Democracy on the road, p.8
Democracy on the Road, page 8
Sonia cracked that the Vajpayee government had been caught in enough scams to make the Guinness Book of World Records, but his Central government was not at stake in this state election. Sitting behind Sonia was her close Delhi confidante Ambika Soni, who was running the Congress campaign in Rajasthan and was known to have helped Gehlot derail party rivals. Talking to people in the crowd, however, we realized that they had no idea who Ambika Soni was. It was hard to figure out why the Congress had chosen an unknown outsider to lead their campaign. It seemed to speak yet again of the party’s Delhi elite micromanaging state affairs.
Meanwhile, the BJP was once again trying to stir up suspicion of Sonia’s foreign roots, repeating claims made in a lowbrow Hindu nationalist rag, about how Sonia had worked as a cabaret dancer back in her village in Italy. They had also invited the popular Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi to campaign in Rajasthan, despite the fact that outside Gujarat he was best known for accusations that he had encouraged or at least winked at Hindu attacks on Muslims during the deadly communal violence that had wracked his state a year earlier. Some BJP insiders admitted to us that with the emotional scars fresh, Modi’s presence might only galvanize support for the Congress among Muslims—who represent a key 10 per cent of the vote in Rajasthan—and among voters with no strong party affiliation.
Shortly after Sonia departed, Vajpayee arrived to lead a BJP rally on the same grounds. We had to leave early for a dinner meeting in Jaipur, but one of the PM’s more avid supporters broadcast his speech to us live over his mobile phone, as we drove the 140 kilometres from Ajmer back to Jaipur. It was a somewhat surreal experience, sitting in the Volvo, listening to Vajpayee’s mellifluous oratory flowing like a 1950s radio broadcast from a tinny mobile phone speaker, dismissing Gehlot’s record in Rajasthan as overhyped and disparaging what he called decades of Congress party misrule.
We spent our first night in Jaipur at the Oberoi Rajvilas hotel, a glittering relief from our usual road accommodations. At dinner we met one of the masterminds of the BJP campaign in Rajasthan, Sudhanshu Mittal, who tried to set us straight about the public opinion polls, which showed a lead for Gehlot and the Congress. Ignore that, he said, our internal polls sample many more voters—over 100,000—and they foretell a BJP landslide victory leading to an absolute majority in the state assembly.
At the time, however, we were not disposed to take Mittal too seriously because much of the Delhi elite had cast him as a ‘tent wallah’—a sneering reference to his family business supplying tents for Indian weddings and other big social occasions—rather than an experienced grass-roots politician.
By now our caravan had expanded to four Volvos and twenty journalists, which was making it easier to land interviews with politicians. Though elusive when in power, major politicians come out looking for attention during election season, and sitting down with us could often generate coverage in many of India’s biggest papers and TV shows. The recent additions to our crew included Prannoy and Radhika Roy, the pioneers of English news television in India and founders of NDTV. Like Dorab, Prannoy is also a prominent psephologist and pollster, and they disputed Mittal’s confident claims, saying all the major pollsters were calling a Congress victory. So we all ignored Mittal, and subsequent warning signs that suggested trouble for the Congress and Chief Minister Gehlot.
One wildcard came from the huge sums of money flowing into this contest. On our first night in Jaipur we saw a leading politician and some of his people walking out of the Oberoi carrying heavy suitcases, and by their dress and demeanour it seemed clear they were not leaving town. Asked what was up, hotel staff said with a smile that the suitcases were weighed down with cash for the campaign.
This came as a bit of a shock. Under the leadership of T.N. Seshan in the 1990s, India’s Election Commission had tried to clean up suspect campaign practices. Seshan had managed to curb many of the most overt abuses, including the use of government machinery for campaign purposes, fake voter IDs and the mobilization of party toughs to stuff ballot boxes or ‘capture’ voting booths so that only members of their own party could cast ballots.
In fact, many political observers complained that Seshan was so successful, he had scrubbed much of the fun out of India’s election carnivals, with rules requiring campaigns to shut down by 10 p.m. and limiting the decibel level of music at open rallies. Back in the day, rallies didn’t get going until 10 p.m. when the star act arrived, and often turned into all-night parties—particularly in mofussil areas where there was nothing else to do. As we bounced around in the Volvos, Suman would tell stories of his days as press adviser to Rajiv Gandhi, returning from raucous rallies at 3 or 4 a.m., waking up a few hours later to do it all over again. Today, political parties make sure to get their star on by early evening so that they can finish before everyone has to go home.
By most accounts, however, the one thing Seshan’s reforms had no impact on was the most important: the corrupting influence of campaign funding. While candidates cut down on glaringly expensive public displays like huge banners, posters and towering wooden silhouettes of their candidates, money flowed in private to buy voters booze and other freebies as election day approached, and to mobilize armies of rally goers and campaign workers.
The basic problem is that India offers no state funding for elections, so campaigning becomes a private business, often a private family business. Just to compete, candidates are under pressure to raise money, which often means courting private businessmen, who then get entangled in the campaign. To win, candidates have little choice but to violate spending caps set by the Election Commission, which at this point were at most three lakh rupees ($7500)7 for each state assembly candidate. The caps would rise gradually over time, but never to a level most candidates felt obliged to respect.
By the time of our 2003 election trip, Seshan was gone but most candidates were leaving the task of moving cash under the table to underlings so that they could profess shock if anyone got caught. Openly violating the rules was a risk as the Election Commission was powerful enough to fine or banish a candidate for funding infractions. Everyone knew money was flowing freely to fund campaigns, but to see a national leader of a major party carrying a suitcase of cash down the front stairs of the fanciest hotel in the capital of Rajasthan was astonishing. If the Congress lost this behind-the-scenes funding battle, it could be in trouble.
The next day we headed south-east back to the city of Tonk, one of the bellwether constituencies highlighted in Dorab’s notebooks. Though leadership of the Rajasthan state government had been rotating among different parties for decades, Tonk had voted for the winning party in every election since 1985. As we approached the city, we started to sense a shift in voter sentiment away from the Congress. We would roll down the windows of the car at traffic stops to ask voters who was ahead and most would say ‘phool’, a reference to the lotus symbol of the BJP.
At a lunch thrown by the Saidis, the same Tonk family that hosted us in 1998, we met Mahaveer Prasad, a fixture in local politics who had run as the BJP candidate from Tonk in every Rajasthan state election since 1980. He was facing off for the fourth time against his Congress arch-rival, Inam Zakiya, who had bested him in the last election with strong support from her fellow Muslims.
Prasad insisted that Zakiya and the Congress were in trouble this time because of the fracturing Muslim vote. Accounting for a quarter of the Tonk population, Muslims can decide local elections if they support one candidate, but this time Inam faced three Muslim challengers, including a Congress dissident named Nazimuddin. Locals described Nazimuddin, a tycoon who made his fortune manufacturing bidis, as the richest man in Tonk, which meant he could play the private funding game out of his own pocket. Prasad believed that the divided Muslim vote would clear his path to victory.
From Tonk we reached the city of Kota in just two hours, at an average speed of 75 kilometres an hour—a near record for our travels. The four-lane highways of Rajasthan dazzled us all. Highway development had begun under Shekhawat in the early 1990s, got another boost from Vajpayee’s Golden Quadrilateral project, and had continued under Gehlot. Many voters proudly pointed out that the roads were much better in Rajasthan than in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh.
We stayed that night at Kota’s Umed Bhawan Palace, one of the many royal Rajasthan residences that have been converted into hotels. Done in a mix of Victorian and Rajput styles, the Umed Bhawan has high-ceilinged rooms overlooking open courtyards and lush gardens, and a vast wood-panelled billiard room decorated with dozens of old hunting trophies, including lions, tigers and bison, all of it a kind of living monument to Rajasthan’s princely past and warrior legends.
Next day on our way back to Delhi we stopped for lunch and our forecasting contest at the Chokhi Dhani ‘ethnic resort’, a multimillion-dollar recreation of an old royal village, with cottages decorated in local styles, traditional folk dances and puppet shows, and a reputation for authentic Rajasthan cuisine. We ate at one of the restaurants, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and listened bemused as the waiters badgered us to ‘khao, khao’ or ‘eat, eat’, like so many pushy grandmothers. Apparently, that is a distinct Rajasthan village style of hospitality.
Exuberantly tacky in conception but so well done it works, Chokhi Dhani drove home our impression of Rajasthan as a royal state on the rebound, home to some of India’s most creative tourist developments. Given all Gehlot had done to lift Rajasthan out of the BIMARU class, most of us were convinced he could not lose—our gut bias no doubt deepened by our recent sail down the new highways, the unique and quirky charms of the Umed Bhawan Palace and Chokhi Dhani. Subtly these splendours seemed to confirm the success of Gehlot’s push to develop Rajasthan, and surely voters would reward him with victory!
In my twenty years of leading this caravan, we have never been more wrong. The BJP took 120 of 200 seats in the Rajasthan state legislature—a landslide win that neatly mirrored its loss to the Congress just five years earlier. Gehlot, so recently named the best chief minister in India, was humiliated and replaced by a BJP leader with royal family origins, Vasundhara Raje.
While Rajasthan royalty had been in decline as a political force, Raje was an exception. Descended from the maharajas of Gwalior, a branch of the politically influential Scindia family in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, she had married the former king of Dholpur in Rajasthan in the early 1970s. The marriage dissolved quickly, and in the early 1980s Raje entered politics, representing the BJP in the state assembly and Lok Sabha.
What seemed to separate Raje from politically failing royals was her common touch—she was widely praised for combining ‘class’ and ‘mass’. It also helped that many of the BJP’s top party bosses had encouraged her rise, thinking it would be easy to control a woman, a mistake the old men of the Congress party had made with Indira Gandhi in the 1960s.
Tonk once again voted with the winner, returning the BJP’s Mahaveer Prasad to a seat in the legislature, not to mention proving him right about how the election would play out. The Muslims did split, with the bidi tycoon using his wealth to take a huge chunk of support away from the Congress and Zakiya, and ensure her defeat.
In the end, we had to concede that Sudhanshu Mittal was right after all and the Delhi elite had been wrong in dismissing him as a ‘tent wallah’. Working closely with Pramod Mahajan, the mastermind of BJP’s electoral strategy in the Vajpayee era, Mittal brought the modern election war room to India. Tech and media savvy, Mahajan set his ring tone on the sound of laughter, part of what he would call a ‘feel good’ campaign to broaden BJP support.
Together, Mittal and Mahajan had begun to introduce the scientific use of data to identify winnable districts, steer funding and manpower to those battlegrounds, and identify top candidates in Rajasthan. Up to then candidate selection was both essential and completely chaotic. Parties would identify recruits of the right caste or religious community for a given constituency, but the main metric they used to choose among recruits was cash. Nominations would go to the supplicant who brought the most money to the table.
The sycophancy that surrounds leading politicians would peak before elections, when aspiring candidates would swarm all the major party headquarters, and scrap for a few moments with the handful of party chieftains with authority to hand out nominations. It wasn’t just the BJP either. I’ve seen these scrums devolve into shoving and fistfights at the headquarters of other parties and wondered whether showing up in a torn kurta helps or hurts one’s shot at a nomination. Certainly it is proof of passion.
What Mittal and Mahajan began to introduce around 2003 was a system that could help choose candidates not only for caste and cash, but a bundle of metrics that would characterize likely winners in each constituency.
The Rajasthan trip inspired a lot of introspection about how we could have been so wrong. One answer was that we had put too much faith in mainstream polls, though we knew they are often far off the mark in India. Pollsters all over India have to adjust their results on the assumption that many respondents are disguising their true intentions. As Dorab later pointed out to us, in rural areas where most people wear kurta-pyjamas or dhotis, locals assume that any visitor in a shirt and pants is probably a government official of some kind. So when a pollster shows up looking like a city slicker and asking who locals plan to vote for, many will automatically say the governing party, just to avoid trouble. In order to draw out more candid answers, Indian polling agencies had started to use ballot boxes for opening surveys. Their agents carry vote boxes into the field and hand out survey forms that look like actual ballots, so respondents can divulge their voting intentions secretly.
Another reason offered for Gehlot’s defeat was that the Jats felt betrayed by the Congress for having chosen him—rather than one of their own—as chief minister back in 1998. Many of them voted against the Congress in this election, and we had missed this turn of events because we had travelled little in rural areas, where the Jats are concentrated.
By overlooking the rural areas we had also missed just how hard it had been hit by the droughts, and how the media had overestimated Gehlot’s success in dealing with this disaster. It was a strategic mistake that we would work hard to avoid in future trips, and we wound up pushing deeper into the Indian backcountry than we otherwise might have ventured.
In fact, later revisions of Rajasthan’s economic data revealed that deep contractions during the worst drought years of 2001 and 2003 had lowered the average annual growth rate during Gehlot’s five-year term to just 4 per cent. His reputation as a development star was undermined by the droughts, and he became the latest victim of India’s deep distaste for incumbents. From Indira Gandhi’s loss in 1977 through 2003, nearly 75 per cent of all state and national governments—and a stunning 90 per cent of Congress governments—had failed to get re-elected.
While the future is always uncertain, former Reserve Bank of India president Y.V. Reddy once told me, in India even the past is uncertain, since official data are revised so often. We thought Rajasthan would prove to be a test for the new development formula for winning elections, but the revised data had revealed that growth was slow all along—and that rural areas had been badly affected by the drought. This ultimately was the lesson of Rajasthan: always be wary of the unknown, because the truth can be elusive, and to find it, you have to get off the main highways and into the mofussil.
In the other state elections at play in late 2003, the Congress managed to hold on to power in Delhi, where Dikshit won again, but it went down in Madhya Pradesh, where Chief Minister Digvijaya Singh was seeking a third term. Once again, these key states in the Hindi heartland had gone to the polls together just ahead of the general elections and were widely seen as a harbinger of national trends, this time showing the BJP firmly on the ascendant.
12
‘Ruchir, Please Pray for Me’
General Elections, Uttar Pradesh, April–May 2004
Emboldened by its recent victories in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and all the global buzz about India’s 8 per cent growth rate, the BJP decided to move up the general elections by six months, and launched its campaign under the sunny slogan, ‘India Shining’.
That phrase entered the popular lexicon with a bang that no economic slogan had made since at least 1971, when the Congress campaigned under a promise of ‘Garibi Hatao’. Eradicate Poverty. In keeping with the growing embrace of free-market ideas, at least among the elite, ‘India Shining’ rang less socialist, more capitalist, as if it could have been written by Western consultants. It drew a clean line between the forward-looking BJP, and a Congress party harking back to its socialist past. Like most commentators, I thought it was resonating well, and could propel the BJP to its third straight general election victory—a feat last achieved by the Congress in the 1960s.
The popular narrative in the English media was that the BJP had reinvented itself as an economic catalyst under the leadership of Vajpayee. To my mind, Vajpayee did deserve credit for policies like controlling the budget deficit to contain inflation, opening the telecom sector to more competition and launching the Golden Quadrilateral highway project. But the real drivers of the Indian boom were global forces. At the time most emerging economies were accelerating just as dramatically as India. Nonetheless, even the BJP’s more conservative leaders were downplaying the party’s Hindu chauvinism and playing up its new claim to economic prowess. ‘India Shining’ was resonating with them as well.
Polls showed that Vajpayee was more popular than his party, admired for his moderation, and his wit. For all the elegance of his oratory, he could defuse tense confrontations with an earthy one-liner. Back in 2001 his party was under fire in parliament after his big Agra summit with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf ended in failure. After two days of raging debate, Vajpayee appeared before the Lok Sabha and quoted the then-inescapable advertising slogan of a Delhi marriage counsellor: ‘Rishtey hi rishtey; bas ek baar mil toh lein—Professor Arora.’ Matches and more matches, at least meet once with Professor Arora. The chamber burst with laughter at this bit of billboard statesmanship, and when Vajpayee suggested that he had to at least try to meet with Pakistan, the debate was over.
