Democracy on the road, p.14
Democracy on the Road, page 14
We were staying 80 kilometres from Moradabad in the Claridges resort at Jim Corbett National Park, the same tourist destination where we had stayed in 2002. Eager to meet Mayawati and other key figures I tried to extend our stay by an extra day, but not surprisingly, Claridges did not have room for twenty. After a frantic hunt we wound up 50 kilometres away at The Manor in Kashipur—a grandly named but barebones hotel near the Uttarakhand border—and failed to reach Mayawati anyway. Her staff told us that since Mayawati was limiting her rally appearances to manage the campaign from Lucknow we would have to come to the capital to see her—but that was a twelve-hour drive.
From Kashipur we drove to the nearby town of Thakurdwara to meet a Rajput politician who had also turned on the Congress. He turned out to be a living embodiment of the warrior prince clichés that surround his caste. When we arrived around 11 a.m., a crowd of courtiers was waiting outside his home, which was perhaps ten times bigger than its neighbours, and had a phalanx of cars and SUVs parked outside. His attendants told us the master of the house was taking a bath, then ushered us into the living room. Stuffed toy tigers sat watching us from the centre table, and portraits of his male forebears brandishing broad swords and large moustaches hung on the walls. I was reminded that back in the 1960s and ’70s a saying in these Rajput regions went: ‘Mooch nahin toh kuchh nahin.’ If you don’t have a moustache you have nothing.
Our host emerged from his morning routine around noon, and made clear that his real loyalty was to Rajputs, not party. Despite family ties to the Congress, he had joined the BJP when it offered him a ticket to run, simple as that. Asked by Dorab whether he would vote for a Rajput from any party over a non-Rajput from his own, he said without hesitation, ‘The Rajput.’ Our conversation then turned to a discussion of the glorious years before AD 1500, when Rajput kings ruled much of north and central India, leaving a code of honour their ancestors live by to this day: ‘Raghukul reet sada chali aayi praan jaye par vachan na jayi.’ Rajputs will be happy to die before going back on their word.
After starting back to Delhi we got intel that Sonia Gandhi was addressing a rally in the town of Amroha, not far off our route, and detoured there to hear her speak. She pitched her national government’s achievements and the Gandhi family legacy, and afterward we heard through her aides that Sonia wanted to meet us for tea at a nearby guest house, apparently eager to debrief us on our meeting with Rahul.
Alas, the mobile phone coverage was so spotty, we could not get back to her aides before Sonia had choppered back to Delhi. By this point, mobile networks had largely wiped out the manned phone booths that once employed a million Indians, and could be found in any small town, advertised with the bold black letters ‘STD/ISD/ PCO’—a jargon-filled acronym for public landlines. Even in the late 1990s we were using these cheap pay phones all over India and at times like this we missed them.
When the results came in, Mayawati won more comfortably than we expected. She took a chunk of Brahmin and other upper-caste voters disillusioned with the BJP. Coupled with her usual Dalit support, that was enough to propel Mayawati to power. With a little more than 30 per cent of the total vote, her BSP won 208 of the 400 seats in the UP assembly. It was the first time a Dalit party had ever won an absolute majority in an Indian state election.
My grandfather and his Bijnor circle would have been alarmed, to say the least, but most observers celebrated Mayawati’s victory as a historic step forward for India, a sign that democracy was working to uplift the Schedule Castes. Surely this novel Downstairs–Upstairs coalition—with Dalits playing senior partner to Brahmins—signalled a welcome easing of the ancient caste order. For years, Indians had voted their own caste because they trusted no one else to fight their battles with the broken state. But here in UP, Brahmins and some other upper castes had rallied behind a Dalit whom they all saw as tough enough to free the state government from the control of a ‘goonda raj’.
To me, the louder message was that Indians will do whatever it takes to toss the bums out, even if it means allying with a caste enemy. For decades, Mayawati, Mulayam and the BJP had rotated in and out of the chief minister’s office, often because two of them allied against the third, and left one chunk of the vote bloc out in the cold. The only real difference in the Downstairs–Upstairs coalition was that these bedfellows were more unexpected than most. Did it reflect a new bond between Brahmins and Dalits, or their old shared dislike for Yadavs? The real test would be whether the Dalits and Brahmins would remain united five years down the road.
17
Live Lion Bait
State Assembly Elections, Gujarat, December 2007
We landed in Gujarat’s largest city, Ahmedabad, and found its six-million-plus inhabitants deeply in thrall to their chief minister. Our first meeting was a breakfast with Keshubhai Patel, who had been replaced by Narendra Modi as the BJP chief minister back in 2001. Meeting at his place over a classic Gujarati breakfast spread of dhoklas, khandvi and bhaji, Patel talked about how Modi had recently paid him a public visit but it was all for show, a phony display of party solidarity. In private, said Patel glumly, Modi was ignoring him completely. Patel said he felt like ‘a lion whose pride has been taken over by a rival’.
This was our first hint of the personality cult that was building around Modi, and the unique leader he would become. He was creating the character of ‘Modi’, a solo act with one name, blending a modern promise of development with an old-fashion pitch to Hindutva to build an unshakable base among India’s 80 per cent Hindu majority. Though his Ghanchi caste had recently been re-categorized as an OBC, and he had told stories of selling tea at his family’s rail station kiosk as a boy, he was not appealing for votes based on lower caste or class solidarity. He was expanding the BJP’s traditional caste base in Gujarat—which included upper-caste Patels and the Bania trading community—to unite all Hindu castes under the Hindutva banner. And Gujarat was clearly just a springboard for his national ambitions.
In a country where Mahatma Gandhi had set a high bar for humility, and where many politicians adopt the pose of humble public servants thrust reluctantly into the limelight, Modi carried himself with unabashed ego and swagger. Eschewing the praise normally lavished on party bosses, Modi never mentioned national BJP chieftains like Vajpayee and Advani, even when they were campaigning in his state. At least in the minds of Modi and his supporters, he was already the biggest name in the BJP.
Modi turned this contest into a celebration of all he had done for Gujarat and could do for India. As the campaigning got under way, rising prices for oil and other raw materials continued to fuel an unprecedented worldwide boom in emerging economies. India was riding the wave, growing faster than 8 per cent for the fourth year in a row. The state of Gujarat was rising with the wave as well, but many voters here attributed its economic success to one local source: Modi.
They said Modi had run Gujarat like a CEO, reining in corruption, cutting red tape, promoting competent and honest bureaucrats, and turning Gujarat into a national model of development. Under Modi, Gujarat’s economy had grown at an average pace close to 12 per cent. That remains a record, the fastest rate posted under any chief minister in any major state, going back to the start of state GDP records in the early 1980s.
Gujarati businessmen told us that Modi lacked completely the deep suspicions of the private sector that had long animated the Congress party, indeed most parties in India. They said he was not only willing to listen to their long PowerPoint presentations on the obstacles faced by private enterprise, but also to act, pushing through approvals in record time. Many cited the way he had pushed forward construction of dams on the Narmada river, begun in 1961 but delayed repeatedly by the protests of villagers defending their land, and activists, artists and writers like Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy, arguing that big dams sever the link ‘between humans and the planet they live on’.
Modi’s supporters said in reply that damming the Narmada had already made power available twenty-four hours a day, provided running water to millions, and helped to trigger a farming boom in a state long ravaged by droughts. Agriculture had grown at an annual pace of more than 10 per cent under Modi, faster and more stable than the rest of India. Long known for its dairy farming, Gujarat was investing the profits to expand into fruits, vegetables, wheat and cotton. And Modi was said to be driving it all, subsidizing farm investment in modern water-saving techniques like drip irrigation, and new technologies including a strain of cotton genetically resistant to the bollworm.
To an extent, Modi shared his practical focus on development with other recent chief ministers like Chandrababu Naidu, Ashok Gehlot and Nitish Kumar, but there was a big difference. Outside Gujarat we had never heard voters express such overwhelming faith that their man could get the job done. By force of personality Modi was shattering the ingrained cynicism of voters who despaired of ever finding a leader who could make India’s dysfunctional state work for them. This election was the first in which we heard Gujaratis call Modi ‘Superman’, using the English word, and capturing the sense that he could leap tall obstacles mortal leaders could not.
Indeed Modi’s detractors—who focused mainly on his record of stirring up animosity to Muslims—admitted to us that he ran a very efficient administration. Under him, Gujarat had vastly expanded the reach of four-lane highways, access to running water, and power production, while reducing crime. Modi’s government had installed meters in many businesses, and sent some power thieves to jail. In one market, a shop owner extolled Modi for expanding the power grid, and when we asked why then his lights and fan were switched off, he said he had to pay for power now, so he didn’t use it during the day. Yet like many voters he seemed satisfied that Modi was bringing order to the chaos of India.
There was another, darker difference between Modi and development-focused chief ministers like Naidu or Kumar, who tended to position themselves as modern in all ways, including tolerance for all religions and castes. Modi did not. After coming to power in 2001, Modi would be widely accused of allowing, if not encouraging, deadly Hindu–Muslim riots the following year. In the wake of the violence he had called new elections and won. By 2007, five years later, Hindu voters had moved on to glory in Gujarat’s economic progress, and most Muslim voters had fallen silent about lingering tensions.9
Modi was playing the Hindu nationalist card as aggressively as any BJP leader in the country, in words crafted to rouse, not calm the tension. In a case then working its way through the courts, Congress leaders had argued that India should be concerned about Hindu as well as Muslim terrorists. Modi had attacked that case in one of his trademark rhetorical devices, the barrage of leading questions: ‘Are you a Hindu? Can a Hindu ever be a terrorist as the Congress says?’ The crowds roared their approval, and Modi promised them that he would ‘never do anything to appease anyone’.
It was the same line of BJP attack I had heard back in my Bijnor summers: by appeasing Muslims, the Congress had encouraged Muslim terror, lawlessness and presumptuous demands for favourable treatment by the government. Modi made this case in a code that anyone could hear, you didn’t need a dog’s ears. He would ask crowds, for example, whether under his rule women had any reason to fear ‘Alia-Malia-Jamalia?’ The string of Muslim-sounding names made clear whom Modi was blaming for crimes against Gujarati women.
When we went to hear Sonia Gandhi, she was trying hard to revive memories of the 2002 riots, and use them to poke a hole in Modi’s popularity. At a rally near the city of Rajkot she went after Modi hard, calling him the ‘Maut Ka Saudagar’, or Merchant of Death, and accusing him of supporting the police killing of terror suspects. But she was stumbling onto a field where he was master, the politics of anger.10
Modi turned the tables on Sonia, protesting to crowds that he was merely trying to contain terror and protect Hindus, while the Congress was soft on terror and pro-Muslim. When he asked what should be done with the likes of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a suspect with alleged ties to Muslim terrorists who had been killed in Gujarat police custody in 2005, his supporters responded with chants of ‘Kill him! Kill him!’
On the last night of our travels we set up a dinner meeting with Modi at The Imperial Palace Hotel in Rajkot, a newly opened property with a gym and round glass elevators or ‘bubble lifts’, modern emblems of the real estate boom that was sweeping industrial cities like this one. Trying to get wine for dinner was an adventure, however. Unlike Tamil Nadu, where booze flows like water, Gujarat imposed prohibition in 1960, limiting liquor sales to state-run stores that are open only to customers who can prove they are not Gujarat residents. We filled out the necessary application forms, amused that the first line asked us for the ‘bewade ka naam’, which means the ‘name of the drunkard’.
The jabs of a prohibition-state bureaucracy thus absorbed, we went and got our whiskey and wine, then waited for Modi to arrive. He came into the room with just one aide, Vijay Rupani, who sat in the corner, his body language so self-effacing that our team remembered it nearly a decade later when Modi rewarded Rupani for his devotion by making him chief minister of Gujarat.
Thus began one of the most contentious meetings I had ever been part of. Many BJP members had been raging at news channels for implicating Modi in the Gujarat riots of 2002 without trial or evidence, and I came in fearing that this spark could easily ignite. It didn’t blow up immediately. Simran, who has a knack for questions that sound soft but expose true character, asked Modi where he had learned to speak so powerfully. He responded with signature self-assurance, ‘It is a gift I was born with, I didn’t learn this anywhere.’
Modi wanted to talk about all he had done for development, but many in our group wanted to press him on the riots. Prannoy Roy led the grilling. India’s most celebrated English TV news anchor, Prannoy is known for his comfortably probing style, and is as gracious in private as he is in public. I had known him since the mid-1990s and had rarely seen him as upset as he was with Modi that evening, demanding in various ways to know why Modi could not apologize for what happened in 2002.
Modi was dismissive, saying there was no evidence of his involvement, so why apologize? He went on to argue that there had been complete harmony in the state and no further riots since 2002, and that he could take us around to meet Muslims who would tell us how happy they were in Gujarat. Prannoy shot back that he had just gone to Beijing, where leaders offered to introduce him to journalists willing to testify to how free they were in China.
Tension rose in the room like floodwater. Prannoy kept pushing Modi, urging him to restrain his rhetoric and offer some gesture of reconciliation to Muslims, an expression of sympathy for the hundreds of kin they lost in the riots. Venu and Chitra pressed the same point but Modi responded with a blank look when Venu suggested that he create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modelled on the one South Africa had established to investigate abuses of the apartheid era.
Modi kept turning the conversation back to development, but that subject too turned testy when some of the women in our group said his development record was skewed to helping men: female literacy remained quite low. For over an hour the running battle kept circling back to the riots, until Modi ended it abruptly, then refused to stay for dinner.
When I thanked him for coming, Modi said darkly, ‘What happened here isn’t good.’ As Shekhar and Senthil walked him out, Modi expressed his deep bitterness. Looking back I suspect this encounter and others like it helped explain why Modi and his party became increasingly hostile to the press. Many in the media did not let Modi and his key aide, Amit Shah, forget the Gujarat riots for years to come.
We left the Rajkot hotel with a sense of foreboding, not of anything specific, but who knows what might happen in a state so thoroughly under the spell of a strongman known as the lion of Gujarat. Modi was already known to keep a close watch on the media, and to call newspaper owners to influence coverage.
Our mood was uneasy as we headed towards our next stop, the Gir forest, the only place in India where lions can still be found in the wild. Gujarat protects its monopoly on these rare Asiatic cats and—despite overpopulation in the Gir forest—refuses to send any to neighbouring states like Madhya Pradesh. As forest officials guided us into the jungle the next morning, we were a bit more jumpy than normal.
It seemed odd that the officials managed to guide us straight to the lions, as if they had been herded there for our benefit. Guards stood around us, armed only with sticks, which seemed utterly inadequate, but there were no surprises until we began the drive back to the hotel. As we bumped along, the rear door of the van in front of us swung open, revealing a water buffalo crammed into the back.
Far from conspiring to stage an unfortunate ‘accident’, park officials had been a bit too eager to make sure we saw the lions, and loaded the buffalo into the van, hoping its scent would help draw in the big cats. Over our travels we had often enjoyed the excesses of Indian hospitality, none more of a relief than the live lion bait.
Gir does have a political claim to fame too: of more than 800,000 polling stations in India, only one opens for one voter, deep in this remote forest. Thanks to rules requiring that no voter shall have to travel too far, the Election Commission sends a team of seven officials to record the votes of Guru Bharatdas Darshandas, caretaker of a small temple in the park, who has said he appreciates this personal service as a sign of how deeply India values democracy.
