This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

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  Until the very end, when Modi thundered home to a massive victory—winning more decisively than any politician had in thirty years—there were attempts by party colleagues, some public, some covert, to block his ascent. Murli Manohar Joshi would whisper to journalists about how ‘autocratic’ Modi was. Sushma Swaraj was miffed at the sudden prominence given to Modi’s troika of spokeswomen—Nirmala Sitharaman, Smriti Irani and Meenakshi Lekhi—which she felt was designed to dilute her profile in the party.

  Nevertheless, in September 2013, party president Rajnath Singh formally announced Modi’s name as candidate for prime minister. Even after that announcement, while nobody had the guts to say it out loud (faced with the prospect of irrelevance in a one-man party), many were hoping for a victory that would be modest enough to ‘manage’ Modi. What may have seemed like innocuous political optics acquired new meaning in the context of this silent power struggle within the party.

  This included Rajnath Singh. In 2011, Narendra Modi had refused to wear a skullcap offered to him by a Muslim leader, thereby setting off a huge outcry. So when Rajnath Singh, in the run-up to the 2014 general elections, chose to wear a skullcap at an ancient Sufi shrine in Lucknow, he was sending out an implicit message that nobody missed. Shia Muslim leaders heaped praises on Rajnath; comparisons were made to former BJP Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee whose charm won him friends and voters in unlikely corners. Within the BJP there was fevered speculation—was this Rajnath positioning himself as a more acceptable face for the post of PM were the BJP to fall short of a majority and need to hunt for allies? Of course, that was not to be.

  It was only L. K. Advani, the original Hindutva mascot and once the patriarch of the ‘Parivar’, who was ready to openly take on the might of Modi. Other anti-Modi forces within the BJP quietly coalesced around him. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, there were interesting parallels in the political evolution of Advani and Modi. Initially, the electoral popularity of both was shadowed by a cataclysmic event that they were held responsible for—by concerned public opinion if not the courts. Advani was blamed for his role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and Modi was held accountable for the Gujarat riots of 2002 that happened on his watch.

  Three decades earlier Advani was to the BJP cadre exactly what Modi was today. When the party made a dramatic jump from two seats in Parliament in 1985 to eighty-five seats in 1989 it was largely because of Advani’s aggressive Hindutva campaign. Both men were fundamentally shaped by the RSS as ‘pracharaks’ but had, later in their careers, tried to distance themselves from Hindutva and recast their political identity for wider acceptability. Advani’s attempts at reinvention came at a large cost—he was forced to resign as the president of the party after he praised Mohammed Ali Jinnah on a trip to Pakistan. Modi, by contrast, had reasonable success (at least in the early phase of his prime ministership) in branding himself differently. The controversies would come later. But his promise of a development-centric government had gone down well with industrialists, the aspirational middle class and young, first time voters looking for change. He was able to shed the labels of the past much quicker than Advani.

  While many leaders in the BJP waged covert wars in the shadows against their prime ministerial candidate, there was one BJP leader of national consequence who remained unflinching in his support for Narendra Modi. That leader was Arun Jaitley, although, in many ways, he was very different from the Gujarat CM. A wealthy, gregarious, easy-going lawyer turned politician, Jaitley was, as the Punjabis in his family might say, a ‘yaaron ka yaar’ or a friend among friends. An early morning walker in Delhi’s Lodi Garden, where the city’s powerful converge, he was known to carry packed samosas and chai for anyone who wanted to join his morning durbar. He enjoyed a good argument unlike his friend Modi. His constant lament was the absence of wit in parliamentary debates, and when he cracked a good joke he was fond of repeating it to friends and journalists and chuckling over it again.

  Again, unlike the man who would be PM, he did not hold grudges, and did not cut you off if you were critical of his actions. On more than one occasion, I had disagreed with him on matters related to Jammu and Kashmir. He would rib me in a good-natured way about it. One day, when I had a sore throat while reporting from Srinagar, he quipped that ‘the Hurriyat had lost its voice’. Because he did not take disagreements personally, of all the politicians in India, Jaitley was definitely the best liked by journalists. This again was in sharp contrast to Modi who, since 2002, had had a friction-filled and antagonistic relationship with many in the media.

  Jaitley was also the perfect antidote to the cultural conservatism that Indians still associated with the BJP. He was, for example, the only BJP leader to take a position supporting the decriminalizing of homosexuality. A suave, well-networked denizen of the power elite in the capital, Jaitley in many ways was Modi’s voice in Delhi before the 2014 election. That he lost his own election in Amritsar, the first time he was running for popular office, would do nothing to reduce his influence in the capital which remained unmatched despite the bitter and vocal resentment of other (one-time) Modi supporters like editor turned politician Arun Shourie.

  But, like Indira Gandhi before him, the Modi campaign had rendered old party machinations and rivalries redundant. In a modern variation of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of direct democracy, Indira and Modi did not want their sovereignty mediated by party structures and parliamentary representatives. Instead, much like American presidents, they sought to portray themselves as regular individuals who drew their power directly from the people.

  It’s because this characteristic of Modi’s was such a powerful dimension of his win that seven months into his term the symbolism of the monogrammed pinstriped suit he wore on his day out with the visiting American President Barack Obama created such a furore. A gift of indeterminate cost (whispers that its value was at least Rs 3 lakh were denied by the Gujarati businessman who presented it), the suit seemed to herald the gentrification of Modi and went against the grain of the ‘I’m just like you’ image that he had used to such great effect in his ascent to power.

  Coming as it did ahead of a key electoral contest in Delhi, it sat in uncomfortable contrast to the shabby but immediately identifiable muffler that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal was always seen wearing. The muffler was anything but chic (in fact, it was the butt of many a joke), but borrowing from Modi’s tactic of proudly embracing an absence of sophistication (as evidence of a humble background), Kejriwal’s team started a self-deprecating but trending Twitter hashtag about the muffler and converted the scruffy black wrap—always worn over one of only two sweaters, maroon or blue—into a badge of honour. #Mufflerman was to the Delhi state elections of 2015 what #Chaiwallah came to represent in the parliamentary elections of 2014.

  Eventually the suit that Modi wore was auctioned for charity and raised over Rs 4 crore but in the perceptional battle between monogrammed pinstripes and shabby mufflers it was obviously the underdog that got the popular thumbs up. Of course, there was also a certain amount of class snobbery in criticizing Modi for wearing an expensive suit in a way that Rajiv would never have been for wearing Gucci shoes. Yet, this was not an argument over aesthetics or the clash of old wealth and the nouveau riche. It was about losing the-little-guy-who-made-it-big status, of appearing as Goliath instead of the David figure that had won Modi the general election. The ‘suit’ stuck as a metaphor for the same elitism that Modi had revolted against.

  In those weeks before the Delhi election results would embarrass the BJP I had a long conversation with a member of the RSS, the organization that had shaped and influenced Modi since he was eight years old. The Delhi state elections were being held just a few months after the big national win and it was expected that the image of the prime minister as an all-conquering hero, combined with the entire Cabinet being marched out into the battlefield, would result in an easy win. Because the BJP had invested so much po
litical capital in the elections, the subsequent defeat was especially discomfiting. The RSS ideologue I met predicted a certain defeat for the BJP in the state elections and whispered conspiratorially to me about how the government was losing its grip on the narrative. Known for its ascetic and spartan values, the RSS, he said, was especially upset about the ‘suit’. ‘Pagalpan tha (it was madness). What were they thinking?’ He went on to complain about how the RSS had been shut out from decision-making by a ‘coterie around Modi’. Pointing to the choice of policewoman turned corruption crusader Kiran Bedi as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate he said the RSS preferred the more low-key but dependable and controversy-free Dr Harshvardhan but its counsel was ignored. ‘We have warned them, you will get less than twenty seats and it won’t stop at Delhi.’ As it turned out, the BJP clocked only three wins in a state election that saw the AAP win an unprecedented sixty-seven out of seventy seats.

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  At first Narendra Modi confounded most of his critics, especially those who were afraid he would usher in an era of hardcore Hindutva politics. As soon as he was elected prime minister he prostrated himself at the entrance to Parliament on his very first day there, repositioning himself as a supplicant at the temple of democracy. Worshipping at the altar of Parliament made for a powerful image and was entirely unobjectionable. As he bent his head down and kissed the steps, seemingly oblivious of the jostling cameras, yet offering them the perfect picture, he was also challenging conventional ideas about secularism, as he had many times before. The semiotics was of prayer but the idol was democracy. The image seemed to drive home his point that in a multi-faith, pluralistic country like India, where religion and culture could often be inseparable, the language of the sacred would always be more effective than the sanitized secularism of his political opponents.

  There were other signs that showed that Modi would not be easily categorized. The same man who had mocked the UPA government for feeding ‘chicken biryani’ to Pakistani dignitaries while Indian soldiers were being killed at the LoC had shown courage and statesmanship by inviting Nawaz Sharif to his swearing-in.

  It appeared at the time that we would be seeing more of what we had seen during his rule in Gujarat. There, his repeated electoral triumphs had emboldened him to centralize power, take bold decisions, and begin marginalizing extraneous influences, especially those with an overtly sectarian flavour. At the centre too, as he pursued his developmental agenda, unveiling initiatives like ‘Make in India’ that sought to woo foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in the manufacturing sector, and a relentless touring schedule through dozens of countries where he sought to rebrand India as a dynamic nation that was seeking to make its mark on the world stage, it appeared that he would be staking a claim to a place in the centre-right spot of the political spectrum. He had been voted in on the promise of achhe din—better days. The young voters who overwhelmingly preferred him to his much younger rival Rahul Gandhi had no patience with controversies that arose out of the Hindutva agenda, and did not identify with social or religious conservatism.

  As his initial moves as prime minister kept people guessing, it was difficult to predict what sort of rule the country would experience. It wasn’t as though everything was in Modi’s hands, as had been the case in Gujarat, once he was firmly in the saddle. But what couldn’t be denied was that whoever ruled a country as diverse and difficult to govern as India had inevitably been nudged towards the centre. During the years that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister, from 1998 to 2004, the BJP had already planed down the angularities of its Hindutva project, partly because of Vajpayee’s own gentle, consensual approach and partly because it needed to keep other parties inside the tent. Though still tagged as ‘Hindu nationalist’, especially by the Western press, the Vajpayee-led BJP government pretty much inhabited the ideological centre, making it possible even for Farooq Abdullah, the leader of India’s only Muslim majority state, to be a partner.

  However, unlike Vajpayee, who had had to keep a coalition together, Modi’s absolute majority freed him from the need to temper ideology. Among a section of his supporters, expectations mounted that his was going to be India’s first truly right-wing government. But they all defined ‘right’ differently.

  Historically, as we have seen, a good portion of the political right had once existed within the embrace of the Congress, especially during the freedom struggle and in the early years of the country’s independence. The Congress at the time was capable of accommodating all manner of ideological expressions, including those of centre–right cultural conservatives. Madan Mohan Malaviya was both a founding member of the Hindu Mahasabha and a proud Congressman. Three weeks before Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel—with whom Advani and later Modi would display a certain affinity—had invited leaders of the RSS to join the Congress, describing them as ‘patriots’ who would need to be ‘won over by Congressmen with love’. The murder of the Mahatma changed all that. While no allegation against the RSS was ever pursued in a court of law, the fact that his assassin Godse had had links with the organization led Patel to blame it (and the Hindu Mahasabha) for creating an environment ‘in which such a ghastly tragedy became possible’. He banned the RSS but lifted the clampdown in less than two years. But it was clear that the days in which the right wing could be an intrinsic part of the Congress were numbered. Soon after, in 1951, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh as the political wing of the RSS. This was the earliest avatar of the BJP.

  Ten years later, in 1961, came the short-lived centre–right politics of C. Rajagopalachari’s Swatantra Party—an anti-communist, non-socialist, secular, progressive party that was sympathetic to the markets and free enterprise. Which version of ‘right-wing governance’ was Modi going to choose for himself? As we know, his supporters included those who hoped he would usher in their long-held dream of a Hindu Rashtra, and others—the young and aspirational, industrialists, free-marketeers and, but naturally, readers of Ayn Rand—who hoped he would be a twenty-first-century hybrid of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

  Would Modi be compelled to ‘outgrow the RSS’ just as President Obama had had to outgrow the Church—a theory first posited by well-known economist Jagdish Bhagwati, a self-confessed admirer of the prime minister? Or would he, as the ever-provocative Subramanian Swamy asserted, never be able to escape the compulsion of his early personal and political upbringing? When I tweeted the highlights of what Bhagwati had said to me, including his likening the various Hindu sectarian controversies that had begun to plague Modi’s tenure as prime minister at about the time I interviewed him to a ‘virulent disease’, the backlash from Modi’s right-wing supporters was furious. And, when Bhagwati suggested that the prime minister would have to put space between his office and the RSS, he faced the wrath of known ideologues of the right. One of them, a professor of history, wrote to me to say ‘even Narendra Modi would dislike this argument. He is an honest swayam sevak. Every swayam sevak is grateful to the mother organization’. A senior newspaper journalist tweeted me to say: ‘Advice is free. Bhagwati telling Modi to leave the RSS is like a girl’s family asking the boy to leave his parents.’

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  After the promise of his early days in office, it appeared that some fears of Modi’s trenchant critics were coming true. Except that the sharpest criticism (and expression of disappointment) was coming from some of his own prominent supporters. Columnists like Tavleen Singh, for instance, an admirer of the prime minister and a journalist with a pathological dislike of the Congress, warned the government repeatedly in her writings and television appearances that the majority of Indians who voted for Modi had not voted for Hindutva. She said again and again that ‘Hindutva fanatics’ were ‘blackening’ the prime minister’s image. But the surround sound of inflammatory politics and extremist statements had begun to drown out all other attempts by the prime minister to hit the high notes. The headlines that Modi would have liked, su
ch as India’s assertive pitch for a permanent seat at the United Nations’ Security Council or those that spoke about his meetings in Silicon Valley, where the world’s most influential CEOs lined up to meet him, began to be interspersed with less flattering ones about the stifling of free expression, the murder of rationalists and the lynching of Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh because he was suspected of storing beef in his house. What was more disturbing—and bewildering—was how much leeway many of those spouting sectarian nonsense were given. The worst offender in some ways, because of the importance of the position he held, was the government’s culture minister, Mahesh Sharma, a doctor turned first-term MP. (The other minister who was often in trouble for making incendiary statements was minister of state for external affairs, V. K. Singh.) When Sharma appeared on one of my shows and spoke about ending ‘cultural pollution’—an ominous sounding prelude to cultural ‘cleansing’—an RSS ideologue who was also a participant on the same show whispered to me that ‘Modi is going to be furious with him. He will probably tell him to never appear on TV again’. And yet, Sharma continued to make cringe-worthy remarks that would have been laughable for their absence of logic were they not in fact dangerous given the office he represented. Sharma would even describe the much-loved former President Abdul Kalam as someone who was a nationalist ‘despite’ being a Muslim.

  Yogi Adityanath, another vitriolic parliamentarian would often make speeches full of invective. He warned that Hindus would ‘organize themselves’ and ‘people who try to defame the symbol of Hindutva will have to pay the price for this’. Not only was he allowed free rein, he once opened a debate on the Communal Violence Bill for the BJP in the Lok Sabha.