by Barkha Dutt
In his classic study, W. H. Morris Jones echoed this argument by pointing out that Congress leaders were so (simultaneously) diverse and dominant that Opposition parties had been reduced to playing the role of pressure groups whose best hope was to address themselves to ‘like minded groups’ within the party. In other words, in some ways intra-party democracy ensured that the Congress was both the ruling party and the main Opposition. And from all these differences and heated arguments would emerge a centrist consensus for governing India. After Nehru’s death in 1964, Rajni Kothari said, ‘Nehru’s life-work was not so much of having started a revolution as of having given rise to a consensus.’
That changed in 1967 just after his daughter Indira first became prime minister. Just a few months earlier the Syndicate, whose influence had risen during Nehru’s dying years, had chosen her as the party chief in the mistaken belief that she could be controlled. She upset every calculation by going over the heads of the regional bosses and splitting the Congress in 1969. She nationalized banks and scrapped the privileges doled out to the country’s erstwhile royalty. With her brilliant use of the ‘garibi hatao’ slogan she lurched to the left of the political spectrum and sought to speak to the poor voter directly without her political fortunes being mediated by provincial strongmen. The creation of Bangladesh and the defeat of Pakistan in 1971 further consolidated her electoral triumphs. But her personal ascent was accompanied by the weakening of the party organization. The Syndicate was routed; state governments now got their (marching) orders from the prime minister’s office in Delhi. Her misuse of President’s Rule—the imposition of central rule in the provinces by throwing out elected governments—was the clearest example of her growing authoritarianism. In the early years after Independence, during the tenures of her father and his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, President’s Rule was imposed eight times. During the periods when Indira was prime minister, from 1966-1977 and from 1980-1984, President’s Rule was imposed forty-eight times. She began to see the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution as an obstacle to her self-aggrandizement. Her decision to impose the Emergency and curb basic freedoms was the culmination of this process. She may have been the party’s ‘strongest’ prime minister but it was she who gave birth to India’s first non-Congress government. After her defeat in 1977, the Janata Party alliance, an unlikely coalition of socialists, right-wing groups and farmers, led India for the next two years.
Interestingly, though Priyanka reminded people of Indira, she told me that it was her brother who had taken after her. ‘His understanding of politics is really very good, much better than he is given credit for. And that, I think, comes from our grandmother.’
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In case you’re wondering here’s what happened with my ‘exclusive’ interview with Rahul. Some time after Priyanka had first broached the idea, we set up a time, date and a venue. Producers, lighting boys, set designers were dispatched to discuss and finalize camera settings. Black cloth was bought to block the sunlight beaming through the windows of Delhi’s Jawahar Bhawan, the chosen venue. Then came the first postponement. Let’s do it after the big decision (whether or not he would officially be the prime ministerial candidate), his sister said to me. Then the second set of dates was locked in. And later the third.
Finally, and mysteriously, the interview was given to my competitor at Times Now whose otherwise rambunctious persona was oddly mild-mannered during his conversation with Rahul. Embarrassing questions about his brother-in-law’s contentious land deals were not asked. Rahul still flunked the interview and became the butt of a million Twitter jokes and social media memes. What’s revealing is that his minders thought he did well. On the evening the interview aired on television, by way of an apology, I got a call from one of Priyanka’s aides. She wanted me to come by and interview Rahul the next afternoon. But I was requested to record and embargo the airing of the conversation by a week. Why, I asked, by this time absolutely furious with the unprofessionalism I had experienced. ‘We want the full impact of the first interview to play out,’ she said, utterly oblivious of the disaster it had been. It was only after the gigantic backlash on social media that Rahul’s team realized how poorly he had performed. At three that morning I woke up to a beep on my phone: ‘Mr Gandhi has been called for an urgent meeting, we will have to postpone the interview’, the message read.
II
In February 2012, I met Nitin Gadkari for a breakfast interview at his residence in Delhi. Gadkari, a portly, cheerful leader was, at the time, president of the BJP. Being from Nagpur—where the headquarters of the RSS are—his influence was seen to derive directly from his closeness to the Sangh. Over poha and sabudana khichdi—Gadkari was an unabashed foodie—we had a long freewheeling conversation. Often seen whizzing about on the streets of Nagpur on his two-wheeler, Gadkari was an old-school politician, politically incorrect and unflappable in the face of the most awkward questions. I remember being taken aback when he freely admitted on a television show, just after he had become a union minister, that he’d flown in a chef from Mumbai at a salary of Rs 50,000 per month to cook his favourite Maharashtrian dishes. When the bookkeeping of his business group was under the scanner he was pugnacious and combative. He never avoided a question.
This morning, however, one of my questions made him uncomfortable. I asked him whether as party president he saw Narendra Modi’s defiantly staying away from the campaign trail in Uttar Pradesh (where elections were imminent) as an act of ‘indiscipline’. Modi was furious with Gadkari for giving Sanjay Joshi—a man he hated—the role of managing the UP polls. Modi had fallen out with Joshi after a fierce power struggle in the nineties and blamed him for his virtual banishment from Gujarat to Delhi back then.
Now the tables had turned. A few months ago, Modi had already boycotted the party’s national executive meet in protest. He had made it clear to the party seniors that he would not address any rallies—in what was the most critical state in the country for the BJP’s electoral fortunes—unless Joshi was sacked. Gadkari fumbled for words to explain Modi’s absence. Unable to come up with a plausible explanation, Gadkari revealed that he and Modi had not even been communicating on the issue directly. Instead, they were talking through a go-between—Balbir Punj, a veteran party leader. A few months later Gadkari had to capitulate. Joshi was removed from the party’s decision-making body and Modi finally deigned to attend a BJP conclave in Mumbai. The primacy of the Gujarat chief minister was evident. He was able to challenge the authority of both the RSS and the party leadership because he knew, and they knew, he was their only passport to seize power in Delhi.
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For Rs 600 you can now take a day-long tour of Vadnagar—a nondescript town in north Gujarat’s Mehsana district made famous by its most famous resident, the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi. Organized by the state’s tourism corporation, the tour is called ‘A Rise from Modi’s Village’. It begins in Ahmedabad and includes a stop at Modi’s simple, one-storeyed ancestral home as well as the railway station where Modi used to help his father sell tea from the age of six. You can, if you wish, also drop by at the Vadnagar Prathmik Kumar Shala where he studied and meet former classmates who recount childhood stories about Modi. The package throws in a mineral water bottle and a traditional Gujarati lunch for free and even offers a visit to the Sharmistha Lake where Modi used to swim every morning before cycling to school and where his childhood adventures included learning how to ‘catch a crocodile’. The tourism corporation’s website describes the railway station as ‘the most unforgettable place’ in the context of his humble origins and his extraordinary journey from Vadnagar to Race Course Road in Delhi. The very existence of the tour, reported to be a big hit, points to the cult status Modi has achieved in the eyes of many of his countrymen, an unusual achievement for an active politician. It also showcases the political leitmotif of his life that he has used to good effect—the struggle from poverty to power.
Three years after India attained indep
endence, Narendra Modi, the third of six children, was born to Damodardas and Heeraben in a lower middle class family which belonged to the ‘ghanchi-teli’ caste, traditionally a community of oil-pressers included in India’s official list of Other Backward Classes (OBC).
At the age of seventeen he left home to join the RSS, where he rose through the ranks. In 1987 he joined the BJP and soon became a key office-bearer of its Gujarat unit. In an irony that neither men could have forecast, among his earliest high profile assignments was the organizing of L. K. Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya. It was Advani who elevated him to the rank of national general secretary. This was several years before the guru–shishya relationship that Advani and Modi had initially settled into would collapse.
Interestingly, other than Deve Gowda—and after him, Modi—India’s prime ministers have mostly been upper-caste Hindus from north India. This clearly represented a social skew but if Modi believed that he didn’t say much about it. In fact, throughout the election campaign of 2014, there were only a couple of moments when he made mention of his caste antecedents. One of these was in Uttar Pradesh when he was craftily able to make Priyanka sound like she was slighting his caste. During the campaign’s final moments, Modi took the war to Amethi, the home turf of the Gandhi family and the parliamentary seat that Rahul represented. Here, while campaigning for BJP candidate Smriti Irani, he castigated Priyanka for saying, mockingly, ‘Who?’ when asked by reporters whether Rahul needed to worry about Smriti. Terming it her ‘ahankar’ (arrogance) Modi bellowed, ‘I will tell you who she is—she is my younger sister,’ immediately raising the political importance of Smriti within the party superstructure. At his rally he matched Priyanka jibe for jibe and made a reference to Rajiv Gandhi as well.
When Priyanka criticized him for ‘neech rajneeti’, referring quite obviously to what she alleged was the ‘low level’ of political discourse he was engaging in, Modi seized the swipe and converted it to his political advantage by suggesting she meant his caste. Referring to his birth into a ‘lower’ caste community, he said: ‘You can insult Modi as much as you like but do not insult the lower castes. I was dubbed a tea-seller as if I have committed a crime. I have sold tea, not the country…’
But mostly his emphasis, during that campaign, was not on caste but on economic aspiration and the promise that a better life need not be proscribed by poverty. He shifted the political pivot of modern Indian politics from the narrative of noblesse oblige to the dreams of the neo-middle class by framing the argument in terms of merit and anti-elitism.
When Modi stood up as the son of a tea vendor, wearing his modest origins like a badge of honour, and spoke about pulling people out of poverty, he sounded authentic and sincere in a way that Rahul, who also talked incessantly about changing the lives of the poor, could not. His main opponent’s lineage provided Modi with the perfect opportunity to mock Rahul as the ‘shehzada’ or prince who had ‘grown up in five-star hotels’; he would say in speech after speech that as Rahul had never experienced poverty he would never understand it.
But the Congress failed to grasp the import of why his personal story was compelling. When Congress MP and senior party leader Mani Shankar Aiyar smarmily taunted Modi for being a ‘chaiwallah’ who would ‘never make it as PM in the twenty-first century’ his jibe perfectly captured the collision between the old angrezi elite and the new India seeking to dislodge it. ‘Dosco’, ‘Stephanian’, ‘Cantabrigian’—the labels on Aiyar’s resume were typical of his pedigree. His clipped English and easy wit enlivened posh living rooms where women draped in tasteful tussars and men in fashionably casual khadi kurtas animatedly debated politics and the state of the world over good French and Italian wine, Russian vodka and imported cigarettes. In this instance, Aiyar’s barb about Modi only reinforced the image of the Congress as classist and feudal. And, although the Congress let it be known that it did not agree with the remark, and that Rahul disapproved of it as well, the rebuke did not seem particularly severe; hours later, at the same party conclave where Aiyar had snootily offered to make ‘some room for Modi if he wants to come and distribute tea’ he got a personal shout-out from Rahul who praised him from the podium for his commitment to grassroots democracy.
The controversy was illustrative of how the ground was shifting beneath the feet of India’s erstwhile elite and transforming old-style politics. If it was once a calling card to be a member of India’s closed circle of influence, today it had become a political liability. Modi took on Ivy League-educated Finance Minister P. Chidambaram with his swipe, ‘Hard work matters more than Harvard’ while Kejriwal constantly referred to himself as a ‘chhota-aadmi’, a small man battling corporate giants. Never before was being shut out of the cozy coterie of the ‘Dilli Durbar’ better for a politician’s public image as it was now.
If the rise of assertive caste-based politicians in India had been the first challenge by the subalterns to the upper-caste, hierarchical status quo, this was the second wave of social revolt. If Kanshi Ram, Mayawati, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav were among the social engineers of the first phase—most of them schooled in an old socialist tradition—in this moment of churn, Modi and Kejriwal were, in very distinct ways (and as it would turn out, with very different measures of success) tapping into the resentments and aspirations of a post-caste (but not necessarily post-religion) middle India. Of course, both found a reasonable number of supporters among the traditional elites as well, but apart from the personality-centric strategy of their campaigns, these two disparate men had this in common: like characters from a Fitzgerald novel, they had both positioned themselves as untainted ‘outsiders’ to a culture corroded by corruption, clubby parties and cliques that protected each other.
In 1956, social scientist C. Wright Mills first examined this incestuous organization of political power and social influence in his influential work, The Power Elite. ‘There is a kind of reciprocal attraction among the fraternity of the successful—not between each and every member of the circle of the high and mighty, but between enough of them, to insure a certain unity,’ he wrote in words that could have been used just as accurately to describe the India which came into being after the economic liberalization of the 1990s. Ushered in by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, and his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, liberalization resulted in sweeping change everywhere in society. Wrote Mills: ‘Members of several higher circles know one another as personal friends and even as neighbours; they mingle with one another on the golf course, in the gentleman’s clubs, at resorts, on transcontinental airplanes and on ocean liners. They meet at the estates of mutual friends, face each other in front of the TV camera or serve on the same philanthropic committee; and many are sure to cross one another’s paths in the columns of newspapers, if not in the exact cafes from which many of these columns originate.’ Before 1991, the circle of power and influence was limited to the old political families, storied business houses and the royals. After economic liberalization, the circle widened, and a few more rich and powerful circles were added to the existing one. Think of the ‘100 most powerful’ lists published annually by glossies and even serious newspapers (and the bruised egos of those who get bumped off them) and you realize that what Mills wrote about America in the 1950s was very true of India in the twenty-first century. It was this elite that Modi sought to disempower by appealing to the millions who were shut out of these charmed circles—the lower middle-class and the poor.
When Modi spoke at rallies or to journalists of a childhood steeped in poverty as the son of a father who sold tea and a mother who washed utensils in the more upscale homes of the neighbourhood, he was successfully able to fashion himself in the public perception as a genuine mascot of the working class. As a thrice-elected chief minister he connected the dots between the 24x7 electrification programme in Gujarat and his own experience of growing up without the guarantee of electricity at home. An underdog, but never a victim, his own political journey was meant
to encourage others to pull themselves out of their socio-economic exigencies.
If Orwell’s 1984 had chronicled how ‘throughout recorded time and probably since the end of the Neolithic age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, the 2014 general elections in India were challenging the rules of the old social order. Until this moment, the political class had wooed the rich and patronized the poor, forgetting for the most part to engage the middle. Now, whether it was Kejriwal’s muffler or Modi’s mojo this was the election of Everyman, and Rahul seemed embarrassingly like the raja who had gatecrashed the revolution.
The undercurrent against the chosen few may have primarily been an urban phenomenon. But given that more than 30 per cent of India was already urbanized—a number projected to rise from 340 million people in 2008 to 590 million in 2030—no party could afford to ignore the middle class or the burgeoning neo-middle class anymore. Winston Churchill may have been able to quip that the ‘best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter’, but after decades of a top-down democracy that was almost feudal both in its dependence on the benevolence of the ruler and its exclusion of the average person from the dominant discourse, the class and cultural walls that insulated India’s elites from the rest was about to be brought down.
Narendra Modi was among the first to understand that ‘people like us’ could no longer condescend to ‘people like them’. Positioning himself as the latter he repeatedly stressed his absence of ‘insider’ status in the rarefied corridors of power in the capital, even underlining it much later in his first Independence Day speech as prime minister. Corruption, uninspiring leadership, and policy paralysis—these aspects of the Congress decade in government were only partial explanations of the Modi victory, the pushback of millions against entitlement, elitism and privilege was at the centre of the churn that he harnessed brilliantly to his advantage.