The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  Ankit was captivated by the anticorruption protests at Jantar Mantar. Dad warned him. Sure, go for a few days, he told Ankit, but don’t let yourself be pulled in. Don’t let politics ruin your plans.

  But Ankit kept going back for more. Day after day. He started volunteering full-time. And when an acceptance letter came from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, he didn’t turn to his father for advice. He didn’t even tell his parents. He went to the protest leader whom he had come to idolize: a skinny, bottlebrush-mustachioed activist named Arvind Kejriwal.

  “What do you want to go to America for—to make money?” Kejriwal asked.

  “No. Not the money really. The experience,” Ankit replied.

  “Experience you want? Then stay with me,” he recalled Kejriwal telling him. “You’ll get the experience of a lifetime.”

  Ankit was already smitten. “He was very sharp, very to the point. He talked data. He talked evidence,” Ankit said.

  Kejriwal’s invitation was all Ankit needed to chuck his grad school plans. This would not be his karma. He would not follow the path his parents had in mind. He would make his own.

  Anyway, the political activists of Dad’s generation had left so much unfinished business. Money had come to rule politics. “Had the issue of corruption been solved by my father’s generation we wouldn’t be fighting today,” Ankit said.

  The protests at Jantar Mantar turned Ankit’s life around in other ways too. It was there that he met Prerna, a journalist with a passion for politics, who was four years younger than he, just as impetuous, big-mouthed, and stubborn. They could talk for hours about politics, about what the country needed, about whether their anticorruption movement was truly democratic or not.

  There was one gulf between them. She belonged to a “backward” caste, he to a “forward” caste. And while their families didn’t forbid them from marrying, there was clearly some unease. Both sides advised them to wait. What’s the rush, they asked. Give it some time.

  Neither Ankit nor Prerna had time for such counsel. Avatars of the new, they were defiant. They decided on a Friday they would get married that Sunday. They cobbled together what little money they had. They bought new clothes worthy of going to temple in. They put down the first and last month’s rent on a tiny, decrepit apartment.

  They were in love. They were young. They were also a bit afraid.

  Prerna said: “We wanted to live with each other.”

  Ankit said: “I had a fear maybe they would brainwash her, convince her you’ll find a better guy.”

  The wedding took place where most cross-caste weddings take place: at a Hindu temple of the reformist Arya Samaj sect not far from Jantar Mantar. In her father’s place, Kejriwal gave away the bride.

  The anticorruption protests spawned the political party that came to be known as the Aam Aadmi Party—literally the commoners’ party. And Ankit, as its social media chief, forced Shashi to pay attention.

  By the time he was campaigning for the prime minister’s job, Modi had spent more than a decade flatly refusing to discuss what happened in his state in 2002. Once he even walked out of a television interview when the host asked him about it.

  He broke his silence in 2013. When journalists from Reuters asked whether he felt regret, he compared himself to a passenger in a car that has accidentally run over a dog. He said that if “someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a chief minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”19

  By that time, a court had cleared him of wrongdoing. He said after the verdict that the entire episode had caused him “pain.”

  It helped his cause when his political opponents mocked his lack of pedigree: What could a tea seller’s son possibly know about running a country, some of them chided. Modi instantly turned that to his favor. He proposed public meetings at one thousand tea stalls around the country.

  Modi’s digital strategist in Bangalore, Shashi, played to the frustrations of India’s young. In a dig at Aam Aadmi, he tweeted: “ ‘the broom’ at best is about basic hygiene, ‘chaai’ on the other hand is inspirational and aspirational.”

  Even if Modi avoided references to 2002, it stuck to him—and often in his favor. One young party strategist told me that the episode had forever sealed Modi’s image as a protector of Hindus. As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi had let Hindus avenge the killings of Hindus on the train at Godhra—and for that, this young man believed, Hindus would be grateful. For Modi, that was “an asset, not a liability,” he said. “He taught the Muslims a lesson.”

  Elections are often about reinvention. In 2014, the parliamentary election in the world’s most populous democracy was in no small part about how the state enabled its people to reinvent themselves—to break free of the past. By now, democracy was no more just top dressing on Indian soil.

  Shashi knew that, unlike the Sangh enthusiasts of his father’s era, their children and grandchildren did not have either the time or patience to go door-to-door rallying voters. They would not waste hours waiting to hear Modi speak at a campaign rally. They would not bother to go to mass meetings. The Internet was how they would join politics.

  On Shashi’s flagship website, www.india272.com, young Sangh sympathizers were invited to share information on who they were, where they lived, how they could help. Their Facebook “likes” and retweets told Shashi’s team exactly which slogans and which speeches worked. Shashi’s team could collect email addresses, Facebook user names, mobile phone numbers: all incredibly rich pieces of data that could be used to reach voters on election day—this year and in years to come.20

  Shashi wanted to build what he called NaMo’s “youth army.” They would be the “firewall,” as he called them, against Modi’s opponents in the public conversation online. Indeed, they pounced on journalists, bloggers, and anyone else who dared criticize him. “Internet Hindus” is what his opponents called them.21

  Shashi’s most ambitious venture was to digitize India’s mammoth voter roll—all 800 million names. He collected information on every voting booth; there are about one thousand voters per booth. He tracked how each booth, the smallest unit of the electorate, had voted in the last election. This gave him a reasonable approximation of its political leanings.

  He digitized whatever nuggets of information he could find on every voter in every state: names, ages, voter identification numbers, whether they lived in a Muslim enclave or a gated community dominated by Brahmin surnames. It took a year to gather it into a database that could then be automatically analyzed. The website drew even more information from potential Modi supporters, including their Facebook friends and their mobile phone numbers.

  No doubt, it was the biggest exercise in political data mining in the world. The effort allowed party workers to zero in on the tiniest voting blocs, getting a handle on exactly where party workers should focus their efforts. This deep vat of data was aimed at the future. It would help to mobilize voters in polls to come. “We’ll know people better. We can target them better,” Shashi said. He declined to give details on how much all this cost.

  Shashi was looking over his shoulder the whole time—and looking at what the kids over at Aam Aadmi were up to.

  They had zeroed in on the rage of an important constituency: young, urban Indians, many of them, like Ankit, angry and impatient with the political class. Their volunteers had grown up with social media. Many had never before bothered to vote.

  I met Ankit in April 2014, in Varanasi, a city in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, in the weeks just before the last round of voting, when his team was scrambling to collect the names and phone numbers of voters in the city’s sixteen hundred polling booths.

  While Shashi’s voter database—covering the entire country—was ready months in advance, Ankit was starting from scratch, for Varanasi alone. The party’s campaign office had
been hastily set up in a former rooming house for college students. Chemistry homework was still taped to the walls. Ankit was sitting on the floor, battling a virus on his laptop. There were no tables or chairs in the social media team office yet. (They came only later that day.) Nor had anyone yet found a broom to sweep the floor. None of this seemed to bother Ankit. He juggled a pair of mobile phones. He goaded his greenhorn volunteers to post videos faster on Facebook. He pushed out hashtags on Twitter. He checked for trolls; one of his main convictions was that Aam Aadmi volunteers not be abusive to their critics online.

  His social media team was made up entirely of digital natives like him, mostly men in their twenties, most of whom had never before even registered to vote. Everything was DIY: campaign videos, Facebook posts. One of their most eye-popping innovations was to blast a fund-raising appeal on Twitter, and then post on their website exactly who gave how much. This was unheard of in India: politicians never declare where they get their money from.

  Ankit looked like he was subsisting on air. He was so small and slight I suspected one of Varanasi’s notorious monkeys could knock him out. He wore a red-and-white peasant’s gamcha around his neck, like his hero Kejriwal

  Ankit was working around the clock. And he was tilting at windmills. Varanasi is Hinduism’s holiest city. It had been a BJP stronghold for fifteen years.

  Aam Aadmi sought to cast itself as something of a postideological party—and in some ways, this reminded me of Obama’s early efforts to blur the traditional left-right divide. It was never really clear what Aam Aadmi would do if it were elected, other than denounce corruption.

  One evening, at the tail end of the campaign season, Ankit and his teammates decided to take a break from their computer screens and head down to the banks of the holy Ganga. They put on their heads the Aam Aadmi’s signature boat-shaped Gandhi topis and wandered down to the ghats. This enraged the BJP workers who had already decamped there. An argument erupted. It got out of hand. Men got in one another’s faces. It was the peak of the hot season. The sun burned their heads. Someone threatened Ankit, to which he remembers asking incredulously. “What, you’re really going to beat us up?”

  Sure enough, a BJP campaigner slapped Ankit on the ear. His head spun. He had to be rushed to the emergency room.

  From this encounter, Ankit drew two important lessons. First, that getting beat up was probably not the best way to make political change. Second, that his fellow Indians could be brutally intolerant. “We need to be more receptive to what others want to say,” he rued. “We are not willing to listen.”

  On election day, noonday’s children weren’t very receptive to Aam Aadmi either. The party won only 4 out of 543 seats. Once mighty Congress won 44. Modi’s BJP won a solid majority.

  Modi had a measurable edge among voters under the age of thirty-five, according to exit polls by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies. Separately, an analysis by the news website IndiaSpend suggested that the BJP did especially well in the five states with the largest share of young, first-time voters.22

  Modi declared on Twitter: “Conquest of India. Good days are ahead.” It was retweeted more than seventy thousand times, making it one of the most widely amplified posts by any world leader, a global survey found.23

  His brand campaign had worked. Those surveyed by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies said they wouldn’t have voted for the BJP had it not been for the promise of Modi as prime minister.

  Young though the electorate was, the parliament they elected was not. Nearly half of them were over the age of fifty-five.24 The share of lawmakers under age forty, which had fallen since independence, reached a record low of 13 percent.

  For all his heat on the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty, Modi’s party was also stuffed with dynasty. Several BJP parliamentarians were sons and daughters of BJP politicians.

  Anupam sent me an email from Mumbai the day after election results were announced. Anupam was sorry not to have been able to vote; he hadn’t lived in Mumbai long enough to register on the rolls. He was relieved that Modi had won, because Modi alone seemed capable of reviving the economy and creating jobs. Still, he felt a twinge of regret. He hadn’t completely bought the Modi rhetoric.

  “These elections are also a bit disappointing as it has moved AAP to the backfoot,” he wrote, referring to the Aam Aadmi Party. “AAP could have been in a better position in fighting against corruption if it had a handful of MPs elected. I hope the AAP movement would not fade in the midst of Modi Wave and would sustain the long journey of its fight for an Aam Aadmi (common man).”

  Modi immediately let it be known who was in charge of the government. He kept a tight leash on bureaucrats, on one occasion letting one of them know when he was inappropriately dressed—and then letting that story spread through the political chatterati in Delhi. He made it clear that he distrusted journalists, whom he saw as part of the Delhi establishment (many of them had been on his back over the violence in Gujarat in 2002). He appointed his loyalists to key posts, including compatriots from the Sangh. His government aggressively went after Greenpeace, which had tirelessly campaigned against the environmental degradation brought on by several big industrial projects. It went as far as stopping Priya Pillai, a Greenpeace advocate and Indian citizen, from leaving the country to speak to British parliamentarians in January 2015; later in the year the government revoked the group’s ability to receive donations from abroad, saying it had “prejudicially affected the economic interest of the state.” Several other nongovernmental organizations came under government scrutiny, including the Ford Foundation, which had backed several scrappy civil society groups and which the government accused of working against “national interest and security,” among other things.

  Noonday’s children had chosen a strongman. Not since Indira Gandhi had Indians elected such an iron-fisted leader.

  Ankit was crestfallen by the election results. “Our overall messaging wasn’t clear,” he said.

  The campaign had been a time of profound personal discovery for him. He had tossed his plans to go to graduate school in America. He did not think he would be happy ever again in a conventional office job. His wife remained sympathetic to the party but returned to a day job. They needed to pay the bills. Ankit could not turn to his parents for help. He had defied their wishes and chosen a life in politics.

  One of his uncles scolded him. “He was like, ‘Man you’ve just screwed it up,’ ” Ankit recalled.

  Ankit shot right back. It upset him that Indians did not appreciate a sense of civic duty, without which, he was convinced, democracy could not prosper.

  “I said, ‘No, the path I’ve chosen is what I wanted to do. If someone was doing the same thing in America, they would be revered. Why not in India?’ ”

  Modi stormed America in the fall of 2014. The U.S. visa ban melted away. There was no way the United States could—or wanted to—keep out the democratically elected leader of the world’s most populous democracy. The White House took pains to say it wanted improved relations with India. The United States was keen to drum up American investment in India and to increase strategic cooperation with this young, ambitious nation next to China.

  Modi curated the trip with an eye to every detail: where he went, whom he was seen with, what he wore. He wore starched white cotton—white is the Hindu color of mourning—for his visit to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, signaling that he could be an ally in the U.S.-led war against terrorism. He invoked ancient Hindu traditions in an address to the United Nations, going as far as to suggest that a yogic lifestyle was an antidote to climate change.

  He made sure to be photographed scattering flower petals at a statue of Mohandas Gandhi in Washington; it was left unsaid that Gandhi was no icon for the Sangh.

  He met not only with President Obama. He made sure to get face time with some of the 2016 presidential hopefuls too, along with some two dozen members of the U.S. Congress and the chief executives of some of the biggest Amer
ican companies, ranging from Boeing to Google.

  And he famously appeared before thousands of his Indian-American fans at an event in New York’s Madison Square Garden, not least to show American lawmakers that he had the support of an increasingly influential political constituency. This was also a vital constituency for Modi. His N.R.I fans could drum up investments for India. They could lobby members of the U.S. Congress. To this audience, Modi spoke of India’s “ancient heritage.” He wore a saffron yellow kurta and matching orange vest. He spoke with arms in the air, telling jokes, rousing the crowd.

  Modi played the N.R.I.s like a fiddle. Many of them were from his native Gujarat. Many belonged to Hindu nationalist groups in the United States. He said they had “glorified the honor of India.”

  Throughout his trip, there was one key message: he was selling a young India. By 2020, the world will be old, Modi observed, but India will be young. He said: “We will be the world’s workforce.”

  He did not specify how he would prepare young Indians for that role. He did not mention that most kids came out of school unable to read or do basic arithmetic. Or how he would create 10 million jobs a year.

  Shortly after his return home to Delhi, his Bharatiya Janata Party came in for a bit of rude awakening. In the Delhi state elections in early 2015, the BJP was routed by the Aam Aadmi Party.

  Modi had stoked aspiration, which made his challenge as India’s leader all the more urgent. His Movado watch seemed to scream it. You too deserve this, even if you are a tea seller’s son. You too can have it.

  In his first few months in office, Modi made it clear he was keenly aware of the demands of a young electorate. He goaded businesses to start manufacturing in the country. He created a new ministry with a mandate to provide job training to young Indians. He seized, rhetorically at least, on the issue of women’s safety that had so energized young Indians, scolding parents for keeping a tight leash on girls and not on their wayward boys. (His government announced a new initiative to prevent female feticide, but it was unclear whether it could do any better than the many well-meaning programs that had come before—and achieved little.)