2014: The Election That Changed India (51 page)

Much like Indira, Modi in power is in no mood to
reach out to the Opposition. The Congress has been determinedly pushing for the Leader of the
Opposition post; the government has steadfastly refused. The BJP claims it’s going strictly by
rules framed by the Speaker’s office and parliamentary convention which say a party
must have at least 10 per cent of the total strength of the Lok Sabha to qualify
for the status of Leader of Opposition. The Congress needs fifty-five MPs, it has just forty-four.
‘When we had very few numbers in Parliament, did the Congress ever give us the Leader of the
Opposition post?’ a BJP minister asked me.

But this battle goes well beyond just the numbers.
Right through his election campaign, Modi had spoken of a ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’. It
wasn’t just about defeating the Congress but decimating them to the point where the party
would cease to exist. By denying them the primary Opposition space, Modi has sent out a firm message
that the Congress’s claims to be a truly ‘national’ party are now under serious
scrutiny.

Indeed, while a triumphant Modi seeks to stamp his
authority on government with a streak of ruthlessness, the Congress leadership needs to lift the
morale of a party that is in deep depression. A question that was first posed after its 1977 debacle
is being heard with even greater frequency now—is the Congress finished?

Within a few weeks of leading his party to defeat,
Rahul Gandhi was flying off abroad. June can be awfully hot in Delhi, and Rahul clearly wanted to
beat the heat. But it wasn’t just the rising temperatures he wanted to avoid—it appeared
that he didn’t want to confront the growing disquiet being felt within the Congress.

When the sixteenth Lok Sabha was convened, the
expectation was that Rahul would be the Congress’s leader in Parliament. Instead, he shied
away from taking up responsibility once again—the seventy-two-year-old veteran Congress leader
from Karnataka, Mallikarjun Kharge, was chosen instead. Kharge, a Gandhi family loyalist, has won a
record ten consecutive elections, but the truth is, he isn’t going to set the Yamuna on fire.
By choosing to opt out, Rahul had once again demonstrated an inability to lead from the front. Even
his self-styled political guru Digvijaya Singh was disheartened. ‘When the going gets tough,
the tough must get going. Rahul is making
a mistake by not taking up the
challenge,’ he told me. Privately, Congress leaders whispered that maybe Rahul didn’t
want to sit in the front row of the Lok Sabha where he would be caught out if he dozed off!

A contrast could be drawn with Indira Gandhi who had
found herself in a similar difficult position after the 1977 election disaster. She was jailed, her
party split, she was written off, and yet, quite remarkably, she made a comeback in three years, her
fighting spirit best exemplified by the enduring image of her on an elephant striding across the
floodwaters of Belchi in Bihar to meet marooned Dalit villagers who had been brutally attacked. Even
Sonia had shown some of that political courage when she refused to buckle under the foreign origin
propaganda against her. It is the kind of resolve which Rahul, it seems, is incapable of
demonstrating. The
Economist
, in a scathing piece, wrote: ‘Rahul, who had been long
groomed for leadership, is a dud: earnest, but lacking in energy, ideas, strategy, and, crucially,
the ability to connect with party workers and voters.’

Is Rahul really a ‘dud’? I hardly know
him at all to answer that with any certitude, but what I will say is that he has singularly failed
to show any quality that marks him out as a leader who can lift a struggling party. He is probably
the first member of the Nehru–Gandhi family who doesn’t even command the respect of his
own party men. At a lunch, an agitated senior Congress leader told me, ‘We need a change in
leadership, Rahul must go!’ I asked him if he had any replacement in mind. He admitted there
was no one he could single out right away. The only option being occasionally mentioned is Priyanka,
who remains insistent that she is not entering formal politics.

To that extent, the Gandhi family remains both an
asset and a liability—it holds the party together in the absence of any alternative
leadership, but it also terribly retards the party’s growth by creating a political culture
that thrives on a nauseating sycophancy and an unwillingness to empower its regional leaders.
Dynasty alone will not sustain the Congress—it needs to throw up a merit-driven, mass-based
leadership that can usher in new ideas and energies.

Over the years, the
‘umbrella’ party that could co-opt and accommodate conflicting interest groups has badly
atrophied, to the point where decay has now set in. UP and Bihar are a good example—in the two
big states of the Hindi heartland, the Congress has fossilized. ‘You can identify a
Congressman by his age. The older they are, the more likely they are to have been Congress
supporters at some stage,’ is how a UP leader explained the predicament.

So, how will this ageing party, devoid of a robust
organization, really combat a cadre-based party like the BJP? ‘Nothing is permanent in
politics, things will change in five years. Who would have thought in 2009 that we would lose the
2014 elections so badly?’ is what one Congress MP told me. If this attitude lulls the Congress
into complacency, then Modi could provide them with another wakeup call. Modi is not Morarji Desai,
the Janata Party prime minister who was unable to hold a disparate flock together. This time the
Congress is having to deal with a tough, dynamic politician who has understood what it takes not
just to win power but to retain it, as he has shown in Gujarat. Challenging him will require the
Congress to move beyond its time-worn slogans and identify more directly with the aspirations of a
younger, more impatient India.

For example, the Congress’s vision of a
secular republic now faces a mounting challenge even from its traditional supporters. At a seminar
in Patna, a young Muslim student leader told senior academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta that he had three
questions he wished to pose to Rahul. ‘I want to know, are Muslim youth less likely to suffer
ordinary discrimination in Congress-ruled states? Does a Congress-ruled state like Assam or Delhi
have a better record of bringing perpetrators of riots to justice? Why, after sixty years of
Congress rule, do Muslims feel they have to vote on their “security”?’

The three sharply worded questions reflect the
dilemma of the Indian Muslim—is ‘secular blackmail’ stemming from the fear of a
Modi-led government enough reason to vote for a party which itself has failed to offer protection or
development to minorities? The Congress cannot rely on handouts and platitudes any longer; it needs
to be ready to start a mass mobilization programme by
taking up issues of
urgent public concern. The era of drawing-room political machinations is coming to an end. It would
be premature to write the obituary of any party, but the Congress does have a long, arduous road
ahead.

Other parties, too, are having to slowly pick up the
pieces after the stunning 2014 results. In Bihar, we have seen the emergence of a potential grand
‘secular alliance’—Nitish, Lalu and the Congress may actually come together in the
2015 assembly elections. It’s an alliance which smacks of political opportunism—once
sworn enemies are coming together in a desperate bid to keep the BJP out. As Lalu told me,
‘Our biggest enemy is Narendra Modi.
Bade dushman ko harane ke liye kabhi kabhi samjhauta
karna padta hai
’ (To defeat a bigger enemy, you sometimes have to compromise). If the
Bihar by-election results are any evidence, then Lalu’s instinctive street-smart politics is a
potential survival ticket.

Other regional forces, too, have to worry about what
the rise of Modi means for their future. Mamata Banerjee in Bengal, for example, has now realized
that the BJP is an emerging force in the state’s politics and has even hinted, quite
tellingly, at a reach-out to the left. Mulayam Singh may have to shift gears as well—the 2014
elections have shown that his brazen attempts at minority appeasement are bound to invite a
political backlash. Mayawati may never ally with Mulayam, but she, too, has to move beyond the
politics of fake empowerment—statues are not a substitute for development. In Maharashtra,
Sharad Pawar is making a big mistake if he thinks reservations for the politically influential
Marathas will be a game changer—every time you give reservations to one group, you end up
alienating many others. Perhaps the only regional leaders who will feel secure are Naveen Patnaik
and Jayalalithaa. The Modi tsunami has stayed away from the Odisha and Tamil Nadu coastline.

Arvind Kejriwal, too, has been humbled by the 2014
election verdict. The politician who insisted that the AAP would fight in more than 400 seats across
the country is now terrified of even contesting the Haryana elections. His sole aim, he says, is
rebuilding his base in Delhi. It seems a rather strange U-turn for a politician who at the
start of 2014 thought he could walk on water. At least Kejriwal has shown some
spunk, though—when the Modi government completed forty-nine days, he put up posters across
Delhi comparing his achievements with that of the prime minister. If only the Congress and Rahul
could show similar fight, politics in the country may become a little less one-sided.

That nothing is permanent in politics is best
exemplified by the left’s pitiable condition. In the 2004 elections, they held the balance of
power at the Centre and helped shape the first UPA government. Ten years later, they have been
reduced to marginal players—intellectual hubris and an unwillingness to adapt to a changing
India have made the left parties almost irrelevant to the national discourse.

Every prime minister is entitled to an extended
honeymoon period, especially one who has scored such an emphatic victory. ‘Achhe Din Aane Wale
Hain’ was Modi’s caller tune in the 2014 general elections. The Modi juggernaut was
driven by an overarching sentiment of ‘hope’, the belief that the moment he was elected
happy days of high growth, low inflation and strong, corruption-free governance would return. Hope
brings with it a rising tide of expectations. When price rise remained stubborn in the first few
weeks of the new government and tomato prices shot up, my driver asked me,
‘Sir, woh achhe
din ka kya hua?’
(What happened to the promise of good days?) When there was no
‘big bang’ announcement in the Modi government’s first budget, his critics were
quick to question his intent to reform. ‘Chidambaram’s budget with saffron
lipstick,’’ was noted columnist Swaminathan Aiyar’s rather caustic verdict. When
the Indian government blocked a WTO agreement by sticking to its stand on food subsidies, Modi
admirer and right-wing economist Surjit Bhalla remarked angrily, ‘A leader, operating from a
position of one of the most voted governments in Indian history, should be making policy with
conviction, not emulating tactics of a defunct government.’

Truth is, Modi as prime
minister has so far been more cautious than he was as a campaigner, the courage to usher in drastic
reform less in evidence. Perhaps he doesn’t see himself as a Margaret Thatcher-like figure, as
some of his supporters would like him to be—someone who will dismantle the Indian state in a
manic urge for privatization. Perhaps he is more of an efficient, project-driven CEO—bullet
trains and smart cities are his ideas for a new India, not labour reform or disinvesting PSUs.

As a resilient politician who has built a career
with single-minded determination over several years of highs and lows, Modi likes to see himself, as
they say in cricket, as a ‘
lamba race ka ghoda
’ (ready for the long haul).
‘My government is here for five, if not ten years—why are you judging me on the first
100 days?’ he asked an industrialist who met him. A close aide told me that it was no
different when he first took over as chief minister in Gujarat. ‘He would like to fully
familiarize himself with the Central government in Delhi before he starts taking big
decisions,’ was the explanation I was given.