The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  Modi was among midnight’s later children, born in 1950, shortly after my own parents and just three years after independence, to a small-town Gujarati family of modest means, on the lower rungs of the caste ladder, one of hundreds of communities categorized as “backward.” His father ran a tea stall.

  Modi went to government schools, but his real education came from the camps run by the Sangh. He became one of its full-time organizers before going on to become a BJP politician.

  The world learned his name just months after he was elected chief minister of his native state, when early one morning in February 2002, the smell of burning flesh came from a train station in a small Gujarat town, called Godhra.

  A train carrying members of the Sangh was engulfed in flames when it stopped at Godhra. Inside, fifty people were burned alive. The next day, their charred corpses were displayed in public. It enraged Hindus across the state.

  Over the next few days, an estimated one thousand people were killed in retaliation, most of them Muslims. A Muslim-occupied apartment complex in the middle of a Hindu enclave was set on fire, incinerating those inside. Muslim-owned businesses, including vegetarian restaurants that catered to Hindus, were destroyed. Women were raped in daylight. Not a single person was arrested from among the thousands who rampaged through Muslim neighborhoods on the first day after the train fire. A Gujarati police official told my colleagues with The New York Times that Chief Minister Modi had directed law enforcement to go easy on Hindu protesters rampaging through the streets. One police officer called it “a state-sponsored pogrom.”9

  Human Rights Watch concluded that the Modi administration had not only failed to conduct serious investigations but also intimidated activists seeking accountability and protected perpetrators of the violence.10

  Over the next decade, after painstaking probes by special investigators appointed by India’s Supreme Court, several dozen people were convicted for the massacre of Muslims. One of Modi’s top lieutenants, Maya Kodnani, was convicted of murder, arson, and conspiracy and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison.11

  When the violence broke out, Shashi was living in Dallas, on assignment for an Indian company hired to solve the IT problems of American firms. That was his day job. In the evenings, he had another mission. He was a blogger by the name of “Offstumped,” a cricket term, and the Gujarat violence and its aftermath offered him plenty of material. Shashi was infuriated by what he saw as the liberal media’s biased coverage of the unrest, and especially of Modi’s role. “The media was making it look like something really bad had happened,” he said.

  In fact, he said, what happened in Gujarat in 2002 was not uncommon. India was prone to violent eruptions, he said. He gave the example of incidents during his childhood in Hyderabad. When there was political trouble, his math teacher, who was a Muslim man, did not leave his Muslim neighborhood in the old walled city. Math class was canceled. When the troubles died down, the teacher returned. Math class resumed.

  “Political violence is something we grew up with,” Shashi told me.

  It was one of the few times I felt truly like a foreigner in India. Here was a man of my generation, smart and worldly. The way he explained his country rattled me. Murderous rage was described as normal, something to grow up with.

  Over the years, India has allowed chauvinists of all stripes to carry on with impunity. Even the Hindu–Muslim violence that marked India’s birth, at midnight, on August 15, 1947, has never been accounted for.

  Likewise, in 1984, after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards, many of her supporters went on a killing spree against minority Sikhs, notably in Delhi, the nation’s capital. The anti-Sikh pogrom left an official death toll of three thousand. Repeated government commissions were appointed to investigate. Some of them pointed to the likely involvement of Congress party leaders. None were convicted, and many rose politically for the next twenty years.12

  Then came the carnage of Gujarat.

  In 2005, the government of the United States, in a most unusual step, barred Modi from visiting the United States in connection to his role in the Gujarat violence.13

  The visa ban had no impact on Modi’s political fate. He was easily reelected as Gujarat’s chief minister. As I wrote in the Times in 2007, it seemed as though his “charismatic, often pugnacious,” style of politicking would be “a force to be reckoned with in the future.”14

  I trailed him again eighteen months later, when he was campaigning for his party in the 2009 national parliamentary elections. His supporters had gathered on a sports field, and hundreds of them had covered their faces in Modi masks. It was as though Modi were every man, everywhere.

  Modi electrified audiences. He spoke without notes. He was brash and confident. His jokes could be snide. At one rally, he compared the ruling Congress party, the nation’s oldest political group, to an aging woman. At another, he mocked Manmohan Singh, the incumbent prime minister, for reaching out to the American president for help in staunching terrorist networks that operated in next-door Pakistan.

  “O-baaaa-maaa,” Modi shouted, in a whining child’s voice. “O-baaa-maaa. Our neighbor has come and attacked us. Do something!”

  The crowd laughed and hollered. Soon, the entire field of supporters was crying, “O-baaa-maa.” All bearing Modi’s face over their own.15

  Shashi is of medium build and medium height. He wears stern black-rimmed glasses. Where Modi is a powerful orator who speaks with arms outstretched, Shashi talks so sparingly one gets the impression that he doesn’t much like to talk.

  Shashi found his voice not on the campaign stump but on the Internet, as Offstumped became well-known among Sangh followers in the Indian diaspora and, soon, among BJP politicians. He railed against the Congress party and its leader, Indira Gandhi’s Italian-born daughter-in-law, Sonia. He was aghast when Congress defeated the BJP in 2004—and again in 2009.

  By 2011, he became part of a small, obscure group of Modi backers that quietly explored the prospects of a NaMo prime ministerial bid in 2014.

  If Modi had the instinct for politics, Shashi, a quarter century his junior, had the skills to leverage him to a big, young audience. Shashi was steeped in the language of twenty-first-century American-style elections. He had the technology chops to put the latest data-mining tools to work. He also understood how to link Modi’s political fortunes to young Indians’ hope for their own fortunes—all by bypassing the journalists and intellectuals who had dominated Delhi’s political circles for years. Shashi referred to the views of Modi’s liberal critics as “elitist secular extremism.”16

  In October 2011, Shashi was coming home for a family wedding in Hyderabad when an invitation came from the Gujarat chief minister’s office: Would he like to come meet Modi?

  Shashi brought a gift to that first meeting: news clippings that he had collected from the 1893 visit of Swami Vivekananda to the United States. Vivekananda was a Hindu monk who had charmed America with his tall orange turbans and his lectures on ancient Hindu philosophy. He was the first modern Hindu evangelist—and one of Modi’s heroes.

  Shashi recognized a fellow introvert in Modi. They sat facing each other for several minutes in awkward silence—the controversial chief minister and his digital defender from Texas. Two generations of Sangh loyalists.

  The Vivekananda clippings helped break the ice. Slowly, Modi began to open up, offering Shashi an early glimpse into his ambitions. By then, the BJP had lost two consecutive parliamentary elections. If it was to have a chance in the next one, Modi said, it would need a national leader, someone who could rouse a mass audience. It would also need to find an issue beyond identity politics, Modi averred; the party could no longer rely on the Ram temple movement to rally the electorate, certainly not the youth.

  The meeting lasted thirty minutes, Shashi recalled. He left Modi’s office energized. “It was clear there was something going on in his mind,” Shashi said. He was thinking big. He had national ambitions.

>   This was a critical time in Indian politics. By late 2011, India was beginning to feel the effects of the global financial crisis. The booming optimism of just a few years ago plummeted. The Congress-led coalition government was flailing. It had not pushed through the economic reforms that foreign investors sought. Its leaders were blasted by one corruption scandal after another. Tens of thousands of people were demonstrating in the streets.

  Modi’s star was rising. At the end of 2012, he won his third consecutive term as chief minister of Gujarat.

  This is when Shashi made the leap. He had recently moved back to Bangalore with his wife and their two children. He now quit his day job. He threw himself into launching the political start-up, dedicated to advancing Modi’s national bid. It was bankrolled by a Modi supporter. It was independent of the party machine. That way, Shashi said, it could be more agile. He once described the model as something between an American Super PAC and an Al Qaeda cell.17

  Early on, Modi told Shashi that it was imperative to laser-focus their efforts on young voters, including those who would otherwise have no interest in the party, or even in politics. “His whole thought process was ‘We need to have a direct connect with the young generation,’ ” Shashi said.

  In the past, age had been a relatively unimportant factor in shaping how Indians voted; it mattered much less than, say, what caste they belonged to, or whether they lived in city or country. In the 2014 race, the demands of young voters began to shape the political agenda—and the medium through which politicians sought to reach them.

  The narrative of aspiration would be at the heart of the 2014 election. For the first time, candidates would vie to be seen as ordinary.

  This would doom Rahul Gandhi, the great-grandson of India’s founding prime minister, Nehru; the grandson of Indira Gandhi; and the son of her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi and his widow, Sonia, who led the party. By 2014, it was a burning hot liability to be seen as having been born to lead. It didn’t help that Rahul, Congress’s presumed prime ministerial candidate, displayed little acumen for politics. And even though he was forty-three years old at the time of the election, he did little to address the ambitions of the young. His party had presided over nearly ten years of galloping economic growth but could not boast of having created the jobs that India’s young electorate clamored for; graft was endemic in the Congress-led coalition government; and when young people took to the streets to protest a ruthless gang-rape in Delhi, in the winter of 2012, Rahul did not seize on it to express solidarity with his country’s young. Critics said he was politically tone-deaf. Modi referred to Rahul as shehzada—prince. It dripped with deprecation.

  Meanwhile, NaMo cast himself as the very avatar of aspiration, a mirror to the aspirations of Indian youth. He branded himself as an ordinary man, a chai-wallah seeking to vanquish the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. His campaign made it known that he was a friend to business and strict with bureaucrats, and that he had a wide chest (fifty-six inches). He promised a muscular India: safe, strong, and prosperous. “Good days are ahead” was his slogan.

  His campaign deftly turned the election from what it actually was—a race to fill 543 seats in the lower house of parliament—to a referendum to elect NaMo. Never mind that many in his coterie, including those who were elected to parliament, were old BJP hands, many of them with criminal records or linked to graft. (At one point, Modi let it slip that God had chosen him to do God’s work.)

  Modi repeatedly reminded voters that he was self-made, unlike Rahul Gandhi. He eschewed the Indian politician’s standard white kurta and pajamas, choosing instead to campaign in stylishly long kurtas of many colors and show off his Movado watch. The message was clear: You too can rise. You too can have this. He projected himself as a pro-business leader who alone could usher in double-digit economic growth and put Indians to work. His record in Gujarat sent a message that he would guard the interests of the Hindu majority.

  The Congress symbol is the upheld palm of a hand. You could see it as a hand that gives blessing or a hand that says, “Stop.” The BJP symbol is an open-petaled lotus, on which Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, traditionally appears.

  Lifting a page from the Obama playbook, Modi used social media to target those who had not been traditionally engaged in politics—young, urban people. Shashi helped Modi crowd-source ideas for his first big speeches, enabling him to tell his supporters what they wanted to hear. Throughout the campaign, Modi spoke repeatedly about issues that would resonate with the young: job skills, jobs, prosperity.

  Ankit was precisely the sort of voter whom Shashi was trying to win over. Young. Hindu. Upper caste. His parents had long backed the Bharatiya Janata Party. His brother loved NaMo. Ankit himself distrusted politicians. He had never voted before the 2014 election. He didn’t see the point.

  Ankit grew up in Patna, just like Anupam, the math prodigy who made it to the IIT, though Anupam’s gritty working-class mohalla was not the sort of place Ankit would dare venture into after dark. Ankit grew up comfortable, went to private schools, moved to Delhi, and became a software programmer. He planned to go to America for graduate school, and then return home to take care of his parents. His path was conventional, much like Shashi’s had been.

  Until a strong wind came and blew those plans away.

  It was called the Aam Aadmi Party, a rambunctious new force that sprang from the zeitgeist of Ankit’s impatient generation and upset the political narrative of his age—at least for a moment. The Aam Aadmi movement sought to speak to those who had become revolted by the established order—most of all, by corruption. Politicians were thieves, went the Aam Aadmi mantra. They kept none of their hifalutin promises; they fattened their pockets; they needed to be booted out.

  Aam Aadmi branded itself as an alternative to the two dominant poles of Indian politics: a left-leaning Congress tied to the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty and a conservative Hindu nationalist BJP. It was an upstart. Still, Shashi knew he had to keep an eye on Aam Aadmi. It instinctively knew how to appeal to young, urban voters.

  The party had no deep-pocketed backers. It had no established political organization. It had no track record. Its rallying cry was to rid the body politic of corruption.

  Its logo embodied exasperation with the political order, which also happened to be the starkest caste mark of all: the sweeper’s broom.

  All this was central to both its rise and fall.

  Ankit was twenty-seven years old when this movement swept him up. It forced him to look at his own destiny and the destiny of his country with new eyes. It led him to squander his career plans—and eventually, his parents’ blessings. Ankit dropped everything to direct the Aam Aadmi’s social media push, which for a brand-new organization with no money and no organization was hugely important.

  Before this, Ankit hadn’t been just uninterested in politics. He had been revolted by it. And this stemmed from the stories he had heard since childhood. Ankit’s father, Atul, had been an activist when he was a young man. He had joined the anti–Indira Gandhi agitation of the 1970s, when public anger escalated over unemployment, rising prices, and graft. “Total revolution,” that agitation had promised, only to be met with Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency rule.

  His father’s political activism turned out to be useful. He founded a company that supplied security guards to a variety of organizations in Bihar and its neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, including to government offices. His business partner was a BJP legislator in the Bihar state assembly. He also became something of a consigliere to local politicians, which meant that Ankit had a crucial backstage view of political deal making.

  Over the years, in the family drawing room, Dad and his friends conferred over who should be fielded for which seat, which caste constituencies could be lured with whom, which rivals could be defeated. There, Ankit heard about who stole ballot boxes and how dummy candidates could be used. He had a pretty good idea of how much cash and liquor was disbursed before election day. In Bihar, as elsewhere i
n India, accused and convicted criminals were sometimes elected to office. Some wielded power from jail.

  Politics was a part of the morality tale of Ankit’s childhood. His father had been steeped in it. And he wanted his son to have no part in it, which was fine by Ankit. He thought of politics as foul. “It was one of those things I hated,” Ankit said.

  Then, in the summer of 2011, as he was studying for the GREs, Ankit heard about thousands of people gathering day after day at Jantar Mantar, Delhi’s protest mecca. Ankit was not much of a protest goer. But these protests hit home. They were about the one thing that affected the life of every Indian: corruption. Every day in the papers, Ankit was reading about spectacular cases. One politician was accused of pocketing huge sums of money from building contracts during the preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Another was accused of selling mobile-phone-spectrum licenses at low prices in exchange for kickbacks. Few political parties seemed immune to graft. In the southern state of Karnataka, an anticorruption board concluded that the chief minister, a BJP man, had granted illegal iron-ore-mining contracts.

  All of these scandals magnified the corruption that ordinary citizens faced all the time. Once, when Ankit went to file a police report for a stolen phone, the only way to avoid a bribe was to name-drop a politician friend of his father. Even the destitute people of Jharkhand, where there was nothing to eat if the rains were late, were not immune. Mani came home from her maid’s job in Gurgaon one summer to learn that her mother had to share a portion of her widow’s pension with a local bank official. In Gurgaon, a traffic cop once suggested to Mani’s boss, Supriya, that she could give him a bit of cash instead of paying a costlier speeding ticket. Corruption had so seeped into the marrow of public life that it led a group of disgruntled citizens to create a website—called, simply, www.ipaidabribe.com—to document their encounters with crooked civil servants.18