat journalist told me the tea story was, in fact, bogus. ‘
Sab jhoot hai, unhone koi chai nahi bechi’
(It’s all a lie, he never sold any tea), he told me confidently.

But Modi’s younger brother Prahlad insists that the brothers did help their father who ran a tea stall near the Vadnagar railway station. ‘Our school was next to the railway station, so whenever we got a break, we would go and help my father,’ Prahlad told me. Later, as a teenager, Modi worked with his uncle Babubhai who had a canteen-cum-tea shop near Ahmedabad’s bus station. ‘Narendrabhai would get up at 4.30 a.m., make hot pakoras and chai and sell them at the bus stand,’ claims Prahlad. Congress leader Ahmed Patel says Modi would only sit at the billing counter of his uncle’s canteen. ‘From what I have found out, he never actually sold tea,’ Patel claims. It seemed to me a case of nitpicking. Modi had, all said and done, endured a tough childhood.

Maybe some of the hardships had been dramatized over the years. Ambedkar decried India’s hero-worshipping culture and indeed we Indians quickly make legends of our leaders. Many apocryphal stories are spun and admiringly retold about a larger-than-life figure. In Vadnagar, I was told that Modi as a child had swum across the lake braving crocodiles!