Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Neither was he prepared to let technology leave him floundering in its wake. In the early weeks of the campaign, I recall being woken early one Saturday morning by a telephone call from the prime minister only to realise a few words in that it was a recorded message sent to virtually every mobile-phone subscriber in the capital. The septuagenarian was trying to harness the zeitgeist, even if his wheezy voice brought unintended meaning to the phrase ‘breathless change’.

  My first sight of his opponent, Sonia Gandhi, came through a billowing cloud of fluttering rose and marigold petals, on a road choked with exultant banner-waving supporters. Her caravan of Tata Safaris nudged its way into Amethi, a hardscrabble town in Uttar Pradesh and the Gandhi family’s long-time political fiefdom. Joylessly playing out her role as the matriarch of the clan, Sonia protruded from the first four-wheel drive, her arm projected almost robotically into the air. The recipient of the kind of adulation that would rouse even the most lifeless of politicians, she struggled even to manufacture a smile. Sonia gave the appearance of hating politics and detesting campaigning, all of which was entirely understandable given the tragedy that had befallen her beloved husband, Rajiv.

  During the 1991 election, he had been assassinated at a late-night rally near Chennai, when a female assassin from the Tamil Tigers knelt deferentially at his feet and then detonated a belt packed with high explosives. All that was left of him were his head and his feet, the latter of which were still enclosed within an expensive pair of training shoes that he wore to help ease the pain of punishing days on the hustings.

  After the murder, Congress pleaded with Rajiv’s Italian-born widow to become the standard-bearer of the Gandhi clan, and eventually, some six years later, she relented. But her halting Hindi and awkwardness among crowds made her an uninspiring campaigner. ‘A personality cult without a personality’ was how one Delhi commentator witheringly described her. ‘Illiterate in three languages,’ scoffed another. Others simply regarded her as an Italian interloper, usually neglecting the unsettling question of why the Congress Party had failed to identify a plausible, home-grown alternative.

  That ongoing search partly explained why we had travelled through the Uttar Pradesh countryside to Amethi, where Sonia’s son, Rahul, was about to make his political debut. For years, he had lived in London, where he was caught in the telephoto glare of the Indian paparazzi wearing pinstripe suits and Jermyn Street shirts, and occasionally with his Colombian girlfriend on his arm.

  Now that he was making his prodigal return to India, these Western accoutrements were banished from view, and instead he wore the uniform of the Indian politician: a long white kurta with his vest visible underneath. Gone was the bouncing gait of the Mayfair playboy, and instead he moved in slow motion, his face solemn, bowed and covered in flop sweat.

  In this shrunken form, Rahul Gandhi was being propelled into a world that he appeared to find thoroughly alien. Tellingly, when he emerged from the rundown municipal office where he had gone to file his papers as a parliamentary candidate and was confronted by the usual flying wedge of Indian reporters, he made a beeline for me, the only white face in the crowd. I asked him if he could personally revive the Gandhi brand, but he smiled benignly and turned away.

  Later on, I put the same question to his mother, after following her from village to village, having been promised a proper interview by her advisers: ‘There are many people who say that the dynastic appeal of the Gandhis isn’t as strong as it used to be. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘You might have seen today. You might have been with us. You might have noticed whether that is true or not.’

  She had a point. Earlier on, she had to change vehicles because rose petals had clogged the engine, and Rahul had a signet ring torn from his finger by clamorous supporters. ‘You think the Gandhi name is as strong as ever?’ I continued. But she turned her back on me and jumped into her car, leaving unanswered a question that most commentators thought could be dealt with in a single word: no. For all their attempts to revive the brand, the Gandhis were thought to be finished.

  As a correspondent used to the control-freakery of American elections, where a candidate’s every outing was tightly scripted and intricately choreographed, the chaos and feast of colour that came with Indian elections was a wonder and joy. Both countries put on impressive shows, but it was like comparing the meticulous staging of a Broadway production to the outlandishness of Bollywood.

  The path to the White House seemed somewhat two-dimensional and prosaic compared to the journey it took to get to the prime minister’s residence on Golf Club Road. Whereas America could only boast the elephant and the donkey, India had as symbols for its political parties the lotus (BJP), the open hand (Congress), a hurricane lamp, an alarm clock, a car, an aeroplane, various models of bicycles, a bow and arrow, a pair of spectacles, the hammer and sickle, an inkpot and pen, a ladder, an electric light bulb, a conch, a mango, an umbrella and even a lady farmer carrying paddy on her head.

  For new parties keen to enter the fray, the Election Commission of India had only three symbols left unclaimed: the balloon, the wardrobe and, more understandably, the banana. Whereas America had the Democrats and Republicans, India could boast an alphabet spaghetti of parties that made election tally boards look like the screens at the NASDAQ stock exchange.

  A Pythonesque splitism, recalling the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front, was also in evidence. There was an Indian Congress Party, a Nationalist Congress Party and even an All India Trinamool Congress Party. On the extreme left, the Communist Party of India vied with the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The world’s biggest democracy had also produced what was surely the world’s longest list of candidates for a single seat: 1033 in a constituency in Tamil Nadu. It turned the ballot paper into a booklet the size of a railway timetable.

  Instead of red, white and blue balloons and bunting, there was a technicolour blaze of flags, banners, bandanas and posters with hand-painted portraits that made even the most physically unattractive of candidates look like screen idols. Giant-sized likenesses of the main party leaders were fastened to multi-storey scaffolds at the site of election rallies. To boost attendance at these gatherings, women were offered free saris. To boost turnout at the polls, men were offered free beer the night before – although a strict prohibition on alcohol was always in place on election days themselves.

  The plural, of course, is deliberate, because so gigantic was this exercise in democracy that it had to be staggered into four separate rounds, with different parts of the country voting on different days. With a breathing space between each round, the security forces could be bussed and trained around the country so as to maintain order.

  As well as being afflicted occasionally by electoral violence, the system was plagued by corruption, cronyism, intimidation and widespread bribery. Hundreds of candidates were also convicted criminals, some of whom orchestrated their campaigns on mobile phones from their prison cells. But lest Indian democracy sound like some kind of feudal throwback, it is worth remembering that its brand-new hi-tech electronic-voting machines were more advanced than those used in many polling stations in America, even if they had to be lugged into remote mountain villages on the backs of elephants. As local commentators never tired of pointing out in the wake of the Florida debacle, Indian elections also upheld the quaint idea that elections should be decided at the polling booth rather than in the courts.

  In making television out of all this, the elephant shots were always received gladly, but in 2004 we also thought we had come up with the superlative film sequence to illustrate the feeling that Indians had never had it so good. Filmed in the soft early-morning light of the Hyderabad spring, first it showed a line of portly, sari-clad women hopping on the spot, laughing uncontrollably. Then we cut to a tight huddle of middle-aged men in complete hysterics wagging their fingers semi-accusingly at their cohorts, as if they had all awoken from a dream and realis
ed they were completely naked. Next came another group of balding men wafting their arms gently in the air, like drowsy seagulls slowly swooping in to land. Finally, we showed a bespectacled Sikh gentleman with his turban fastened tightly around his chin, who looked like he had just been told the most hilarious joke known to man. After putting the report to air, we never did think to ask what the members of this Yogic Laughing Club, one of thousands that meet every morning in parks across India, thought of our report. Even though it made them look certifiable, one hoped they would have seen the funny side.

  After filming the laughing club, we drove seven hours into the countryside of Andhra Pradesh, where the parched terrain of cropless farmland provided a wholly different electoral landscape. On a water-starved field, which had not absorbed a drop of monsoon rain for the past four years, a farmer told us the story of his brother, Hana Manteredi, a 45-year-old who could no longer repay his loans because he could no longer harvest a crop. At the tiny family home, his wife, Lakme, and two teenage daughters peered up at a portrait of Hana that was garlanded with flowers – a common household memorial. A proud man who believed he had failed his family, he had taken his life by swallowing pesticide. Across Andhra Pradesh, some 2000 farmers had done the same, and in this part of rural India the country only shined through the spirit of the hard-pressed people left behind.

  Our report from the countryside gave us much-needed balance. Up until then, much of our coverage reflected the metropolitan bias of the metropolitan elites, who were the prime beneficiaries of the country’s new abundance. It was almost as if we had been partially blinded by the ‘India Shining’ slogan.

  Our tunnel vision was particularly unforgivable given the evidence of a twin-track election on our doorstep in the Indian capital. Early one morning at Delhi golf club, where Mogul tombs flanked the lush fairways and where the annual membership fees cost more than most Indians earned in a lifetime, we interviewed my landlord, Amit, a successful entrepreneur who perfectly framed the poll. ‘India may be shining for me,’ he said, as he strode towards the green in a monogrammed polo shirt, ‘but not for my caddy. Ask him if India is shining. I don’t know whether he’ll agree. Does he have clean water? A place to stay? Food? Education? That’s what he’s looking for. The rising stock market doesn’t concern him.’

  Another journey well worth making during the campaign was to Ayodhya, the sacred town in Uttar Pradesh that doubled as a political fault line. It was there in 1992 that a mob of Hindu nationalists ransacked and demolished the Babri mosque, which had been constructed in the sixteenth century by the first Mogul emperor of India. Nowhere in the history of modern India had there been such a flagrant act of religious vandalism, and it unleashed communal rioting across the country in which more than 2000 people were killed, most of them Muslims.

  Hindu nationalists believed fervently that the Mogul invaders had deliberately built the mosque on the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, in order to subjugate India’s Hindu masses. Now, 400 years on, they believed it was time to balance the historical ledger, even though there was no historical evidence to suggest that the mythical Ram had ever walked the earth, nor incontrovertible archaeological proof that a Hindu temple had once occupied the site. However, for diehard Hindu fundamentalists, to use a phrase that many religious scholars consider theologically nonsensical, there was no more ringing issue.

  In a stonemason’s yard nearby, the components of a new temple were being chiselled out, block by block, pillar by pillar, with bearded sadhus consecrating the craftsmanship with tridents in hands. Names of wealthy donors, many from overseas, were etched onto the bricks, and huge prefabricated pillars and slabs of finished sandstone panelling were piled high, with each individually numbered to aid in the eventual construction. A flat-pack temple awaited assembly.

  Back in the early 1990s, when it was little more than a fringe party, the BJP had organised the great yatra, or procession, which had not only led to the destruction of the mosque but also laid the foundation stone for its speedy rise to power. In 2004, however, party modernisers believed it could run on the twin themes of peace and prosperity. This meant downplaying the more medieval aspects of its platform, namely the Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, which promised to end the supposed privileges Muslims had come to enjoy, such as their constitutional entitlement to be polygamous.

  Vajpayee, who was often called ‘the acceptable face of the BJP’, attempted to fudge the Ayodhya question by suggesting it should be a matter for negotiation and the courts. Yet, if the BJP won the election, many feared that onsite construction work on the new temple would soon commence. That was most certainly the intention of the BJP activist we interviewed, who proudly told us he had taken part in the destruction of the mosque. Now, he spent his days touring the streets of Ayodhya, in the shadow of the disputed site, in a jeep mounted with four megaphones and draped with the saffron and lotus flower of the BJP. He gripped a small microphone as if he were about to crush it and yelled with a primal scream, ‘We’ll tear down more mosques and build more temples.’ Indians who cherished the country’s secular ideal – the founding belief that all faiths could live in peaceful co-existence without government interference – feared this was the true intention of the Hindu nationalists and the BJP.

  His might have been a lonely BJP voice during the 2004 campaign had it not been for mounting evidence, after the first two rounds of voting, that the ‘India Shining’ slogan was not cutting through. Now, the inevitability of a BJP victory had been brought into serious question, as the party’s internal polling showed that two very different elections were unfolding: one in the cities and the other in the countryside. Even the ever-popular Vajpayee was struggling to draw big crowds to his rallies, however many free saris were handed out. To bolster its fortunes, party chieftains therefore decided to call on a figure they knew could mobilise the Hindu masses, even at the risk of some reputational damage: Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, who up until then had been kept largely hidden from view. As if illuminating some great Hindutva sign in the skies above Ahmedabad, they called on him to finally join the national campaign.

  Again, the action unfolded in Uttar Pradesh, the Florida and Ohio combined of Indian politics, which harboured the most people, over 190 million, and thus the most parliamentary seats. Here, Modi descended from the skies for his first campaign appearance in a saffron-coloured helicopter, as if engaged in some great aerial rescue mission. Then he took up his place on the dais, in a sumptuous claret-upholstered throne.

  Scornful of the international press in general and the BBC in particular, Modi had walked out of an interview with a colleague just a few months previously. So, when he spotted us positioned below the podium, he decided to get his retaliation in first. The BBC was here to abuse him, he shouted to the crowd. It would say, ‘Modi is a Hitler.’ Rather usefully, now we did not have to.

  His speech over, Modi exited the stage with his hands clasped in a namaste as a guard against our questions. Then he climbed back into the belly of his helicopter, which left behind a cloud of dirt and a swirl of controversy. The BJP had returned to its Hindu nationalist roots, and now Sonia Gandhi had a rallying cry, if only she could come up with the right words to voice it.

  When Delhi went to the polls in the final round of voting, the BJP was expected still to triumph, even if talk of a landslide had now receded. As the votes started being tallied, however, a great and unexpected drama began to play out: Congress and its allies appeared to be nudging ahead. The first tallies, like the exit polls from the initial rounds of polling, were treated with extreme caution. Hours later, though, the trend was unmistakable. In an election thought to heavily favour the incumbent government, a mood of anti-incumbency was sweeping across the country. Inside our rickety rooftop studio, with its commanding view across to the Lok Sabha, a string of seasoned commentators expressed near disbelief that Congress seemed on the verge of victory. And no one was more surprised by this unexpected turn than Sonia Gandhi herself,
who reportedly came close on a number of occasions that morning to vomiting.

  By now, hundreds of jubilant Congress supporters, with bandanas tied tight around their heads, had rushed to her Lutyens bungalow at 10 Janpath in New Delhi, where they let off long strings of firecrackers, banged and clattered their drums and screamed ‘Sonia Jindabad! Sonia Jindabad!’. For this yelling throng, the politically miraculous had just become real.

  This frenzied setting seemed perfect for a quick piece to camera delivered, at deafening volume, over the cries and exploding pyrotechnics. What made it even more atmospheric was the close-up sight of firecrackers spewing flames and sparks as the camera panned from Sonia’s supporters to me. However, the very thing that made the piece to camera look so dramatic also made it mildly hazardous, for these small fountains of fire were spewing sparks into my hair.

  Viewers who watched our report later that night might have wondered why I chose such a climactic moment to coif my hair, at that time a rather extravagant bouffant that cost me the princely sum of 30 rupees from a barber in Khan Market. What they could not quite make out was that a stray spark had embedded itself in my scalp, briefly causing my hair to catch alight. To this day, my scalp bears the scar.

  Still, there was no time to nurse my wounds, since the press pack had been granted rare access inside 10 Janpath for a photo opportunity with the victor. Not for the first time, it helped to have Nik, a multi-storey cameraman, at my side, who got a fabulous series of semi-aerial shots showing the Indian media pressing in on the new prime minister-in-waiting. With Sonia Gandhi standing before them, her thick mascara even darker than ever, the scene seemed almost Fellini-like. Inspired by the moment, I got a little expansive in my scripting. ‘So the paparazzi treatment for the Italian-born leader,’ I shouted. ‘Written off as a lightweight when the campaign began, today she was living la dolce vita.’ It was a textbook case of letting a script-line strangle the real story. Sonia was not revelling in her triumph. Rather, she was completely traumatised, her vita far from dolce.