2014: The Election That Changed India (6 page)

Even Togadia, who had played a crucial role as a
rabble-rouser during the 2002 elections, was completely marginalized. Modi even went to the extent
of razing roadside temples in Gandhinagar built by local VHP karyakartas, if only to send out the
message that he wasn’t going to do any special favours to the VHP for supporting him. Senior
VHP leader Ashok Singhal likened Modi to Mahmud Ghazni for the demolition—ironical, since the
rise of Modi had begun in 1990 during the rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya. Years later, an
incensed Togadia told me in an interview, ‘We have nothing to do with Modi. He may be
Gujarat’s chief minister, we stand for all Hindus!’

Perhaps the most controversial challenge to
Modi’s leadership came from Haren Pandya, the BJP strongman from Ahmedabad.

Pandya, like Modi, was strong-willed and
charismatic. He was a two-time MLA and had been home minister in the Keshubhai Patel government when
Modi became chief minister. Modi wanted Pandya to vacate his safe Ellisbridge seat in Ahmedabad for
him. Pandya refused and a rather ugly battle ensued.

Pandya’s own role during the riots was
questionable—more than one account claims that he was among the mob leaders in the city. And
yet, a few days after the riots, he dropped into our office in Ahmedabad with what sounded like a
potential bombshell of a story. ‘I have evidence that Modi allowed the riots to fester,’
he claimed. On the night of 27 February, he said, Modi had called senior officials and told them to
allow ‘the public anger’ to express itself. I asked him to come on record. He refused
but gave me a document which showed that the Gujarat government was carrying out a survey to find
out how the riots would politically influence the electorate.

What Pandya did not tell me on record, he told a
Citizens’ Tribunal headed by a retired judge in May that year. In August 2002, Pandya was
removed from the government for breaching party discipline. In December, Modi ensured that Pandya
was denied a ticket to contest the elections, even going to the extent of admitting himself to
hospital to force the party leadership to agree to his demand. On 26 March 2003, while he was on his
morning walk, Pandya was gunned down. The killers have not been caught till date, even as
Pandya’s family pointed a finger at Modi. A senior police officer told me, ‘It was a
contract killing, but who gave the contract we will never know.’

Remarkably, through all the chaos and controversy,
Modi remained focused on his own political goals. He had won the battle within the BJP; he wanted to
make an impact beyond. In this period between 2003 and 2007, Modi spent a considerable time
understanding governance systems. Working a punishing eighteen-hour schedule at times, he was
determined to chart a new path. He did not trust his fellow ministers, but he developed an implicit
faith in the bureaucracy. Maybe he felt bureaucrats were less likely to challenge his authority. He
collected around himself a core team of
bureaucrats who were fiercely loyal.
‘Modi gives clear orders, and then allows us the freedom to implement them. What more can a
bureaucrat ask for?’ one of the IAS officers told me. No file would remain on his table for
long. Fastidious about order and cleanliness, he liked a spotless, paper-free table.

Three IAS officers, K. Kailashnathan, A.K. Sharma
and G.C. Murmu, formed a well-knit troika—‘Modi’s men’ is how they were
perceived. Another bureaucrat, P.K. Mishra, guided him through the early period. All low-profile,
loyal and diligent, they were just the kind of people Modi liked around him. ‘They are more
powerful than any minister in Modi’s cabinet,’ was the constant refrain in Gandhinagar.
It was true—Modi’s cabinet meetings lasted less than half an hour; he would spend a
considerably longer time getting presentations from bureaucrats. For an outwardly self-assured
individual, Modi seemed strangely paranoid about his political peers. At one stage, he kept fourteen
portfolios with him—his ministerial colleagues, naturally, were unhappy.

One of the disgruntled ministers came to see me once
in Delhi. ‘Rajdeepji, I am planning to leave the government. Modiji doesn’t trust me, he
still thinks I am a Keshubhai man,’ the senior minister said. A few months later, when I met
the minister, I asked him why he hadn’t resigned yet. ‘Well, I have realized that in
Gujarat, if you want to remain politically relevant, you have no choice but to be with Modi,’
he said.

The minister was right. The ever-pragmatic
Gujarati’s business, they say, is business. The brightest minds find their way into
dhanda
(entrepreneurship)—politics hardly attracts any talent. The Congress, in
particular, was a party in sharp decline, haunted by the familiar malaise of not empowering its
local leadership. Their main leader, Shankersinh Vaghela, had spent most of his career in the BJP.
‘How can we take on the RSS when we have made an RSS man our face in Gujarat?’
Congressmen would often tell me.

Compared to his political competition, Modi was not
only razor-sharp but always quick to seize on new ways to motivate his administration and push them
towards goals. Whatever the political
benefits he gained from the riots, it
seemed as if he was always anxious to rewrite his record, reinvent his personality, his tasks made
even more urgent by the desire to forget and even obliterate events which paradoxically and
fundamentally shaped his political persona.

His bureaucrats were given twin
tasks—implement schemes that would deliver tangible benefits to the people in the shortest
possible time, and ensure the chief minister’s persona as a development-oriented leader gets
totally identified with the successful projects. In this period, the Gujarat government launched
multiple projects, from those aimed at girl child education to tribal area development to irrigation
and drinking water schemes. The aim was clear—show Gujarat as a state committed to governance
and its leader as a
vikas purush
(man of development).

A good example of the extent to which Modi was
willing to go to push the ‘
bijli, sadak, shiksha aur pani
’ (electricity, roads,
education and water) agenda was his Jyotigram Yojana, designed to ensure twenty-four-hour power
supply, especially to rural Gujarat. A flat rate, approximating to market costs, was to be charged.
Farmers who refused to pay would be penalized while power theft would lead to jail. RSS-backed
farmer unions protested; the Opposition stalled the assembly. Unmindful of the protests, Modi went
ahead with the scheme, convinced of its long-term benefits. ‘Only someone with Modi’s
vision could have pulled off Jyotigram,’ says one of his bureaucrat admirers. The Gujarat
Model was born and would pay rich dividends to its leader in the years ahead. Today, Gujarat’s
power supply compares favourably with other states as does a double-digit agricultural growth rate.
And even if there are dark zones as reflected in troubling child malnutrition figures, the
overarching impression is of a state on the fast track to prosperity.

But the Gujarat Model was not just about growth
rates and rapid development. It was also about recasting the image of the man who was leading
Gujarat. It was almost as though development was Modi’s shield against his critics who still
saw him through the prism of the riots. For example, Modi took great pride in his Kanya Kelavani
(girl child education) project. Every year from 2003, in
the torrid heat of a
Gujarat summer, IAS officers would fan out to convince parents to send their children, especially
girls, to school. Modi himself had laid out the blueprint. In his book
Centrestage
,
Ahmedabad-based journalist Uday Mahurkar says that Modi told his officers, ‘Why should a child
cry when she goes to school for the first time? We need to bring a smile on their face.’
Cultural programmes were started to make the toddlers feel at home in school. Dropout rates fell and
the enrolment percentage rose from 74 to 99.25 per cent in a decade. ‘Why don’t you show
positive stories about Gujarat?
Kab tak negative
dikhate rahoge
?’ (How long will you keep showing only negatives?), Modi asked me on
more than one occasion.

It seemed as though Modi wanted to constantly prove
a point. The riots had left a big question mark on his administrative capability, and he now wanted
to undo the damage. This wasn’t just about his national ambitions—it was also about
conquering the demons that nestled within, a yearning to prove his critics wrong.

An interesting aspect of this was Modi’s
relationship with industry, well documented in a
Caravan
magazine profile in 2012. In March
2002, barely a few weeks after the riots, at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) meet in
Ahmedabad, Cyrus Guzder, a much-respected industrialist, had raised a pointed
question—‘Is secularism good for business?’—and likened the attacks on
Muslim homes to a ‘genocide’. It didn’t stop there. I was speaking at a panel
discussion at the CII annual summit in Delhi in April 2002 on ‘Gujarat at the
Crossroads’ when Anu Aga of the Thermax group, who later became a member of Sonia
Gandhi’s National Advisory Council, lashed out, ‘The Gujarat riots have shamed all of
us.’ She got a standing ovation from an audience that is normally very careful in displaying
its political preferences openly.

In February 2003, the confrontation between Modi and
industry appeared to worsen. Rahul Bajaj and Jamshed Godrej, two of the country’s seniormost
corporate leaders, spoke out on the 2002 riots in the presence of the Gujarat chief minister.
Describing 2002 as a ‘lost year’ for Gujarat, Bajaj asked, ‘We would like to know
what you believe in, what you stand for, because leadership is important.’

Modi listened to the rush of criticism and then hit
back. ‘You and your pseudo-secular friends can come to Gujarat if you want an answer. Talk to
my people. Gujarat is the most peaceful state in the country.’

Modi was now seething. He carried this sense of hurt
and anger back with him to Gujarat; this rage would become a driving force channelized towards
greater self-reinvention, towards revenge on those who questioned him critically.
‘Een
Dilliwalon ko Gujarat kya hai yeh dikhana padega’
(We have to show these Dilliwallas what
Gujarat is), he told one of his trusted aides. Within days, a group of Gujarati businessmen led by
Gautam Adani established a rival business organization—the Resurgent Group of
Gujarat—and called on the CII’s Gujarat chapter to resign for ‘failing to protect
the interests of the state’. The CII was on the verge of a split, forcing its director general
Tarun Das to broker peace through senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley. Das was forced to personally
deliver a letter of apology to Modi. ‘We, in the CII, are very sorry for the hurt and pain you
have felt, and I regret very much the misunderstanding that has developed.’ Modi had shown
corporate India who was the boss.

That year, the Gujarat government launched its
Vibrant Gujarat summit, designed to showcase the state as an investment destination and re-emphasize
the traditional Gujarati credo—‘Gujarat’s business is business’. I attended
the summit in 2005 and was struck by the precision with which the event was organized. This was not
just another government initiative—it was a glitzy event where one individual towered over all
else. Every speaker would begin their speech by praising the chief minister, some a shade more
effusively than others—Anil Ambani of Reliance Communications even going to the extent of
likening Modi to Mahatma Gandhi and describing him as a ‘king of kings’.

While corporate India fell in line, the media was
proving more recalcitrant. On 12 October 2007, a few weeks before the Gujarat assembly elections, I
had the occasion to moderate a session with Modi at the
Hindustan Times
Leadership Summit.
Dressed, appropriately perhaps, in a saffron kurta, I was looking forward
to
the dialogue. The topic was ‘Regional Identity and National Pride’. While Modi spoke
eloquently on Mahatma Gandhi and development, I could not resist asking whether he had transformed
from the politician of 2002 when he had been described by his opponents as a ‘hero of
hatred’ and even a ‘mass murderer’. The question touched a raw nerve—a
combative Modi questioned my credentials as an anchor and wondered whether I would ever change and
be able to look beyond the post-Godhra riots even while my kurta colour had changed!

At least, Modi did not walk out of the gathering.
Less than ten days later that’s precisely what happened when senior journalist Karan Thapar
was interviewing him for CNN-IBN’s
Devil’s Advocate
. I had warned Karan before
the interview that Modi was still very sensitive about Godhra and the riots and maybe he should
broach the subject a little later in the interview. But Karan has a deserved reputation as a bit of
a bulldog interviewer—relentless, unsparing and direct. Less than a minute or two into the
interview, he raised the question of Modi’s critics viewing him as a mass murderer despite his
reputation as an efficient administrator, and whether he would express any regret over the handling
of the riots. There was only one way the interview was going from that point on. Asking for a glass
of water, Modi removed his microphone, thanked Karan and ended the interview. ‘The friendship
should continue. You came here. I am happy and thankful to you. These are your ideas, you go on
expressing these. I can’t do this interview. Three–four questions I have already
enjoyed. No more, please,’ was the final word.

The walkout might have embarrassed any other
politician. Not Modi. When I rang him up a short while later, his response was typically sharp.
‘You people continue with your business, I will continue to do mine.’ The Gujarat
assembly election campaign was about to begin and Modi wasn’t going to be seen to be taking a
step backwards.

A few days later, Sonia Gandhi on the campaign trail
said those ‘ruling Gujarat are liars, dishonest and
maut ka saudagar
’ (merchant
of death). Modi was enraged. It was one thing for a
journalist to refer to
him as a mass murderer in an interview, quite another for the Congress president to call him a
‘killer’. The positive agenda of development was forsaken—in every speech Modi now
claimed that the Congress had insulted the people of Gujarat. ‘How can a party which
can’t act against terrorists talk about us?’ thundered Modi. ‘They call us maut ka
saudagar. Tell me, is it a crime to kill a terrorist like Sohrabuddin?’ The reference was to a
killing by the Gujarat police that had been labelled a fake encounter. Muslim terrorism, Gujarati
pride, Modi as a ‘victim’ of a pseudo-secular elite and the ‘saviour’ of
Gujarat—it was almost 2002 all over again.