MANVENDRA SINGH
CAMPAIGN DIARY
Chronicle of an Election Fought and Lost
Contents
Dedication
Map
Introduction
March 2009
April 2009
May 2009
Barmer Characters
Footnotes
March 2009
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
For the people of Barmer, Jaisalmer and Shergarh,
who made the dream a reality
Introduction
It all began on a Saturday in 1999, when the Kargil War was winding to a close. I don’t remember the date, but I remember everything else about that day because that was the day I ‘began’ to enter politics. ‘Began’ is correct because unlike most political premieres, which are pre-programmed, prepared and practised, mine was accidental and completely unchoreographed.
Late in the afternoon on that Saturday in 1999, I requested a courtesy call on L. K. Advani, then Union home minister. Since it was a weekend, I didn’t have to wait long to get an appointment, and as I entered Mr Advani’s chamber I hadn’t even mentally rehearsed what I’d speak about. After the pleasantries, I steered the conversation towards the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. He seemed confident of the BJP/NDA doing well. I asked about the Rajasthan seats, and if all the candidates had been identified. When he said no, I said I had a request to make. He asked me to continue, and I opened up, not in the most coherent manner, but I still managed to say what I wanted. And it was essentially about the Barmer Lok Sabha seat, which neither the Jan Sangh nor the BJP had ever won. This made the party import candidates from elsewhere, who would lose and then return to their districts and thus not help the BJP establish itself and expand in Barmer. ‘My request, Sir, is that the BJP get a local to contest, and even if she or he loses at least there is somebody to prepare for the future,’ I said. ‘The party can then invest in that person for the future, which can only help the overall growth,’ I added. Mr Advani was silent, his eyes seemed as attentive as his ears. And then, without hesitating, he asked me, flatly, ‘Would you be interested?’ I was taken aback. After a few moments I pulled myself together and mumbled, ‘If there is no other local claimant . . .’ And with those words I began my journey into politics.
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Being born into a political household gives one an early and prolonged exposure to the vagaries of the political life and the rigours of an election campaign in India. My first memory is of Indira Gandhi’s ‘garibi hatao’ election in 1971, in which princely and titled families were among her main targets. An aunt was contesting as an independent from the Jodhpur Lok Sabha seat, and her symbol was a very graceful camel. I remember that I used to have a clutch of camel labels pinned on to my shirt during that election campaign. There was also a neon-lit camel on the ramparts of the Jodhpur fort, and one evening it lit up to show a camel silhouette without a neck or head. Our whole family was shocked, but especially the children. After endless discussions we, the children, finally came to the conclusion that the worst people had to be Congressmen since they didn’t even spare innocent camels—imagine what they’d do to us little human beings if they found us alone. That incident was a political awakening of sorts, even if my age was still in the single digits.
The next big shock was the declaration of Emergency in June 1975. Our social life changed after that, even for the children. My brother and I ended up spending the longest part of our school holidays in Gwalior with my cousins for they were even worse off than us. Their father was in jail, as was the Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia. There was a feeling of being treated differently, of being constantly under threat.
Then came the euphoria of the 1977 election results—we were on a school trek to an Ajmer lake, the Hindi teacher had the radio going late into the night, and we wouldn’t sleep until we had heard the full results. At that early hour, when the final results came in, and our tired eyes began to close, the stars above us shone brighter . . .
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I came into politics after higher education abroad followed by many years of journalism in India. I hadn’t really thought of a career in politics until 1990, when the late Bhairon Singh Shekhawat offered me the opportunity to contest an Assembly election in Rajasthan. I replied that I had no first-hand experience of politics, so this decision wasn’t mine alone to take. He then asked my father, who told him that I needed to get a life first, a proper job, and only then should I think about joining politics. This was repeated to me a few days later and I mumbled my approval.
This episode must have remained in the recesses of my memory for, a decade later, when I was asked to contest by Mr Advani, I knew I had fulfilled those conditions—I had established myself as a journalist, I had a wife and children, and I’d made a life for myself. And while there was never any parental pressure on me to join or not join politics, I knew that they would approve. When I reported to my father my conversation with Mr Advani, and that I would be willing to contest if there was no local claimant, all he said was, ‘Good. I think you’ll make a good candidate.’ That was all I needed to hear, to know that my father felt I had succeeded in ‘making a life’ and was now ready to go into politics.
So my first electoral experience was the 1999 general election. I wasn’t prepared for it in terms of logistics, people or party network. I only knew the constituency as a home, as my village, Jasol, is part of it. There are various other villages in the constituency that I’m connected to through family relationships both in Barmer and Jaisalmer districts. And there are also many people from Shergarh who had worked with my grandfather, so that gave me a little social insight into that part of Jodhpur district that was part of the Barmer Lok Sabha seat. At its peak, before the last round of delimitation in 1975, the Barmer Lok Sabha constituency was larger in area than Sri Lanka. I tried to cover as much of the constituency as I could in the limited time available to me before polling day. I lost that election, but it was a tremendous learning experience, in terms of geography, sociology and psychology. I felt that I’d pushed to the best of my abilities, and I had come within a whisker of winning.
I returned to that same North Block office of Mr Advani and expressed my regret at not having won the seat for the party. He waved it off, and said, ‘You’ve done well—now live up to the expectations we have from you.’
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For the next five years I was obsessed with living up to those expectations. Friends in Delhi would ask if I was nursing my seat, and I’d reply: ‘No, actually I’m bottle-feeding it.’ That was how involved I became, to the point that the 2004 election campaign was completely micromanaged by me. From the star campaigners to the last polling booth, I was involved in every decision. And my margin of victory in 2004 was the highest of any election in any seat in Rajasthan, ever.
By the time 2009 came around, the Barmer constituency had changed—the delimitation exercise had removed two Assembly segments that had benefited me enormously in 2004. Well-wishers kept telling me to shift to another constituency, that Barmer had become too risky and that more than a lakh of BJP votes were now in the Jodhpur Lok Sabha constituency. I couldn’t dispute their reasoning, but my problem is that I feel so much a part of the desert, my heart and soul are there in those vast open, sandy spaces . . . The searing heat, and the endless hours on the road take a toll, but the relationships I had built up with people in my constituency were very precious to me. And sleeping on the desert sands under the stars at night is as cleansing an experience as there can ever be. I was born in Jodhpur, my roots are in Barmer, and I have close relatives in Jaisalmer. I couldn’t imagine myself in politics anywhere else.
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Life as an MP can be stressful. The demands of the constituency range from panchayat-level expectations to truly transnational concerns. Voters have no qualms about asking the MP for something that is actually the responsibility of the panchayat or the municipal councillor. In their belief, every elected person is answerable for all their needs. And an MP even more so since ‘you know Delhi’. This makes for an extensive list of demands, and not always reasonable ones. But then there is the other side of being an MP, where the involvement in events and policies, both national and international, happens at a level that can only invigorate the mind. Politics takes its toll when the stressful aspect significantly outweighs the more stimulating, rewarding aspects of being an MP. Many a friend in Parliament complains about the thankless nature of the job.
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My term as an MP from 2004 to 2009 was marked by three big events. At the end of January 2006, my father organized a jatha for a visit to the Hinglaj Mata temple in Baluchistan, in Pakistan. The Pakistan government gave permission for two Indian vehicles to cross the border at Munabao in Barmer district of Rajasthan, and the rest of the yatris accompanying us from India were to board hired transport on the Pakistani side. It was the first visit of its kind since 1947, and the mood on both sides of the border was euphoric to say the least.
The second big event was that, for the first time since 1965, India and Pakistan reopened train services across the border through the desert. This happened with in a month after returning from the Hinglaj Mata temple. Reopening the train service was the second item on the manifesto we had presented for the Barmer election in 2004. Water was, of course, the first item. It was a sad and telling reflection of the human versus political priorities that prevail in our system, that an international train route could be restarted before potable water could reach every village.
The third big event was the devastating flood of July–August 2006 that ravaged parts of Barmer and Jaisalmer districts—areas that are usually afflicted by drought and acute water shortage. It taught me a lot about human nature as well as the peculiar phenomenon of disaster tourism. It also opened my eyes to the scavenging nature of the administration—there are people in government who make a profit from disasters and relief operations, and the 2006 floods in the desert were no exception. I thought my performance in organizing and delivering relief to the flood-hit areas had won me ample goodwill in my constituency. It was only later that I realized that politics is not only about performance or goodwill. In fact, it was only after I had been in politics for a couple of years that I realized the complexities and difficulties of politics as a profession, and how little people know about what we do and what it entails.
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My years as a journalist had taught me to look for—and at—a story every day. As a politician who had also been a journalist, I often thought that readers would find it interesting and informative to read a story about twenty-four hours in the life of a neta, and that everything a politician needs to do should be aired for the people to see. But no journal seemed interested in the idea. And then the idea of this diary was born, during a chance conversation with Ranjana Sengupta of Penguin. I told her I’d never kept a diary in my life. ‘Be yourself,’ she said. And so I started this diary, religiously writing it every evening during my campaign for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections in Barmer.
Since the last parliamentary election I had stood for in 2004, delimitation had taken away large numbers of the voters who had supported me; the area of the constituency had shrunk; and the political scenario, both nationally and in Rajasthan, had changed—the BJP was out of power both in Rajasthan and at the Centre. Only the searing desert heat during the election campaign remained unchanged.
The following pages are my personal record of the Great Indian Election Circus—the gruelling pace of an election campaign, the chaos and colour, the rumours and intrigues, the rivalries and infighting, the human relationships and the political strategies that I encountered and experienced as I criss-crossed my constituency over two months in the countdown to polling day in May 2009. I hope this record of my election campaign in Barmer Lok Sabha constituency will give a glimpse of how democracy works from the grassroots upwards. I hope, too, that it will give some idea of the rigours as well as the rewards of political life.
March 2009
7 March 2009
The morning phone call from Prakashji had carried a hint about the declaration of candidates today. As the Organisation General Secretary of the BJP in Rajasthan, he is one of the key people in the process of selection of candidates. He said there would be a meeting in Delhi later in the afternoon to decide on the first list of candidates from Rajasthan, and asked if I was still hell-bent on the Barmer constituency. I told him that had there been even one per cent change of mind the party would have been the first to be informed. He sounded relieved and said that it was exactly what he had been saying.
Over the past couple of months there had been much discussion, in public and within the party, that I should be the candidate for either the Jodhpur or the Jalore parliamentary seat. The reasoning was that, since delimitation had taken place, these two neighbouring seats ‘favoured’ a Rajput candidate. Constitutionally, India is supposed to have a delimitation of constituencies every decade. This is meant to follow the census and the changing demographic profile of the country. Population increases and people migrate. So the Parliament of India must reflect that demographic reality, while maintaining the same number of seats in Parliament and in state Assemblies.* As a result of the 2001 Census, the Delimitation Commission made a new constituency sketch of the country, affecting its 543 Lok Sabha and 4120 Assembly constituencies across India. Some seats disappeared, new ones were born, while some got reserved for Scheduled Castes, or Tribes, depending on the size of those communities. And some seats got de-reserved too.
The old Barmer Parliament seat saw two new Assembly segments born. Which meant that somewhere in Rajasthan two Assembly seats would not exist any more, so as to maintain the number of state Assembly seats at 200. Since each Parliament seat in Rajasthan has eight Assembly segments, the Barmer parliamentary seat would thus have to cede two of them to remain with in the limit of eight seats. The seats ceded from Barmer to Jodhpur were two extremely favourable Assembly segments, from where I’d been given an enormous lead in the 2004 elections. Other parliamentary seats in Rajasthan had also seen significant changes following the delimitation process. Jalore, for example, from where former home minister Buta Singh had contested once Punjab had become impossible for him after 1984, had now lost its reserved status, since Bikaner parliamentary seat now had a higher percentage of Scheduled Castes. The famous actor Dharmendra, thus, lost his chance to contest from Bikaner again, since it was now a reserved seat, and a general candidate could contest Jalore since it was now de-reserved.
In political perception, both Jodhpur and Jalore favoured a Rajput candidate, but the last thing I wanted was to be typecast as a ‘community candidate’. That had always been the basis of my politics in Barmer, and I was convinced that this was the only way forward. The sociology and demographics of the Barmer parliamentary seat are such that the winner needs to break out of caste–community limitations and forge a larger support base. There is, for one, a strong traditionally Congress vote bank in Barmer and a Muslim population that is upwards of 20 per cent.
After all these dialogues over caste arithmetic, it would be a relief to finally get confirmation about my candidature. The process involves consultations that begin roughly at the tehsil level and, through stages, make it all the way to the central office of the BJP on Ashoka Road, New Delhi. There has to be unanimity along the way for the candidature to go smoothly, but since I had been the only local claimant since 1999, I didn’t imagine there would be much of a problem. But, with the omnipresent bogey of social engineering, nothing can ever be a certainty.
I was in Jaisalmer when Prakashji called in the morning. After his call, when I set off on
my rounds of the Jaisalmer Assembly segments, it was with a more purposeful gait. I had already covered the entire Chohtan area, and most of the Pachpadra over the past few days. Polling was still more than two months away, but it is always good to get as much of the area under the belt as possible. Today’s round began near the main Indira Gandhi Canal. I would do a counter-clockwise move towards the Ramgarh area, and then head back to Jaisalmer. The rounds had been planned in such a manner that I could reach Jaisalmer at night, for a good shower and a clean bed. I have found these two the most essential requirements during a political tour or an election campaign.
The first stop was at Nehdai and, as is the practice in these villages that are located along the canal, the meeting was held in the anteroom of a shop, a kind of all-purpose village grocery store. This shop, because of the political bent of its owner, also served as a meeting place for my supporters. But such meetings also cause delays in the programme through the rest of the day. People start coming only when word is sent out from the shop that the candidate has arrived. And until the host announces that no more people are expected to come, one cannot leave or even express fears that subsequent meetings will get delayed. That would be taken as an affront. I make it a point to attend the first meeting of the day punctually, as scheduled, and most times I have managed to keep to that rule. Thereafter, the delay is not from my side—at least, that is what my conscience tells me! However, reaching on time also has its drawbacks, as the Nehdai meeting proved once again. Nobody reaches the meeting venue as per schedule since there is a general perception that ‘politicians are never on time’. So despite one’s best efforts, one cannot keep to the schedule. By the time we managed to leave Nehdai, it was well-nigh lunchtime.
The local MLA, Chotu Singh, was with me, and I suggested that he send his car ahead to the next meeting at Mandha. It was only when we stopped under the scanty shade of a khejdi tree with a kair bush nearby that I told him that we were stopping for lunch. Both the khejdi and the kair are vital to life in the desert, for while the former provides a delicious bean, the latter produces a berry that makes great pickles as well as a vegetable dish. Chotu Singh is a diminutive man, and I remembered that during his election campaign, Rajnath Singh, the national president of the BJP, had said in his speech, ‘Your candidate looks exactly as he is named!’
Campaign Diary Page 1