2014: The Election That Changed India (48 page)

Now, in the general elections, the Gujarat experiment was taken nationwide. While in April, Modi would do a 3D rally once every three to four days, in the last stretch, he was doing nearly one a day. As a result, he was able to touch over 1300 locations, 325 of which were in UP alone. 3D was also used to reach out to remote places. ‘We even managed to get to the upper reaches of Uttarakhand. It was a logistical challenge, but we did it,’ says a Team Modi member.

This was quintessential ‘shock and awe’ campaigning, Modi-style. Two studios were set up in Delhi and Gandhinagar for Modi’s ‘outreach’. A crew of 2500 members handling 125 3D projector units were involved and more than 7 million people reportedly witnessed the 3D shows over twelve days. In the 2012 assembly elections, Modi would appear in 3D in an almost static position on a flat screen; this time, the technology team innovated and attempted to capture every movement, including someone serving him a cup of tea, or a towel being asked for to wipe the sweat. ‘We wanted Modi to appear as lifelike as possible to heighten audience excitement,’ is how the 3D adventure was described to me. I later asked Kishore how much they spent on each 3D show. He wouldn’t tell me but BJP sources said it was amongst the most expensive elements of the campaign. ‘Upwards of Rs 200 crore’ is one figure I was given. Whatever the final amount, the purpose had been served. Modi was, literally, everywhere.

On 8 May, Modi was to conclude his Varanasi campaign with two rallies and then participate in an aarti by the banks of the Ganga. But twenty-four hours before his arrival, the local administration denied him permission—citing security concerns—for a rally in Beniabagh in the heart of the city and for the aarti.

Free from his campaign in Amritsar, senior leader Arun Jaitley was now supervising the final push in Varanasi. Incensed by the administration’s decision, he decided to go on the offensive. A legal defence was prepared, and a letter sent to the Election Commission and the district magistrate’s office. The local BJP was told to stage a dharna in protest. ‘We genuinely felt that the administration was under pressure from the SP government not to allow Modi into the city,’ Jaitley told me later. The fact that the DM, Pranjal Yadav, was a Yadav only gave added ammunition to the BJP propaganda machine, with a rumour being quietly spread that he was related to UP’s ruling family.

By the time the DM relented, it was too late. The BJP was keen to turn adversity into advantage. Playing victim, Modi accused the Election Commission of bias and acting under political pressure. The Chief Election Commissioner V.S. Sampath is a quiet, lowprofile man with a non-confrontational persona, very unlike some of his predecessors, such as T.N. Seshan. The charge of bias left Sampath nonplussed. ‘We have tried our best to ensure a free and fair elections—why is Modi talking like this?’ he asked me when I called him up for a reaction. Sampath, too, was slowly learning that Modi was not your average politician. His instinctively combative nature meant that even the Election Commission would not be spared his ire (as another CEC, J.M. Lyngdoh, had discovered in 2002).

Modi was determined to have the last word. Landing in Varanasi, he chose to go on an impromptu roadshow through the city right up to the party headquarters. If the nomination journey had been a march of triumph, this was a final act of defiance. On 24 April, the masses had come out in large numbers. This time, the streets were dominated by BJP supporters in saffron caps. I asked Jaitley if the roadshow was also another ‘well-planned’ event. ‘Well, you can’t
expect a political party to stay silent if we are denied our right to hold a rally,’ was his prompt answer.

From day one of this election campaign, the BJP, unlike the Congress, had never missed an opportunity to seize an opportunity. Varanasi’s DM, intentionally or otherwise, had provided them with one last moment to exploit. On the final day of the campaign, Rahul Gandhi went on a similar roadshow through the city’s streets. It looked imitative and, frankly, a little late as always. Rahul once again lived up to the rather harsh description of him as a ‘tubelight’.

Modi concluded his 2014 campaign by addressing his last rally in Ballia in eastern UP. His publicists were quick to provide the details. Their leader had done 437 rallies and covered more than 3 lakh kilometres since being anointed the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in mid-September. But if he was tired, he wasn’t showing any signs of it.

On the way back from Ballia, he stopped at Varanasi airport where his trusted aides, Jaitley and Shah, were waiting for him. The troika who had shaped the BJP’s 2014 campaign then flew back together to Delhi. ‘There was a feeling of deep satisfaction amongst all of us. Narendra was convinced that victory was ours and Mission 272-plus would be reality—there was no self-doubt at all,’ Jaitley told me later.

On arrival in Delhi, Modi made a quick stopover at the RSS headquarters at Jhandewalan where he met the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. It was a reminder that even as a prime ministerial nominee, he was first and always a swayamsevak. It was also perhaps a thanksgiving to Bhagwat. After all, the Sangh with its well-drilled cadres had come out in almost full strength to provide the organizational support and feet on the ground for Modi and the BJP in this election. Indeed, the RSS had pulled out all the stops—grass-roots organizers, campaigners and mobilizers—perhaps as enthusiastically as it had done in the JP movement against Indira’s
Emergency. With a targeted door-to-door campaign, they had been Modi’s last-mile warriors.

The same night Modi flew back to Gandhinagar. The most gruelling campaign in the history of Indian elections was over. Modi had run a marathon with unbelievable stamina. 7, Race Course Road, the most cherished address in Indian politics, was now well within his grasp.

Narendra Modi was due a late lie-in on 11 May. It was possibly the first Sunday in eight months when he didn’t have to hit the road and deliver another
bhashan
(speech). But for a swayamsevak, old habits die hard. Even though his first appointment was only after 8 a.m., Modi was up by 6, leafing through the morning newspapers and government files. I had been trying to speak to Modi for a fortnight now but to no avail. Normally, Modi would reply to a missed phone call. But in the rush of the last phase of campaigning, it seemed he had no time for even a short conversation. Vijay Nehra, additional secretary in the chief minister’s office, had promised that he would try and connect him on Sunday.

Finally, at around 10.30 a.m., the chief minister called back. ‘Should I be congratulating India’s next prime minister in advance!’ was my first response. I could hear a slight laugh on the other end. Our big post-poll survey results were to be out the next evening and Modi was anxious to know the findings.
‘Kya number
de rahe ho, Rajdeep?’
(What number are you giving?), he asked. ‘My sense is our final number will be anything between 270 and 280, sir,’ I told him reassuringly.

Modi didn’t seem too pleased. ‘We will reach 300 seats—wave
hai
, wave,’ he said. I agreed with him. ‘Yes, I also feel 300 is the likely figure, you are sweeping north and west India, sir.’
‘Yeh jo Dilli main baithe political pundit hain, inko kaho studio ke bahar jaaye!’
(Ask your Delhi-based experts to move out of the studio), he suggested. And then he suddenly broke into English. ‘First time since 1984, you will have a majority government in Delhi.’

There was an authoritative tone to his voice, almost as though he was already the prime minister. I tried to needle him a bit. ‘What about Jayalalithaa, Mayawati or Mamata, will you take anyone’s support?’ I asked. ‘
Kissi ki zaroorat nahi padegi
[We won’t need anyone], it will be a clear verdict!’ Before I hung up, I had one final journalistic shot. ‘Narendrabhai, you did not give your old friend an interview during the campaign. I hope you will at least give me one once you become prime minister!’ Modi parried the request with ‘
Ab Dilli mein milenge!
’ (We will now meet in Delhi.)

Delhi was already preparing for a change in guard. The only real question was whether Modi would cross 272 comfortably and have an absolute majority or need outside support. Airtel chief Sunil Mittal was hosting a dinner that evening for a few close friends at his Amrita Shergill Road bungalow. To make the evening a little exciting, he announced a competition, asking his guests to come up with the final BJP tally of seats. Whoever came closest to the actual number would get a Franck Muller watch as a reward, the one furthest away would have to host the next dinner.

At the dinner were politicians, media barons and corporate tycoons. Only one of the guests, Meenakshi Dass, from a prominent business family, gave the BJP by itself a figure close to the magical 272 number—her guess was 266. Even Arun Jaitley’s figure was a more modest 245 seats. The media leader at the dinner table gave the least—less than 200 seats. So much for us journalists having our ear to the ground!

Even the RSS was playing it safe. An internal poll done by a Sangh supporter had placed the BJP around the 230-seat mark. ‘We may need to do some post-poll alignment,’ an RSS leader told me. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, since not everyone in the saffron
brotherhood was joyous at the prospect of a colossal victory by a dominating personality. In Gujarat, pumped up by repeated electoral victories, Modi tended to ride roughshod over not only his own party but even the Sangh.

Yet there was also genuine concern in a section of the Modi camp over voter turnout numbers. Across India, the turnout had risen, in some states rather dramatically. ‘This was the one X factor that worried us. We were just not sure who had got this additional vote,’ a BJP strategist admitted to me later.

A senior journalist who met Sharad Pawar the day before the results said that the NCP leader was still hopeful of a hung Parliament. ‘I could sense he was still hoping that if the BJP ended up with around 200 to 220 seats, then smaller parties like his could play a major role in government formation,’ the journalist told me after his meeting with Pawar.

Some Congressmen were still living in denial. When I spoke to a Union minister and suggested that 300 seats for the NDA couldn’t be ruled out, he laughed: ‘You guys will never learn. You got it wrong in 2004 and 2009, you will be proven wrong yet again.’ A New York-based banker friend had a similar concern. ‘Waiting anxiously for your exit poll tomorrow night, Rajdeep. I just hope you guys won’t do a 2004 on us!’

Ah, 2004! The election that had virtually buried the science of psephology, or poll forecasting. No one had predicted that Vajpayee and Shining India would lose power and the Congress would form a coalition government. Frankly, by the last phase even then, there were signs that the NDA was on the decline, but no one wanted to stick their neck out and actually predict a Vajpayee defeat. Two states in particular—Andhra and Tamil Nadu—had swayed that verdict. This time, the locus of the conflict had shifted to the north. The final numbers in UP and Bihar would hold the key to whether India would really get its first single-party government since Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide in 1984.

Exit polls are now an integral part of the great Indian election carnival. Many viewers are sceptical about the findings, but there are very few who don’t track the numbers. From Dalal Street to North Block, TV sets get switched on when the numbers are being announced.

My former boss at NDTV, Dr Prannoy Roy, is the guru of poll forecasting in India, building his reputation by getting the 1980 elections spot on. Prannoy, an economist by training, had a childlike enthusiasm for numbers. I’d watch him and his ‘partner in crime’ Dorab Sopariwala, a delightful old-style Mumbai Parsi, scribble away on a sheet of paper, making all kinds of calculations.

Prannoy and Dorab took polling seriously and had developed the concept of Index of Opposition Unity (IOU) as a statistical measure. It had been evolved by looking at the Congress as the principal pole of Indian politics and then determining the potential of victory or defeat based on how united the anti-Congress Opposition was. The IOU method had worked in the 1980s. In the more competitive elections of 2014 where the Congress was no longer unassailable, new formulas were needed. Prannoy and Dorab, in fact, had almost lost faith in poll predictions after the 2004 miscalculation. Even on their programmes, they’d often issue a statutory warning—‘Look, you can always get this wrong, it isn’t as if any of us have a magic formula.’

It’s a warning that my other psephologist friend Yogendra Yadav would also often give. ‘This isn’t a maths sum, Rajdeep—can we please tell our viewers that.’ Yogendra was more academic in his approach—he liked to see himself as a political scientist first, a number cruncher only later. His team at Lokniti in CSDS had evolved a more refined system for a post-poll survey, one with a smaller sample size but which involved going to people’s homes with a questionnaire. ‘Whether out of fear or bravado, people sometimes can tell a lie outside a polling booth as to who they have voted for—they are less likely to do so in their homes,’ was Yogendra’s logic. The bigger challenge in any random sampling system remained—how do you convert vote percentages in any poll into seats? That was the statistical jugglery which could trip up a pollster.

Indeed, despite the attempts at a more rigorous exercise of measuring voter behaviour, exit polls faced a severe credibility crisis in the 2014 elections. For some self-styled pollsters, providing numbers to a television channel had become a business opportunity. A sting operation just ahead of the 2014 election campaign had revealed that some pollsters were ready to fudge the numbers if required. A senior politician once told me in all seriousness, ‘Rajdeep, television channels can fix ratings and I can fix a poll!’

Personally, I was troubled by the tamasha that exit polls had become. It felt as though the months of effort in reporting and analysing an election were being reduced to a single number. If you got your exit poll number right, then it was as if your entire election coverage was validated. If you got it wrong, then you were scoffed at, and all the good work done previously was consigned to oblivion. It was almost as if the soul of journalism was being mortgaged to the marketplace—every channel had to do a poll because that was what the viewer supposedly wanted.

I will never forget the trauma I went through during the 2012 UP elections. Our exit poll had predicted a comprehensive win for the SP and a rout for the Congress and the BJP. But in the first hour on results day, the BJP was actually leading, with most of the leads coming from postal ballots and early counting. That was enough for a senior BJP leader to come on air and demand an apology from Yogendra and me. ‘You should apologize to the people of India for having misled them. Your poll has been proven to be totally wrong,’ the BJP leader insisted. For the BJP, for whom a so-called ‘bias’ in the English-language media is a favourite theme, asking for an apology from the media comes very naturally. Yogendra looked shell-shocked, fearing his integrity was being questioned.

By afternoon, the final results were out—the Samajwadi Party had indeed swept the polls, the BJP had been routed, our numbers had been proven absolutely correct. I wish the same BJP leader had appeared on our prime-time evening bulletin that day. I might have been tempted to demand a similar apology from her for her all-too-ready suspicion of the media and its motives.

Traumatic or not, we were all rushing to kick off the exit poll race. Election Commission rules prohibited announcing any findings till the last vote had been cast. So at 5.30 p.m. on 12 May, once the final round of voting was done, every channel began blasting their poll results. Some screamed louder than others, but for once most of the polls were pointing in one direction—a victory for the Modi-led NDA. Only the scale of the win differed.

ABP News predicted 281 seats for the NDA, NDTV 280, TV Today 261 to 283, India TV 289, CNN-IBN 274 to 286. Times Now was the only channel to suggest a hung Parliament with a figure of 249 to the NDA, while News 24 was the outlier—their poll predicted a massive 340 seats to the NDA. All polls predicted the Congress-led UPA struggling to cross the 100-seat mark.

The News 24 poll (which would eventually come closest to reality) was done by someone called Today’s Chanakya. This esoteric sounding gent who had named himself after the canny ancient scholar was, a little more prosaically, a certain V.K. Bajaj. I had first him met more than a decade ago, during the 2003 Rajasthan elections. He was from Bikaner and had come to see me with a packet of the town’s famous
bhujia
.

‘Sir, Vasundhara is winning the elections. I have an interest in predicting elections, please give me one chance!’ he told me. I took the bhujia but was a little dismissive of his claims to be a pollster. He thrust a piece of paper in my hand with his findings. They turned out to be pretty accurate. Every time there was an election, he’d SMS or email me his numbers. More often than not, they were right (yes, he got some wrong too!). I asked him what his trade secret was, especially since he didn’t have a sample size for his poll. He’d just smile and say, ‘I have my nose to the ground, sir!’ VK, as I called him, was proof that no one had a monopoly on being a successful pollster. No wonder people in India take the
satta
market seriously too!

One of the other problems with exit polls is quite simply this—the winning politician comes on air and praises your poll, the loser calls you biased. The 12th of May was no different. The Congress, in fact, had gone so far as to say that the exit polls were rigged and
unscientific, and none of their leaders would participate in a TV debate on the findings.

The BJP leaders were predictably ecstatic, while the so-called third or fourth front leaders were a little nonplussed. ‘You may have no role now to play,’ I told Derek O’Brien of the Trinamool. ‘Let’s wait till the 16th, then Mamatadi will show her cards,’ was his measured response. The exit polls showed the Trinamool, AIADMK and Biju Janata Dal doing strongly, but not in a position to be kingmakers.

The real kingmaker, it seemed, was Amit Shah. Most polls were giving the BJP fifty or more seats from the decisive battleground state of Uttar Pradesh. Shah came on our programme that night once the findings were out. ‘Your poll has underestimated us slightly. My final number is 295 to 305 for the NDA,’ he claimed in his trademark no-nonsense style. I asked him if he was willing to put a wager on it. ‘
Rajdeepji, yeh sab chodiye, hum 16 May ko baarah baje baat karenge!’
(Forget about bet and all that, we will speak on 16 May at 12 noon).

Frankly, I agreed with Shah’s assessment. I had argued with our statistician, Dr Rajeeva Karandikar of the Chennai Mathematical Institute, that maybe we should be edging the NDA closer to the 300-seat mark. ‘Rajeeva, if the BJP is getting 40 per cent votes in UP, they will sweep the state,’ was my argument. Rajeeva, a brilliant statistical mind, wanted to be a little careful. ‘I agree, but maybe sometimes it is better to be cautious,’ was his advice. Perhaps we erred on the side of caution because the ghosts of 2004 were haunting all of us.