In March, Narendra Modi was appointed to the BJP’s Central Parliamentary Board. In June, he was appointed head of the election campaign committee. Finally, in September, he was officially nominated the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. His elevation was opposed by some party seniors who were nervous of his abrasive personality and controversial past. Each time, the clamour of the cadres forced the opposition to Mr Modi within the BJP to back down.35
On 15 August 2013 India celebrated its sixty-seventh Independence Day. The prime minister gave his customary address to the nation from the Red Fort in Delhi. In a daring bid to outdo him, Narendra Modi gave his own Independence Day speech in the town of Bhuj in north Gujarat, with a mock Red Fort erected on the podium. The speech itself taunted Dr Singh for the failures of his government. A chief minister mocking a serving prime minister on Independence Day was unprecedented. However, Modi’s speech helped project himself as the alternative to a corrupt and corroding regime.36
In November 2013, assembly elections were held in the major states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The BJP won all three comfortably. The frailties of India’s Grand Old Party, and of the government it ran in New Delhi, were increasingly visible.
Narendra Modi now began to campaign full-time for the general elections. Between January and May he gave several speeches a day, flying in to one venue in a chartered plane and flying on to the next after he had spoken. He addressed more than four hundred rallies across India, in large cities, small towns and rural locations.
In the eyes of many Indians the 2002 Gujarat pogrom remained a blot on Modi’s reputation. However, in later years he had assiduously remade himself as a ‘vikash purush’, a man of development. Meanwhile, Manmohan Singh had ruled out a third term for himself. The Congress’s election campaign would be led by Rahul Gandhi.
In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul’s father, was prime minister when there was a pogrom against Sikhs in New Delhi. Given India’s painfully slow criminal justice system, perpetrators of the anti-Sikh violence had not yet been brought to book. Meanwhile, Congress leaders who led the mobs were renominated as MPs and, in at least one case, as a minister. And so, to those who pointed to Mr Modi’s complicity in the violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, the BJP pointed instead to the Congress-sponsored violence against Sikhs in north India in 1984.
One pogrom having cancelled out another, Modi now asked to be compared, as an administrator and politician, with Rahul Gandhi. In this contest there could be only one winner. Modi was an energetic and effective orator in his native Gujarati and in India’s most widely spoken language, Hindi. On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi was an indifferent and unwilling speaker. Modi had vast resources of energy, travelling across the country to spread his message. Rahul Gandhi’s political activities were erratic and episodic. He would spend a night in the home of a poor villager, then not be visible for weeks on end.
To make this contest presidential, man-to-man rather than party-versus-party, was an inspired move on the part of Narendra Modi. For he had been chief minister of an important Indian state for more than a decade. On the other hand, in ten years in Parliament Rahul Gandhi had made few speeches, and no memorable ones. He had declined to take up a post in the Cabinet. He had no administrative experience whatsoever.
Modi often compared his family background to that of the Congress heir-apparent’s. The Gujarat chief minister claimed to have worked in a tea-shop as a young boy. The claim was unverified; but what was not in dispute was that he was born in a backward caste, in a family of modest means. Narendra Modi was entirely self-made. On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi was born to privilege, yet had made little of his good fortune. The contrast between him as a one-time chaiwallah and Rahul as a pampered princeling was relentlessly hammered home by Modi throughout his campaign.
Modi also took to referring to Rahul as shehzada, a Urdu word of Persian origin meaning ‘crown prince’. That the Gandhis saw themselves as a hereditary dynasty destined to rule India far into the future was a charge easy to sustain, not least because, while in power, Sonia Gandhi had named dozens of government schemes after Nehru, Indira and Rajiv, and because as party president she had automatically chosen her son as vice president although he was by no means the most capable Congressman of his generation. Still, the choice of appellation was noteworthy; Modi deliberately did not choose the common Hindi word for crown prince, yuvraj, preferring a word that denoted foreign-ness, a barely concealed reference to Sonia’s Italian origins as well as to the Congress’s perceived ‘appeasement’ of Urdu-speaking Muslims. In his speeches, Modi mocked the shehzada for his laziness and incompetence, while asking voters to give him sixty months in office to undo all the harm the Congress was alleged to have done in the past sixty years.37
Mindful of his sectarian past, Narendra Modi did not foreground his party’s Hindutva ideology in his speeches. Rather, he emphasized the importance of rapid economic development, and, in particular, job creation. In the two decades since the Indian economy had been freed from stifling state controls, it had made impressive strides, as witnessed by the rapid decline in poverty and a corresponding growth of the middle class. However, the sectors that had fuelled this growth, such as IT and pharmaceuticals, did not generate much employment. Noting this, Modi promised to pay more attention to manufacturing, to better satisfy the aspirations of the millions of young men entering the workforce every year.
The crowds that flocked to hear Narendra Modi everywhere were evidence of the excitement and hope he generated. Despite Rahul Gandhi being much younger than him, first-time voters were far more impressed by Modi, who exuded authority and decisiveness whereas his rival seemed weak, lazy and confused. A third-year college student in Mumbai, who would vote in a general election for the first time, told a reporter at a Modi rally that ‘we need him. We need dictatorship in India. He is a dictator who can fight corruption and lack of unity and discipline in the country’.38
Narendra Modi’s campaign was widely (and sometimes breathlessly) covered on television, a medium far more ubiquitous in India than it had ever been before. Back in 1996, only 19 per cent of Indians watched news shows on television. By 2014 this was up to 46 per cent. Tens of millions of voters watched and were impressed by Modi’s speeches, and by his evident zest and energy. Surveys conducted in 2013–14, in the run-up to the elections, showed that among those who regularly watched television and read newspapers, potential BJP voters led potential Congress voters by as much as 20 percentage points.39
In reaching out to younger voters, Modi made good use of forms of communication even newer than television. He had an extensive website, which was regularly updated, as well as active Facebook and Twitter accounts. He tweeted often about the concerns of the young and of his own emphasis on development, with exhortative tweets about these subjects juxtaposed with sarcastic or derisive tweets about his opponents.40
Narendra Modi’s election campaign was superbly orchestrated. He hired the country’s top copywriters, who gave him two simple but tellingly effective lines: ‘Abki baar Modi sarkar’ (This time a Modi government, much more resonant in Hindi, where it rhymes); and ‘Achche din aane wale hain’ (The good times are about to come). His campaign was also extremely well funded. Money was raised from large corporations and from Indians living abroad. By one estimate, the money spent by the BJP on advertising alone was equivalent to £500 million.41 A comparable amount would have been spent on busing people to rallies and on the leader’s travel expenses.
Modi was advised by, among other people, young Indian professionals who had worked in the United States. They brought with them the latest techniques of campaigning, including the adroit use of social media. On the other hand, the Congress eschewed such methods, choosing to rely on old-fashioned appeals to the name and fame of their First Family.42
V
In December 2012, while campaigning in the Gujarat state elections, Narendra Modi used the phrase ‘neo middle class’, to describe the tens o
f millions of Indians who wished to climb out of poverty and enjoy the fruits of a middle-class life. This class helped him win re-election in Gujarat, and he now hoped it would propel him to national power too.
Mahatma Gandhi famously said that India lives in its villages. By the time the twenty-first century arrived, it had begun increasingly to live in its cities and towns too. In 1951, only five Indian cities had a population greater than 1 million. By 2011, as many as fifty-three cities did. The urban population now constituted some 31 per cent of the total population of India. Back in 1951, it was a mere 13 per cent. Close to four hundred million Indians now lived in urban centres.43
There had always been a great deal of migration in India, between villages and from village to city. This movement of people across the country became even more common after economic liberalization. One study estimated that inter-state migration increased by 53.6 per cent between 1991 and 2001. This was a consequence of uneven development, with some states and regions prospering more than others. Eastern India in particular was economically depressed, so it saw a large outflow of migrants going to work in the cities of the West and the South, and in the farms of Punjab and coffee estates of Kodagu as well. In 2001, three in five families in rural Bihar had migrants working outside the village. Their contribution to household income was substantial, especially among the lower castes.44
In the cities, the new migrants worked chiefly in the informal sector. With factories closing or laying off workers as they adopted labour-saving technologies, these villagers-turned-townsfolk took jobs as hawkers, vendors, construction workers, plumbers and security guards. An overwhelming majority of these migrants were male. Attracted by the vigour of the city, they made the urban economy more vigorous by their own labour. Thus the contribution of cities to India’s Gross Domestic Product had increased from 29 per cent in 1950–1 to 62 per cent in 2007.45
Urbanization bred new desires and aspirations, with migrants to cities seeking to leave their old lives in the country behind. They wanted a pucca house, running water, access to entertainment and to such consumer goods as they could hope to buy. And they wanted to make their own way in life, rather than be patronized by welfare handouts by the state.46
Meanwhile, as the cities grew, the villages changed: socially, economically and politically. Once, upper castes such as Brahmins in south India and Rajputs in north India had dominated the countryside. Now, they had lost or sold their land, and were challenged on the ideological front as well. Integration with the outside world had once been a preserve of upper castes, but now many middle- and lower-caste men (less often women) were also going out of the village to study, or more often to work.
Increased mechanization of agriculture had led to a decrease in the demand for rural labour; but there had been a decline in supply too, as Dalits no longer wanted to work in the fields. They preferred employment outside the village because it paid them better and also freed them from the stranglehold of their locally dominant caste. The work they did now – for example, in construction, or the loading and unloading of trucks and railway carriages – was often physically demanding as well as hazardous to health. But it was much less demeaning.
Another, and perhaps even more fundamental, change was with regard to education. In one fairly representative village in northern India, the percentage of literate upper-caste Thakurs had increased from 38.6 per cent in 1958 to 82 per cent in 2008. In the same period, the percentage of educated lower-caste Jatavs (traditionally considered Untouchable) had increased from 3 per cent to 42.7 per cent. In 1958, less than one in ten Thakur women were literate; in 2008, more than four in ten. In 1958, no Jatav women in the village could read or write; in 2008, one in five could.
There was a strong interest, across castes, in educating one’s children. Rajputs did not want their children to be farmers; Dalits did not want their children to be condemned to a life of agrestic serfdom. With young men across castes seeking jobs and fulfilment outside the village, a growing proportion of those who actually cultivated land were in their fifties or sixties, for whom it was too late to contemplate a change of profession or location.
Village life was changing profoundly across India. Yet in some spheres there was a marked continuity between past and present. Castes were still segregated in residential terms; and, at least within the village, in social terms too. An overwhelming majority of marriages (probably closer to 100 per cent than 95 per cent) in rural India were contracted within the same endogamous group, and were arranged by parents or relatives.47
There had, in recent decades, been a blurring of boundaries between town and country. Indians who lived in villages became increasingly familiar with city life, either because of their own experiences or of the influx of artefacts of modernity in their homes. Village patriarchs now wished to send their children to the nearest town to study in an English-medium school. They themselves rode motorcycles rather than cycles or bullock-carts. Many even worked part-time in the modern sector, in the small factories and workshops that had begun to be located along highways, where land was cheaper than in crowded cities.48
The ever-greater mobility that Indian villagers now enjoyed led to a weakening – though certainly not a severing – of the links between caste and occupation. Some Banias chose to abandon trade for teaching school teachers, some Yadavs preferred service in the army to herding cows. And, in a more radical break with tradition, some Dalits chose to venture into entrepreneurship. They built successful companies in the leather trade, a trade traditionally associated with their caste. Others ventured into altogether new areas; running automobile dealerships, construction companies and pharmaceutical factories. There was now even a Dalit Chamber of Commerce.49
To be sure, such success stories were rare and exceptional. A majority of Dalits continued with their old, lowly paid, stigmatized professions. They lived in separate quarters in villages and in towns. Upper castes would not eat with them, meet with them, marry amongst them. Yet seven decades of democracy and development had made dents in the edifice of tradition and prejudice. With affirmative action, some Dalits could become senior government officers. With elections based on universal adult franchise, some Dalits could become ministers and chief ministers. Now, with economic liberalization, some Dalits could become billionaires too.
VI
As the BJP, the Congress and the major regional parties campaigned for the next general elections, battles of a more elemental kind were being played out in some parts of the country. In July 2012, savage riots broke out in Assam between Bodo tribals and Muslims originally from Bangladesh, but settled for several decades in eastern India. Close to fifty people died in the violence, while more than 100,000 fled their homes to refugee camps. The majority of victims were Muslims. With the local police unwilling or incapable of stemming the violence, the army had to be called in to restore order.50
The epicentre of the violence was in the Kokrajhar and Baksa districts of lower Assam. Even after the riots had subsided, the mostly Muslim refugees were fearful of returning to their homes and villages. When, at last, they did, they faced fresh violence. In the first week of May 2014, Bodo militants killed 23 people in a single day. Once more, the army came out to conduct flag marches and seek to re-establish the authority of the state.51
The clash in Assam was between two vulnerable and insecure communities. The Bodos felt that they had been suppressed by the dominant Ahom community of Assam; after a long struggle, they had been granted autonomy in the districts in which they were a majority. Meanwhile, Muslims from densely populated Bangladesh had settled in their vicinity, sparking fresh resentment, and, in time, violence.52
A year after the troubles in Kokrajhar, riots broke out in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. The Muslims here were authentically of the land. They had lived in the Indo-Gangetic plains as long as the Hindus, except that, some six or seven centuries ago, they had converted to Islam. From the late nineteenth century this part of northern India had bee
n subject to periodic bouts of religious rioting. Hindus and Muslims had clashed in the 1940s, before and after Partition, and in the 1980s and 1990s, as a consequence of the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation.
Social peace in Uttar Pradesh was fragile, threatened on the one side by the hardline Hindutva elements of the Sangh Parivar and on the other by parties who canvassed support among the Muslim clergy. In power in UP in 2013 was the Samajwadi Party (SP), whose major leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, was so known for cultivating the Muslim vote that he was referred to as ‘Maulana Mulayam’. His young and inexperienced son, Akhilesh Yadav, was now chief minister.
In September 2013, riots between Hindus and Muslims broke out in western Uttar Pradesh. The trouble began after a young Muslim man was seen in conversation with a young Jat woman, whereupon he was killed by her brothers. The violence escalated, with BJP leaders asking Hindus (and the dominant Jats in particular) to teach Muslims a lesson and SP leaders urging Muslims to answer fire with fire. The call to action, and vengeance, was communicated through Facebook and WhatsApp, this perhaps the first time these new technologies were used to foment inter-communal hatred in India. More than fifty people perished in the riots, and tens of thousands were rendered homeless. As in Assam, as indeed in most parts of the country (outside of Kashmir), when such incidents took place, Muslims suffered disproportionately.53
VII
Through April and May 2014, some five hundred and fifty four million Indians voted in the country’s sixteenth general election. This was, as in every previous Indian general election, the largest exercise of the popular will in human history. The election was conducted over nine phases. Some 800,000 soldiers and policemen were placed on election duty, with five hundred trains and even fifty helicopters commandeered to convey them from place to place.54
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 93