Democracy on the road, p.23
Democracy on the Road, page 23
The next day we drove to a Congress rally in a tribal village on the border of Madhya Pradesh. Rahul was running late again and after a wait of nearly three hours the first helicopter delivered a team of SPG agents who sprinted to their positions as the second deposited the main attraction before a vast crowd that organizers claimed was 80,000 strong. Rahul started out with a long tribute to Nelson Mandela, followed by a rambling story about how Mahatma Gandhi once visited his family’s ancestral home and slept on the floor as a gesture of solidarity with Jawaharlal Nehru, who was then sleeping on the floor in a British jail. ‘This is your history,’ Rahul told the crowd, but they seemed utterly unmoved by a Nehru–Gandhi tale from the 1930s.
Rahul plunged ahead, tracing the roots of Gujarat’s success to local entrepreneurs like Verghese Kurien, father of the ‘white revolution’ that made dairy farming a big business in India, and to his own family. He invoked the name of Sam Pitroda, a Gujarati who had spearheaded telecom reform under his father Rajiv, and he credited his father for ‘the mobile phone in everyone’s hand’. He talked about everything that the Congress had done for Gujarat, including the rural employment guarantee scheme, while dismissing Modi as a clever self-promoter who had claimed Gujarat’s successes as his own.
After the rally, Rahul spoke to us for forty-five minutes, holding forth about how Modi’s strongman model was a bad fit for India, and how he planned to shift power within the Congress from smoky Delhi back rooms to open forums at the village level. At this point, however, Rahul had yet to give his first public interview, and Simran asked him, ‘Why, as a public figure, don’t you let the public get to know you?’ He answered non-committally, ‘Yes, I will do it soon.’ (His first interview came more than a year later, in the run up to the 2014 general elections.)
Rahul went on elaborating his theories on grass-roots democracy for so long that Swami Aiyar, one of the original and most irreverent members of our crew, started reading a copy of The Times of India. When Henny Sender suggested that the Congress hardly resembled Rahul’s model of openness and transparency, he shot back, ‘How well do you know India?’ Henny said she knew India quite well, as a Hindi speaker who had lived here as a student and visited the ancestral home in Allahabad he had just mentioned in his speech. To which Rahul replied, ‘Come to Delhi and I will tell you exactly why you are completely wrong.’
At a rally for Sonia in Gandhinagar, north of Ahmedabad, the crowd seemed much smaller than Rahul’s but more genuine, less bussed-in and paid-to-attend, dancing to the songs of two Gujarati singers. Sonia also invoked family lore, saying her mother-in-law gave her life for India and ‘we will never sell the country down. We will never sell off Sir Creek to Pakistan.’ She said Modi offered big dreams but was a ‘disuniter’, and tried to steal some of his claim to development success by listing factories that the Congress had brought to Gujarat before he arrived. Tellingly, however, all the factories she mentioned were government-owned, a sign of her Gandhian distaste for private sector capitalism.
After the rally, acting on a request we conveyed through Ahmed Patel, Sonia granted us a fifteen-minute audience and appeared a shell of the radiant person we had met only months earlier in Uttar Pradesh. Her hands shaking, she appeared to be suffering from health issues and this would be her only rally of the day. Asked about Modi, she said people, particularly in tribal areas, were much more alienated than the hype suggested, and accused Modi of taking credit for improvements in people’s lives that were paid for by the Congress government in Delhi. The day before, she said, she had met a woman who did not know that her husband’s job as a labourer was supported by the Congress’s rural employment scheme.
Following Sonia’s rally we returned to Gujarat’s largest city, Ahmedabad, for a meeting with Arun Jaitley, who had become leader of the BJP opposition in parliament. He hosted us for lunch at Agashiye, a restaurant famed for dishes with up to twenty-three different items on one plate. Jaitley argued that the Congress had a serious succession problem because it had discouraged the rise of strong state leaders, leaving no one in line to follow Sonia should Rahul falter, and he had. Rahul had scored only one notable success, three years earlier in UP.
Meanwhile, Jaitley said, the BJP had evolved into a decentralized party with an entire generation of strong state leaders including Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh and above all Modi, who was emerging as heir apparent to the aging party leader L.K. Advani. Asked when the transition might come, Jaitley told us half-seriously that it’s like cricket, you don’t ask a superstar like Sachin Tendulkar—then faltering as a member of India’s national team—to retire. You wait for him to make the decision.
That night, fashion designer Umang Hutheesing, scion of a prominent Gujarat family, threw a party for us and leading Ahmedabad writers, artists and entrepreneurs, who showed up in elegant evening wear. We were, as usual, our dishevelled selves after twelve hours on the road, with one intrepid exception, Henny. She told the drivers to look away while she slipped into a fresh kurta in the back seat of an Innova.
Since our hosts assumed Modi would win, the conversation turned to how he would rule. The editor of a leading English newspaper, Daily News and Analysis (DNA), told us that he had a tellingly narrow range of complaints from Modi and his aides in the chief minister’s office. They would call often but always about the language of headlines, never the content or details of a story. His takeaway was that Modi was a micromanager but with a clear sense of what really makes an impact on voters in the age of information overload.
The next day we attended a final Modi rally in the town of Himatnagar, where supporters greeted him with the familiar chant, Look, look who has come … the lion of Gujarat has come. Modi responded with a salute to India, ‘Bharat mata ki jai’, and each time he repeated the words the crowd grew more delirious. ‘I have met the youth of Gujarat in every corner and from everywhere the message is that the BJP is coming and will wipe out the Congress,’ he roared. ‘Maunmohan Singh or Madam Sonia, have they come here?’ asked Modi.
‘No!’ the crowd shouted.
‘What is the Congress plan for Gujarat?’ he demanded.
‘Nothing!’
In quick succession, Modi hammered the themes of his campaign and his national ambition, saying a big win here in 2012 would force ‘all of India to take the development path of Gujarat’. He said that the Congress had been criticizing him for years but misruling India for decades, and that he had no fear of leaving nothing to his family, implying corruption among those who do. He mocked Congress candidates who make promises to Gujarat but can’t name its districts. He vowed that ‘not a piece of Sir Creek will go to Pakistan’, and elicited waves of laughter every time he fired a dig at ‘Rahul Baba’. Modi even mocked Rahul’s story about the founding fathers, suggesting that while Gandhiji was sleeping on the floor, Nehru was probably sleeping on a bed.
We could see the sea of faces straining towards Modi, hanging on his every word, as he finished on a quiet, intimate note, sealing his bond with 10,000 people at once. ‘I know you and you know me,’ Modi said. ‘I have been on cycles and scooters in this area and I know it well. Give me five more years to serve you. I know your hopes and dreams and you know mine. Press the button for the lotus, and it will accumulate into my account directly.’ He didn’t mention his party or any other name in it, only himself, and his voters, who were to transfer the power of their vote directly to Modi.
It was an extraordinary performance, ranking among the most powerful speeches we had ever heard on the campaign trail. Even Congress voters and BJP insiders who worry secretly about the arrogance of highly personalized power said the outcome was not in question.
Late that evening we arrived amid the terraced gardens of the Balaram Palace Resort in Palanpur, a city on Gujarat’s border with Rajasthan and home to Jain merchants who rose to dominate the global diamond trade as far away as Antwerp. Once a hunting lodge for the local nawab, the Balaram was a shadow of its original self, paint cracking on the walls of palatial rooms furnished with greying antiques and illuminated by bare light bulbs.
At the resort, we ran into Bollywood star Paresh Rawal, who was here campaigning for the BJP and spoke with us about how only a leader like Modi could bring progress to India and lift its declining image abroad. While actors often make it big in south Indian politics, Rawal would go on to become one of the few to earn a Lok Sabha seat in western India.
Over a midnight dinner of thin soup and bland vegetarian fare we held our forecasting contest, and the BJP wave was so strong, none of us got the outcome wrong. Modi returned to office as chief minister with 49 per cent of the vote and 117 out of 182 seats in the state assembly—a result that nearly mirrored his win five years earlier. Only this time he delivered his victory speech from Ahmedabad in Hindi, not Gujarati—a clear sign that his next goal was to lead all of India.
28
Bandit Queens and Kings
State Assembly Elections, Madhya Pradesh, November 2013
Manmohan Singh had been prime minister for nine years and voters were growing more than tired of a government long plagued by corruption scandals, and now by inflation as well. Singh’s government had been pumping money into the economy to keep growth alive, but it had fuelled four straight years of double-digit price increases, one of the worst streaks on record. And though inflation had been toppling Indian governments since the colonial era, Congress leaders seemed oblivious to the political risks.
The obliviousness didn’t really surprise me. In early 2012, I had gone on a national TV news show reviewing the government budget, which are major annual events in India. These shows always include a leading business figure, who invariably scores the budget a nine or ten out of ten, but this guest went beyond merely insincere flattery. He gave yet another inflationary Congress budget an ‘11 out of 10’ when the cameras were rolling, then started bitching about Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his reckless spending as soon as the cameras were off.
Major Indian politicians live in this bubble of false praise, especially in Delhi and the state capitals, where many business people bow to them with hands folded, some touching their feet to show respect. I once asked an Indian billionaire about these craven displays, and he explained it as a defence mechanism. At any given time companies can face dozens of outstanding cases filed by tax authorities or the enforcement directorate, which will be decided by bureaucrats with wide discretion to enforce loosely written rules. The only people powerful enough to influence the mighty bureaucrats are leading politicians, so big tycoons can’t afford candour that might upset their political contacts. They would be the last people to tell a Congress government that it was mismanaging the economy and driving up inflation.
For our next trip we headed back to Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, where Modi was leading the BJP charge against the Congress. Advani had been retired as BJP leader, not of his own volition like a cricket star but by the groundswell of support that had swept Modi back to power in Gujarat. The party had named Modi its official candidate for prime minister, and though he was campaigning in Madhya Pradesh to help BJP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan win a third term, he barely mentioned Chouhan. Modi was campaigning for himself, trying out his attack lines for the coming national election.
At a rally in Gwalior, a semi-feudal region where local royals representing the Congress sat in parliament, we found Modi at his vitriolic best, savaging the Gandhis and the elite around them. Since the BJP took power in Madhya Pradesh a decade ago, he said, it had been battling the damage and neglect left by ‘one loudmouth Congress leader after another’ over the previous fifty years. The BJP had spent millions improving the state roads, yet MP struggled to attract foreign tourists because Manmohan Singh was neglecting the national highways. Worse, said Modi, ‘The Congress has committed one sin for which you should not allow it to return to power in this state: inflation.’
Modi again tried to make the campaign about him and the Gandhis, launching into ‘Madam Sonia’ and rolling out a new term of disdain for Rahul, ‘Shehzade’—an Urdu word for prince. Contrasting his own simple roots to the corrupt machinations of the Congress elite, he said they had embarrassed India with an ordinance signed by Singh that would have defended the right of criminal convicts to run for office, a move widely seen as a lifeline for Congress allies such as Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar. Modi also fired back at Rahul’s charges of BJP thievery in the Madhya Pradesh state government, asking the crowd, ‘Is the BJP a thief?’
The crowd roared, ‘No!’
‘Are the accusations false, are the accusers lying?’
‘Yes!’ came the reply.
‘The Congress says we are thieves and yes we are, in the sense that we have stolen the sleep of the Congress party!’
Modi went on, spelling out how it would be: the BJP would return to power in Madhya Pradesh this year, it would take power in Delhi next year, and both governments would work together to push the BJP agenda: development, jobs for the young, help for the poor and oppressed. ‘Now the winds of change are clear,’ said Modi.
That evening we picked our way from the Taj hotel through the unlit and garbage-strewn streets of Gwalior to the nineteenth-century palace of the Scindias, the region’s pre-eminent royal family and a major force in national politics. In the pitch-black of a moonless night the palace stood out like a gaudy chandelier, with blue spotlights illuminating a white marble statue in the courtyard. We were met there by Jyotiraditya Scindia, a Harvard and Stanford graduate who had worked as an investment banker in the mid-1990s before becoming a Congress party leader.
As Scindia showed us around the palace, servants would address him as ‘Hukum’, or My Lord, touching his feet, bowing and walking backwards to withdraw from his presence. Henny later said Scindia seemed more comfortable with this treatment than other Indian politicians she had visited, including one who posted a ‘no feet touching’ sign on his front door.
Scindia walked us through the palace’s glorious past, describing at length how the enormous chandeliers hanging in the grand hall had only one match, which was hanging in the Vatican, and were so heavy that the installers supposedly suspended ten elephants from the ceiling to test its strength. In the equally lavish dining room our eyes were drawn to a model train, riding an oval track around the long table in the centre of the room. Purchased in 1906 from the Bassett-Lowke company of Britain, its silver engine pulled seven cars carrying silver and crystal liquor decanters, and stopped automatically when a decanter was lifted. We were all gawking at this marvellous toy when Henny told us to snap out of it and start asking some real questions.
At one point, Scindia seemed to realize he was going on about regal luxuries for a bit longer than Congress party sensibilities allow. Suddenly he changed theme, talking about how his family of ‘modern maharajas’ was ‘egalitarian’ and had to fight tooth and nail to win elections, just like everyone else. We asked him in that light why it was that the surrounding neighbourhoods of Gwalior were so dark and littered with garbage, and Scindia gave us the usual answer: hell in India is other parties. Under a BJP chief minister, Madhya Pradesh was choking Gwalior of funds and services.
The Scindia clan had divided along party lines as many Indian political families do. Jyotiraditya and his late father Madhavrao were serving as leaders of the Congress, while Madhavrao’s sisters and his mother had joined the BJP. One of those sisters was Vasundhara Raje, BJP chief minister of Rajasthan. The other, Yashodhara Raje, was running for the BJP in the neighbouring district of Shivpuri, where we had a chance to see her road show.
Yashodhara seemed to symbolize the evolution of both women and royals in Indian politics. Later a party insider told us that as late as the 1970s, royal women had favoured whiskey and wore their saris with a ghoonghat—a veil to cover the face. Now they favoured wine, eschewed the veils, and threw themselves into the rough and tumble of campaigns. Yashodhara was campaigning atop an open jeep, greeting delirious supporters, clearly enjoying herself.
Wearing designer sunglasses and a modern sari made of green chiffon—still the royal material of choice—she cut a regal figure but had to deal with the nitty-gritty of any constituency in the hinterland. When a group of women complained about an overflowing drain, she promised to have it fixed. When we asked her about her nephew in the rival Congress party, she said she would never say anything bad about Jyotiraditya in her speeches—and there was no record she ever had.
We also found many women shrugging off old feudal habits, showing more willingness to speak up and contradict the political views of their husbands, even compared to our last trip to MP. Like the royals many had dropped the conservative ghoonghat for the sleeveless kameez—which was once considered a bit racy in these parts. The sight of girls riding bikes in their school uniforms, and dish antennas poking out of small village homes, offered some clue to where women were getting more modern ideas.
The next leg of our trip took us into the ravines of the Chambal, off the trail of the mainstream parties and into the land of the dacoits. A sense of dread clings to this sparsely inhabited region, where these bandits roamed freely into the 1960s and ’70s, and in many cases became popular heroes, lionized as rebels against government oppression, or as Robin Hoods who stole from the rich. Daku Man Singh—one of the most famous dacoits—got his own movie, and a temple named after him in his ancestral village of Khera Rathore. Phoolan Devi haunted this vast maze of mud ravines and hillocks before being immortalized in the movie Bandit Queen, and later became a member of parliament.
