AFTER A SUICIDE BOMBER BLEW UP A BUS carrying CRPF personnel in Pulwama, Kashmir, in February, an angry crowd appeared in the form of a procession in the main town of Samastipur in Bihar. Anti-Pakistan slogans were raised; eyewitnesses say that many people got emotional, including a policeman outside the collector’s office, who hurled choicest abuses at Pakistan. Many among the crowd hailed Narendra Modi and beseeched him to take revenge. Similar impromptu processions were taken out in many other places in Bihar, as in rest of India.

The revenge came later in the form of the Balakot strikes. While questions are still being raised about its veracity, that did not seem to be an issue for most people one spoke to in Samastipur or elsewhere in Bihar. Even as elections are in progress in the state, one issue has dominated the narrative and seems to have tilted the balance in favour of Narendra Modi: Pulwama.

“Maamla thoda gadbada gaya tha (the situation had become tricky),” said Prem Kumar Sahu, who ran a cigarette shop on the Samastipur-Hajipur border, referring to BJP’s electoral prospects in Bihar. “Magar Pulwama se sab phir gaya (but everything turned after Pulwama).” But does he believe in the Government’s version of Balakot? “Ekdum, yeh sirf Modiji hi kar sakte thhey (Absolutely, only Modi could have done this),” he said. According to Sahu, most people in his village believed that after Indira Gandhi, Modi is the strongest Prime Minister to lead India. “Mukhya mantri badalte rahein, lekin upar mazboot leader chahiye (Chief Ministers may keep changing, but a strong leader is needed at the top),” he said.

Even the BJP cadre is surprised at the response of the people. “Somehow the message has gone that only Modi can save this country from its enemies,” said a senior party functionary in Ujiarpur constituency.

This popular sentiment has turned elections in Bihar into Modi versus the Rest. Even Kanhaiya Kumar, CPI’s candidate from Begusarai, believed his fight is directly against Modi. “Speak to people here and ask them who they will vote for. Nobody is taking Giriraj Singh’s (BJP’s candidate) name. They’d say they will vote for Modi, or they will take my name,” he said. What is further creating this impression is that none of BJP’s alliance partners have bothered to campaign with gusto. “Did you notice how passive Nitish Kumar has become?” asked a journalist in Patna. “He also knows in his heart that in these elections only Modi’s currency is working.”

On April 25th, addressing a public rally in Darbhanga in north Bihar, Modi said that those who do not shout patriotic slogans must be defeated. He was making a dig at RJD’s candidate Abdul Bari Siddiqui who, while speaking to a TV channel, said that reciting Vande Mataram was against his belief. Sharing stage with Nitish Kumar, Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi, and Lok Janshakti Party’s Ram Vilas Paswan, Modi then asked the crowd to shout “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Vande Mataram”. As other leaders on the dais raised their hands, Nitish Kumar was visibly unsure of how he should respond. It was evident that Modi had stolen all thunder.

THE FIRST THING ONE becomes aware of in Patna is the noise. It comes mostly from relentless honking: thousands of thumbs pressing at the button, paying no attention to whether it is required or not. It is as if everyone in Patna has an enemy, invisible, who he is trying to bring down with darts of electronic clamour.

In June, 1974, though, when the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan addressed a mammoth crowd in Gandhi Maidan here, he had a very formidable opponent in mind: Indira Gandhi. Calling for a sampoorna kranti (total revolution), Narayan asked her to step down. In response to the growing opposition against her, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency. It was revoked in 1977; that year the Congress was defeated badly in the elections, paving the way for the first-ever non-Congress Government at the Centre.

But in the same year, an event at a village not very far from Patna became pivotal in bringing her back to the throne in 1980 which she then held till her death in 1984.

Belchhi is situated along the Patna-Nalanda border. Today, a major road runs by it. But in 1977, it was inaccessible; there was no road, and the village was surrounded by swamps of mud and slush. In those days a petty landlord, Mahavir Mahato, held sway in the area. By caste a Kurmi (OBC), Mahato was a strongman and ran an armed gang. With his might he had usurped all gair majurwa (government land) and had also laid claim on land belonging to Muslim families who had chosen to shift to Pakistan during the Partition.

Mahato troubled everyone, including fellow Kurmis, but the Harijan (the term Dalit was not popular those days) families were always the worst victims of his strong-arm tactics.

The scene changed a bit when a Harijan girl from the village got married to a Harijan from another village who then decided to resist Mahato. His name was Singeshwar Paswan; locally, he was popularly known as Singirwa.

On the morning of May 23rd, the two groups exchanged fire, after which the village slipped into an eerie calm. A little afterwards, Janki Paswan, then 38, whose elder brother’s daughter had married Singirwa, noticed a flurry of activity at Mahavir Mahato’s house. “I could see a lot of water coming out of their drain, indicating the presence of several people inside,” he recalls. He also saw puris being fried in desi ghee in the courtyard of the house. He immediately alerted Singirwa and others.

“He (Singirwa) felt that Mahato and his men would come and hurl expletives at them and then go away,” recalls Janki Paswan. But still, Singirwa and his men hid inside a supporter’s house. They blocked the only door to the house with heavy objects.

After a while three men from Mahato’s gang appeared outside the house and said that Mahato wanted a compromise. They asked that one of their man be let inside so that a formal compromise could be signed between the two parties. After a little deliberation, Singirwa decided to let the man in.

As Singirwa and his men got busy in studying the draft agreement, Mahato’s gang approached the house from behind and one of them got through a window using a ladder and then made way for others. Soon Singirwa’s gang was outnumbered. Their hands were tied, and they were led outside.

In the maize fields, Mahato’s men shot Singirwa and 10 others and then tossed them in a fire they had created by burning wooden planks.

Janki Paswan watched this entire episode lying flat on the thatch roof of another house nearby. “I was terrified. I can still smell the burning flesh of those men,” he said. After the killings, Mahato and his men sat nearby and had sherbet, as a numb Janki Paswan still lay in hiding.

Even as elections are in progress in the state, one issue has dominated the narrative and seems to have tilted the balance in favour of Narendra Modi: Pulwama

OVER TWO MONTHS LATER, on August 13th, Indira Gandhi decided to visit Belchhi. Her cavalcade started from Patna airport in the morning. In between, she stopped at several places, including places where anger against the Congress party was very high.

About 15-20 kilometres from Belchhi, the cavalcade could not carry on any further because of mud and slush. So, she sat in a car pulled by a tractor. It had not even crossed a mile when it got stuck as well. But she was adamant. She began to walk towards Belchhi till an elephant called Moti came to her rescue.

By the time she reached Belchhi, evening had descended. The Harijan families were overwhelmed at her sight. With hands folded and tears in their eyes, they raised the slogan of: Indira tere abhao mein Harijan maare jaate hein (Indira, your absence is resulting in the killing of Harijans).

Indira Gandhi did not get down from the elephant, but it would be lowered in the village so that people could interact with her. Many people petitioned her, including the families of the accused in the case. “She tore those petitions into pieces,” recalls Indra Dev Prasad, a villager.

After a few years, because of Janki Paswan’s efforts, Mahato and one of his accomplices were hanged to death while 14 others got awarded life punishment.

Paswan donated a portion of his land so that a school could be opened in the village. But even after so many years, education remains a challenge. “I catch hold of children and take them to school which riles up the teacher there. He says: ‘Why are you getting them? I am here to just sign the attendance register’,” says Paswan.

For decades after Indira Gandhi’s visit, Paswan and many others remained Congress voters. “They have disappeared now,” he says. “It has been more than 15 years.”

In February this year, when Rahul Gandhi addressed a rally in Gandhi Maidan, it was a significant moment. It was the party’s first independent rally in Bihar in 28 years. “It was Rahul’s chance to play front-foot,” said a senior Bihar Congress leader. In 2014, in its alliance with the RJD, the Congress got 12 seats, out of which it won two. For 2019, according to the Congress leader, the party leadership asked for 14 seats. But Lalu Prasad Yadav did not relent. “Even from the prison he dictated terms,” said the leader. Ultimately, the Congress got only nine seats. “Even on those nine, the party could not field candidates of their own choice as Lalu wielded his influence even there,” he says.

A leader stood up and said that if Jamaat-e-Islami could be asked to convince Muslim voters to vote for Kanhaiya Kumar, that strategy could yield results

Much before Lalu became the messiah of the downtrodden in Bihar, a very significant voice rose from Samastipur in the form of Karpoori Thakur. He came from the barber community. In the early 1900s, his village, Pitaunjhia, now named Karpoori Gram after its most illustrious son, had about hundred households. The first man to matriculate from the village was a Rajput called Janak Singh—he later retired as ticket checker in the Railways. In 1934, two others passed. In 1940, Thakur was among the three who matriculated that year. There is a story about those times. After Thakur passed, his father took him to a local landlord’s house and told him about his son’s achievement. The landlord, as Thakur would recall later, looked at him and said: ‘Okay, now press my legs.’

Thakur would become an MLA in 1952 and Bihar’s first non- Congress chief minister in 1970.

Thakur’s son, Ram Nath Thakur, who is currently a Rajya Sabha member from JD(U), says that in those days, caste oppression was rampant. But, today, he feels it is futile to remember those days. “We are in a political space. So we cannot remember these incidents. Because we must ultimately ask for votes from the same people,” he said.

Ram Nath Thakur remembers that in those days the relationship between a voter and a leader and a party worker was very different. In 1966, he recalls his father sending him to an associate Malhar Das’ house. Das’ daughter had got married recently and Karpoori Thakur had been unable to attend. The father now wanted the son to go there and placate him. “When I reached his house, Malhar Das was putting his washing on a clothes line. The moment he saw me he began to abuse me in anger. I was taken aback,” he said. When Ram Nath Thakur told this to his father, he remembers him smiling and saying: Unko adhikar hai (he has the right). Later, Das would work relentlessly for Thakur again.

It is Thakur’s legacy that Lalu Prasad Yadav claimed to take forward when he took over Bihar in 1990.

The 90s belonged to Lalu. The Patna-based journalist, Ravi Narayan whose home is in Aurangabad, remembers a servant in his house who was a lower caste. His father and grandfather also worked as servants in the household earlier. “I had no understanding of caste till one day that man sat in front of me on a string cot and my grandfather saw it and kicked him in the rear,” he says.

It is for people like that poor servant that Lalu came as a saviour. Journalists remember how Lalu would campaign, taking a barber along with him, making the downtrodden touch his helicopter, offering them sattu, reinforcing that he was one of them and that if he could become chief minister, they could also become something. He took the fear out of their heads. “Earlier, my father would see a ticket checker in the train and hide. Laluji taught us to raise our head and look into the eye,” said Deepak Yadav, a teacher in Vaishali district’s Raghopur. “All lower castes came together for Lalu. He turned caste into a category,” said Narayan.

In January, one worker Suraj Yadav died in Odisha where he had gone to work in a jute mill. He was just 28. “We were just told that he felt unwell and died,” his mother Kalasi Yadav says

Today, the son of the man who served in Narayan’s house is not a servant. He went to school and is now working as a head postmaster somewhere in the state.

What happened later to Lalu is well-known. His tenure came to be known as the ‘jungle raj’ in Bihar. Also, he could no longer keep up with the aspirations of the Dalits. The widespread disenchantment of 15 years of RJD’s rule resulted in the victory of Nitish Kumar in alliance with the BJP.

By this time, say Congress old-timers, their party had got completely eclipsed. “From 1990 to 1995, we did not play opposition at all. There was not even a symbolic dharna against Lalu in Bihar,” says a senior Congress leader.

Gradually, a perception was created that the Congress is not even fit to be in opposition in Bihar.

In the 1995 Assembly elections, the Congress came third. In the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, the RJD and the Congress had an alliance. But the RJD offered alliance only on 8 seats, forcing Congress not to fight on 46 (in undivided Bihar). In 1999, Congress fought on 13 seats. “We got only 8, while on 5 there was a friendly fight,” says the leader.

In 2000, the Congress decided to go it alone, fighting on an anti-Lalu plank. It won 23 seats. “But by evening, we were again standing by Lalu,” the leader says.

By 2004, according to Congress insiders in Bihar, Lalu had virtually taken over the party. “Some leaders would go to Sonia Gandhi and tell her: ‘We have no chance of winning. Do as Laluji says’,” he said. In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, Lalu only gave Congress 4 seats, out of which they won 3.

In 2005, the alliance became a farce. Giving an example, a senior Congress leader recalls how in two adjoining constituencies, divided by a road, the Pradesh Congress Committee chief said in one that Lalu is a symbol of social justice and just across the road said that he is a symbol of corruption.

In 2009, Lalu struck again with four. The Congress broke the alliance and fought alone, winning two seats.

After 1995, said the Congress leader, the Brahmins stopped voting for the party. The Muslims had already gone. “Let me tell you one thing: when Brahmins come back, the Muslims will return to you too,” he said.

Recalling the February 3rd rally, the leader rued that they had worked hard for the rally and then Rahul Gandhi came and said Tejashwi Yadav is the future of Bihar. “Dukaan humne lagayi, mithai Tejashwi le gaya (We had set up shop, Tejashwi came and had the sweetmeat).”

On March 23rd, the first election rally of Rahul Gandhi in Bihar, Congress leader Poonam Paswan walked up to Rahul Gandhi and said that both Dalit candidates the party has fielded are from the same sub-caste and it would be better if he fielded her, a Paswan, from Hajipur against Ram Vilas Paswan’s brother. Sources say that on the stage itself Rahul Gandhi passed instructions that this be done. But later, it wasn’t.

For decades after Indira Gandhi’s visit, Janki Paswan and many others remained Congress voters. “They have disappeared now,” he says. “It has been more than 15 years”

Meanwhile, riding on the Pulwama wave, the BJP cadre was confident that they would win. “See, we have been able to communicate very clearly with voters,” says a senior functionary in the Ujiarpur constituency from where BJP’s state chief Nityanand Rai is in the fray. What message is that? “That Modi doesn’t need this country, this country needs Modi,” he said. He explained how the BJP’s electoral system works on ground: “The cadre of RSS is already out. They don’t even meet the candidate. The BJP’s vichaar parivar (ideological family), which includes RSS, ABVP, VHP, Bajrang Dal, fan out separately to influence voters. Think of BJP as a groom. The groom will do whatever he wants, the workers will make sure that things are taken care of.”

Helping them is an extensive streaming of propaganda on social media platforms and WhatsApp. “Our main force is WhatsApp,” he explained. He showed his smartphone which has a piece of information coming every two-three minutes. “Look at this,” he said, showing his phone screen. There is a message which says that Rahul Gandhi has donated a lot of money to mosques and churches in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Another message says that Jawaharlal Nehru was born to a Muslim woman. Another says that it is because of Modi that petrol costs Rs 77 there, whereas it costs Rs 177 in Pakistan.

But doesn’t the Congress also use these mediums for influencing voters? “The Congress’ problem is that they think they are very clever and make sarcastic videos that nobody understands here,” he says.

But beyond the world of memes and nationalism, the poor have nowhere to go. In Samastipur, the only jute mill in Bihar, established in 1926, was shut three years ago. It has left thousands of workers jobless. Many of them continue to live in the quarters of the mill where electricity and water connections have now been disconnected for 18 months. The building itself is in an extremely bad state. Open sewers make a living hell here. “Since 2010, we have received no gratuity from the mill,” says Harish Chander Sahni, one of the workers. In the absence of work, the workers have been forced to go to places like Kolkata and Odisha to work in jute mills there. But there they are forced to work as daily wagers and get no compensation in case of an accident.

Surinder Paswan, who had been working in the mill for 17 years, was recently forced to go and work in a jute mill in Kolkata where he broke his foot in an accident in March. In the absence of any treatment facility, he was forced to return and spend his own money on treatment. “I have ten mouths to feed; tell me what I should do?” he asked.

In January, one worker Suraj Yadav died in Odisha where he had gone to work in a jute mill. He was just 28. “We were just told that he felt unwell and died,” his mother Kalasi Yadav says. A few weeks ago, Suraj’s father-in-law came and took his daughter and one of their two kids along to his village. “He took only one child because he cannot feed more than two,” says Kalasi Yadav.

Shailendra Rai’s father and grandfather had also worked in the mill. He joined in 1988. After the mill shut down, he went to Kolkata to work. He had to return after his finger was severed and they refused to get him treated.

The entire lot of workers in the mill has decided to boycott elections this time. “We will lynch anyone who comes here, asking us for votes,” a lady said.

IN BEGUSARAI, THE comrades faced the ultimate challenge. They fielded Kanhaiya Kumar, but there was to be no consensus on him, resulting in the RJD fielding its candidate separately. In 2014, ex-comrade Bhola Singh, fighting on a BJP ticket, defeated RJD’s Tanweer Hassan. The CPI’s candidate, Rajendra Prasad, came third.

This time the BJP asked Giriraj Singh to fight elections from here. In 2014, Singh wanted a ticket from here, but was instead sent to Nawada. But in 2019, when Singh was asked to fight from Begusarai, he seemed reluctant. But after a meeting with party chief Amit Shah he relented.

In his campaign, Giriraj Singh has spoken mostly about Pulwama and the need to identify and eliminate enemies of the country. Did he feel that in Begusarai the fight was between Modi and Kanhaiya Kumar, like Kumar had claimed? Singh began to come up with an answer, but left it midway and walked away.

At GD College, a classful of students waited for Kanhaiya Kumar to appear. He had been out since morning, travelling from one place to another, seeking votes.

As time passed, it became clear that Kanhaiya wouldn’t be able to reach the college anytime soon. So, the students were addressed by other leaders, including CPI’s ex-MP, Shatrughan Prasad Singh.

Afterwards, Singh travelled to Bihat to preside over a meeting of local community leaders and the CPI cadre. “The Communist Party has a long history in Begusarai. The first comrade to win elections from here was Chandrashekhar in 1956. A newspaper called Searchlight published a headline that read: ‘First Red Star in Bihar Assembly’,” he recalled.

But gradually, the Communist legacy weaned off. Singh attributed it mainly to caste politics taking root in the state with Lalu’s ascension. “It was at our behest that Lalu arrested LK Advani in Samastipur during his Rath Yatra. But we could not take credit for it,” he said.

The biggest worry the CPI leaders had was that with RJD’s Tanweer Hassan contesting as well, the Muslim votes would go to him, thus making Kanhaiya Kumar’s victory difficult.

“From 1990 to 1995, we did not play opposition at all. There was not even a symbolic dharna against Lalu in Bihar,” says a senior Congress leader. Gradually, a perception was created that the Congress is not even fit to be in opposition in Bihar

In Bihat, the deliberations were already on by the time Singh reached. A leader stood up and said that if Jamaat-e-Islami could be asked to convince Muslim voters to vote for Kanhaiya Kumar, that strategy could yield results.

On his part, Kanhaiya Kumar addressed one meeting after another, speaking and connecting to people. At Kusmahat, he addressed a gathering of people and told them that he was one of them. “Tomorrow if one of you has to go to Delhi, does anyone even bother if you have got your train tickets or not,” he asked them. He said he will be available for them unlike those who come asking for votes and are then barely seen even in Patna. “Modi’s popularity was at its zenith in 2014 and then he got 31 per cent votes. This time it will only come down,” he said.

As he left that meeting for another, on the way, Kanhaiya spotted a few men waiting for him with garlands at Azadnagar Qasimpur. He stopped and got down to speak to them. He was garlanded and two men greeted him with “Lal Salaam.”

After he was gone, the men stopped on the road and spoke to each other. I asked them about the “leher” (wave) in their village. “Modi ji ki lehar hai (It is Modi wave),” they said. But hadn’t they, just minutes ago, garlanded Kanhaiya Kumar? “We will welcome anyone who comes here,” one said. But why would they vote for Modi? “Modi is fighting and dying for the country,” said Ramnand Rai.

Clearly, Pulwama was at play in Qasimpur as well.

Also Read
Other stories of General Election 2019

IF YOU MUST quibble with Aiyar’s question, then it is not about any reprehensibility incurred in calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a neech kisam ka aadmi (a low-minded person) on that fateful day of December 7th, 2017. For that was just on the anvil of the Gujarat elections and during campaign season, it is a little bit of a free-for-all with all parties agreeing to the free-for-all. What is more pertinent to remember is how that word had singed him, forcing him into a disclaimer. Soon after the remark, Aiyar, stunned by the wide-ranging imputation that he had made a casteist slur, had clarified, ‘I meant low-level when I said ‘neech’, I think in English when I speak in Hindi as Hindi is not my mother tongue. So if it has some other meaning then I apologize.’

Having been bitten once by ‘neech’, you would think Aiyar would have the wisdom to stay away from the word. But, alas, to the trepidation of his own party, the Congress, and the eruption of glee from the Bharatiya Janata Party, that was not to be. All he had to do was to just maintain a few more days of silence when voting would end. He had been remarkably well behaved so far, his feet and mouth being in their correct places. And almost everyone was in agreement that in this election at least his traditional role of supplying Modi with 15 minutes of material for speeches had been taken over by Sam Pitroda. But just in the nick of time Aiyar maintained his reputation by an editorial in a newspaper, Rising Kashmir, where he ended with reiterating that he had been prophetic with that description, which obviously referred to ‘neech aadmi’.

Note that it did not matter the first time what he had actually meant. It is the twist given that prevailed, embarrassing his party and himself. And this was the result of a long history of his loose tongue being capitalised on by Modi. Like when Aiyar said before the 2014 election that Modi would never become Prime Minister and they could make some space for him to sell chai (a prophecy which even he will count as hitting some way off the mark). Much before, in an earlier age, he called Atal Bihari Vajpayee ‘nalayak’ and used the same excuse of not knowing what it meant in Hindi.

From the BJP’s point of view, Aiyar has been a gift that never stops giving during election campaigns. Earnest and intense though he may be in his criticism, the words he uses seem to be the exact ones which Modi can use to highlight the Congress as arrogant, classist and casteist—an establishment that he is seeking to change. When Aiyar calls him a chaiwallah it not only reinforces Modi’s aura as someone coming from humble beginnings but also the disdain that those against him have for chaiwallahs. Likewise, when ‘neech’ is used, it allows him to tell his audience to scratch the surface of sophistication and see the real face of people who he is up against.

The Congress has belatedly realised the damage such self-goals do. You therefore had its leader Rahul Gandhi rap Aiyar on the knuckles once again for his present comment. He did the same with Sam Pitroda when he spoke on the Sikh riots. Given this series of regrets he has to give out, Rahul might finally be seeing the wisdom of Modi’s policy of retiring politicians above the age of 75. As for Aiyar, he followed up his humiliation with telling a journalist asking him about his Modi comment to ‘f?$% off’. And true to the Aiyar tradition, it was on camera for all of India to see.

Also Read
Other stories of General Election 2019

ON THE DAY HE WON THE SECOND TERM AS Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi’s demeanor was like Arjuna in the Battle of Kurukshetra—composed yet confident. He seemed unprepared to rest on his laurels, his body language exuding the ambition of a man who is out to serve his countrymen to “ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea”, a lofty target that Alexander the Great had set for himself. In victory, the BJP supremo displayed a general’s grace by congratulating his cadre for toiling in the scorching heat to ensure that they protected his honour. In the Indian political firmament, Modi proved that he simply had no peers, as this landslide of a second triumph reinforced. At a robust 68, Modi seemed to realise the enormity of his role and destiny.

As the results of the seven-phased 2019 Lok Sabha elections trickled in on the tense morning of May 23rd, showing an advantage for the BJP before it transformed into into a landslide victory for the ruling party, rival politicians who appeared on TV channels looked puzzled, even though they had asserted on previous days that exit polls projecting an NDA sweep were off the mark. Much to their anguish, the exit polls were slightly off the mark in the opposite direction: several of them trailed the BJP’s actual tally, which far exceeded even the forecasts of a thumping victory by the ruling coalition leader. The saffron juggernaut was galvanised by a mammoth campaign that relied on the aura around its spearhead Narendra Modi. It was ably reinforced by an armada of volunteers steered by party president Amit Shah who came up with off-centre gambits to tap new opportunities, turn adversities into gains and dwarfed the opposition’s messages and promises that failed to strike a chord with the majority of voters, especially lakhs of women and millennials making up a chunk of new voters.

By the evening, as BJP workers congregated in thousands to celebrate Modi’s victory, the skies thundered with lightning and rain as if Shiva himself was dancing a taandav of furious victory, uprooting trees along Delhi’s boulevards as the Modi wave had done to his opponents.

Speaking shortly afterwards to euphoric party workers gathered at the BJP office in Delhi, Modi described his win as a “victory of democracy”. To chants of ‘Modi, Modi’, the BJP supremo called himself a fakir (ascetic) and took the opportunity to thank the people of the country for filling up his jholi (bag), referring to the historic mandate for his coalition—he is the first non-Congress Prime Minister to return after a full term in office. Electoral feats don’t end there: he is the first Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to secure consecutive majorities on his own; he is also the first Prime Mi nister since Indira Gandhi to return to power with an absolute majority for his party, just as she did in the elections held after the Bangladesh war of 1971 to the fifth Lok Sabha.

Though Modi took subtle digs at the opposition in his speech, he vowed to not work with any ill-will to anyone. He also urged his rivals to criticise him when he goes wrong. Modi, whom Shah called on the occasion as the “Mahanayak of Mahavijay” (the great leader of great victory), also pledged that he would not “do anything for himself but will do everything for the country”. Disapproving of caste-based politics, he said that there are only two kinds of people: poor and those who help the poor.

For a consummate politician, Modi knows only too well that his voters see a message in each of his actions, even if it has to do with visiting a hill shrine for prayers and meditation. And now, the enormity of his consecutive wins of comparable magnitude confirms that Indian politics has shed its old inhibitions and acquired new dimensions. It may never be the same again.

From the start, it was an unequal contest. The 2019 election, which saw BJP neutralising myriad political dynasties and battering current players of caste-based politics to submission, brought to the fore the clever and imaginative use of organisational prowess by the party. All this was in stark contrast with Congress’ relatively frail outreach bids and the failure of other rivals, including overrated regional contenders, to rise above conventional methods to pull in votes, even from their traditional vote banks that seemed to crumble as fresh trends buffeted the nation. The 2019 elections herald the dawn of an India born anew, where for the first time in its electoral history, there was animated talk about the consolidation of majority Hindu votes.

The BJP, on its own, won 302 (at the time of going to press) seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, well past the magic figure of 272 required to form a government, and its allies managed 49. The Congress, which won 53 seats, again short of numbers to stake claim for the de jure role of the main Opposition party in the House, won no seats in 20 states and Union Territories. They include Delhi, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Tripura, Manipur, Mizoram, Daman & Diu, Dadra Nagar Haveli, Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Chandigarh, among others. The Grand Old Party of India, created in 1885 and which led the country’s freedom struggle under the guidance of Mahatma Gandhi, managed to win only one or two seats in many other states. Congress President Rahul Gandhi lost from family bastion Amethi, which he and his family had won in consecutive polls since 1980, except for two very short-lived terms. On the other hand, the BJP won more than 50 per cent votes in as many as 224 seats compared with 136 five years ago; the Modi-led NDA won more than 50 per cent votes in some 15 states and Union Territories, and ensured that it retained a large chunk—over 80 per cent—of its seats while Congress languished at 37 per cent. As the results confirm, the BJP poses a grave danger to the mere existence of regional parties in several states, including Uttar Pradesh where it decimated the Mahagathbandhan of Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) by winning 64 seats against their 15. In West Bengal, the saffron party cruised ahead with 18 seats from 2 in 2014, nipping at the heels of Trinamool Congress chief and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who won 12 seats fewer than 2014, winning 22 of the 42 constituencies. In Bihar, it won 17 and its ally, Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) 16 while Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) drew a blank. Even in Telangana, the BJP won four of the 17 seats while the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti won only nine seats.

Endless Pursuit

MODI HAD KICKED OFF THE CAMPAIGN WITHIN days of it coming to power with an absolute majority at the Centre in 2014. Though there was enough and more of criticism of the Prime Minister—the first post-Independence- born candidate to occupy the top post—not interacting with the media through press conferences in the years that followed, Modi had made sure he communicated incessantly regardless, through online platforms such as Twitter, his own app, regular programmes like Mann ki Baat and well-timed addresses to the nation that outlined his vision and policies for the country.

While scorned by a section of the elite, his pronouncements were treated like gold dust by a much larger voter base, as the results of various elections over the past five years have proved. In fact, controversial topics such as the Rafale deal and setbacks caused by demonetisation were hardly discussion points in the elections this time around, as Open reporters were surprised to discover during their tours in various states. In Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs to Parliament, the largest by a single state, most people surveyed by Open contended that they treated their vote as one for Modi, not essentially for the local NDA candidate. Behind the tactic to transform the 2019 parliamentary poll to an election akin to a presidential one in which Modi was the sole leader and key contender to power, lay relentless hard work, craftily packaged federal schemes targeted at the poor and grand moves to garner the support of other socially, economically and politically marginalised groups.

Merging Class, Caste

FROM GORAKHPUR TO FAIZABAD AND AZAMGARH TO Allahabad, there was a popular Bhojpuri song that resonated through the bylanes, in this election: ‘Aadha roti khayenge, Modi ko jitwayenge.’ It is a variant of renowned singer Keshrilal Yadav’s words ‘Nun Roti Khayenge’. The song reflected the massive sway of Modi in Uttar Pradesh over a new social coalition that finally trumpedthe grand alliance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that had placed hopes in the advantage of caste arithmetic in the most populous state. It was a coalition of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, irrespective of caste and community, both of which have been building blocks of politics for decades in the state. For the first time, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were in the thick of a transformative new identity politics that, breaking the powerful caste barrier, brought its poor on a single platform, as the 2019 election results confirm. The coalition comprised the poorest of the poor, a large section of who were Dalits and lower OBCs, who account for close to 30 per cent of the state’s population.

This newly-formed social support base for the BJP included those who had voted for Modi in 2014. Its preference for Modi then was mainly fuelled by the credibility deficit suffered by the Congress-led UPA and the socio-political and economic domination of the Yadavs over other OBCs under Akhilesh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party. This time around, however, this group of non-Yadav OBCs and MBCs—besides all the marginalised, unorganised and economically weak—threw their weight behind Modi thanks to a plethora of common denominators transcending caste. The notable non-Yadav OBCs in the state include Saithwar, Bind, Gadariya, Nishad, Prajapati, Teli, Sahu, Hahar, Kashyap, Kachhi, Kushwaha, Rajbhar, Nai, Badhayi, Panchal, Dhiman, Loniya, Noniya, Gole Thakur, Loniya Chauhan, Murao, Fakir, Lohar, Koeri, Mali, Saini, Bharbhuja and Turaha. All of these groups have been successfully co-opted into Modi’s new socio-political coalition.

Besides, most of them are beneficiaries of innumerable government schemes, Central and state, including low-cost housing, sanitation, free gas connections, power, healthcare and so on. The Direct Benefit Transfer scheme was the icing on the cake. In just five years, thousands of voters have thus been empowered with a transformed lifestyle unimaginable for decades. In field surveys, officials vouch, there were hardly any complaints from Muslims of any discrimination as it was feared by a section of potential beneficiaries. Unsurprisingly, Muslim anger of the kind seen in the past against the BJP, and especially Modi, is subdued this time even in Muslim-dominated seats.

This electoral tactic of carving out a vote bank among the poor was successfully replicated by BJP/RSS volunteers across the vast Hindi belt well prior to the elections as part of, what they affirmed, was Modi’s inclusive governance that obliterated existing walls of social compartmentalisation. Gone are the days when Lalu Prasad could utter a catchy slogan like ‘Swarg nahi diya, swar diya (didn’t give you paradise, but gave you voice)’, and win the backing of the backwards.

Such efforts of the BJP over the past few years, through the government as well as mobilisations by the party, brought into force a perception about Modi as a doer that began to click well. Brand Modi therefore became an irresistible proposition, especially among beneficiaries of the NDA Government’s schemes that account for close to 220 million people. Interestingly, women form a nodal part of Modi’s coalition of the poor across UP and the Hindi belt. Team Open’s tours to the hinterland validate the BJP’s claims that a section of Muslim women who benefited from the welfare schemes in north India tend to view Modi as a do-gooder though it is not sure whether that perception has translated into pro-Modi votes. Yet, such a perception among the minorities is gaining in traction.

As a result, such new coalitions engender a watershed moment in UP and effect a realignment in political affiliations. In 2007, BSP chief Mayawati spearheaded a new political inclusion movement in UP. Modi’s idea of inclusion rests on both development and politics. Historically, there were four milestones so far in identity politics of the Hindi belt: The first was when the three peasant castes of Yadavs, Koeris and Kurmis formed the ‘Triveni Sangam’ with a view to rally other marginalised castes behind them in a movement for social justice prior to freedom. The move didn’t meet with much success.

Muslim anger of the kind seen in the past against the BJP, and especially Modi, is subdued this time even in Muslim-dominated seats

And then came the vigorous assertion of OBCs in Indian politics: in 1959, Ram Manohar Lohia was the first leader to demand empowerment of the socio-economically backward castes. Karpoori Thakur, in his second term as Bihar CM, introduced quotas for OBCs in government jobs and educational institutions. The Karpoori Thakur ‘formula’ batted for a kangaroo quota for MBCs from the reservation quota for backward classes, checkmated by the powerful Yadav bloc on whose support Thakur, from the numerically weak Nai community, relied on. Then, in December 1980, the Mandal Commission submitted its report on reservations to socially and educationally backward classes to the Government. The subsequent Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi governments put the report on the back-burner. The report was finally accepted by the VP Singh Government a decade later, in August 1990.

The third attempt triggered much political churning. Mulayam Singh Yadav became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1990. A few years later, he formed SP and became the unquestioned leader of the upper OBCs in the state. The Yadavs had become a powerful force, on the back, among other things, of the Mandal Commission. True, the transfer of power from the upper castes of UP to the OBCs was not smooth. But the empowered OBCs had come to stay on the political firmament across the country, radically altering social equations across north India.

Following this came the Dalit surge under the guidance of Kanshi Ram. As tensions mounted between the upper OBCs and Dalits, the latter came up with aggressive slogans like ‘Tilak, taraazu aur talwar, inko maaro joote chaar’. Dalit politics came into its own in UP for the first time but the primary targets were upper castes, the Brahmin, Bania and Thakur. Mayawati was a persona non grata in the upper caste and upper OBC-dominated politics of UP in the beginning. But by 2007, she aligned with the Brahmins who took credit for her victory. Mayawati put them in seats of power far disproportionate to their numbers in the state and sold the act to her hardcore Jatav supporters under the slogan ‘Sarvajan Hitay’. Incidentally, it was in 1995 that Kanshi Ram had decided to resort to social engineering to widen his party’s base. The social engineering in 2007 allowed the highest and the lowest in the social order to ally to check the OBC upsurge. Some distinctive slogans of the day reflect the thinking in the BSP which transformed Mayawati from a leader of a few social groups to one of a broader cross-section of society, the hallmark of mature leadership. And Mayawati subsequently emerged as the biggest challenger to Mulayam Singh Yadav and OBC politics. As many as 139 of the 403 seats the BSP contested in 2007 went to the upper castes: 86 of these were Brahmins; the BJP lost this group’s support in over 35 seats to the BSP. Mayawati could not have moved to Lucknow with the support of 17 per cent Muslim vote alone. The results were stunning. Mulayam Singh’s SP fell to only 97 seats in the Assembly (down from 143 seats won in 2002), while the BSP notched up a tally of 206 (up from only 98 in 2002). She appointed Satish Mishra as the party’s first Brahmin national general secretary and the powerful upper-caste face of the BSP regime.

Yet, Mayawati continued to draw from the Jatavs once she become chief minister, and the cracks between the Jatavs and the non-Jatav Dalits continued to widen, allowing the BJP more than just a foothold among the Dalit vote bank both in 2014 and in the 2017 Assembly polls. Mayawati has been unable to strengthen herself among the other Dalit communities since. With every election, the BSP chief has been gradually losing her hold over the Dalit vote bank in UP, a downslide that has continued to the advantage of Modi and his powerful new alliance among the castes considered lowest on the social pecking order. Without doubt, these elections show that the BJP has gained enormously from the goodwill it has generated among the poorest of poor who had reposed faith in it.

Mission & Ambition

TARGETING THE REAL POOR IN ORDER TO OBLITERATE ruses that politicos employ to stay in power by appealing to clan-like sympathies was followed up with hard work that required utmost devotion from committed cadres. Selling Brand Modi topped the priority in the goal towards a second term and a spectacular win, and almost equally crucial was making inroads into uncharted territory, and in the process expanding the party as a well-oiled machinery to take on challenges as daunting as pursuing organic growth as well as tying up effective alliances in the south, the east and the Northeast. While electoral forays into the south and Northeast are well known and documented, efforts to secure a base in West Bengal where the BJP didn’t seem to have a strong chance, started in right earnest days after Mamata Banerjee won the state elections in 2016. BJP President Amit Shah has since made 84-odd trips to the eastern state, starting with the most difficult of turfs for the BJP to make a political dent: Naxalbari in Darjeeling district from where extremist Leftist movement of Maoism originated in India in the late 1960s. Shah also held numerous parleys with senior RSS functionaries and BJP leaders and point persons in the state to chart out a growth plan. This bid was in line with the resolve by the party to expand to 120 new Lok Sabha seats where the BJP didn’t have any flicker of hope some five years ago. Talking to Open shortly after the grand victory in the Uttar Pradesh state elections in 2017, Bhupendra Yadav, general secretary of the party, had said that the new pastures for the Hindu nationalist party would include Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, West Bengal and several states in the Northeast. “Certainly, on the list of our new targets are Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,” he had averred, emphasising that a “lot of work” was being done in these turfs by the party, either on its own or with allies. At that time, the BJP was in power in 17 states that are collectively home to two-thirds of the country’s 1.25 billion people.

For his part, the BJP president made it a habit to closely survey seats where the BJP was present but had never won, besides high-profile seats of top-notch opposition leaders. For example, in Guna in Madhya Pradesh, when Shah realised that the Congress candidate had overwhelming support from a region called Ashok Nagar, he encouraged party workers to work exclusively in that terrain. The idea was to go the whole hog in pursuing growth for the party. Till date, the BJP has 110 million members, making it one of the largest political parties in the world.

Such all-out efforts across the country to fight to the finish became a game-changer for the party. Presently, Shah recruited over 3,800 full-timers to work in difficult areas and trained them to connect with people across class and caste. He also insisted that they share meals at least once a week with an underprivileged family to build solidarity and cement ties with people from such backgrounds. The efforts proved to be fruitful, indeed.

By the time he faced the 2019 elections, Shah felt more comfortable than ever. Besides a record number of party workers, he also had hopes from 220 million beneficiaries of the federal welfare schemes. He was confident of wooing 330 million voters to his party’s fold; in comparison, the BJP won 170 million votes and managed 31 per cent votes in 2014 to cruise itself to an absolute majority on its own, for the first time a party did so since 1984. Shah tells Open in an interview: “I was fighting the election in my own turf.” As with the new base of the poor, he notes, “We were assiduously cultivating a vote bank. We created it from those who were either aligned with the Congress or the Left. And we did it without hurting the interests of our traditional vote banks.”

Interestingly, three issues – inflation, corruption and secularism – were not topics of concern in this election. Inflation had been a major poll issue since 1957; and since the time of Indira Gandhi, corruption had invariably been a subject; secularism was a perpetual slogan for a long time, especially since the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJP’s predecessor) made decent gains in north India in the 1967 elections to the fourth Lok Sabha.

The BJP leadership also had plans at the drop of a hat for newer problems, not merely long-term plans. For instance, following the setbacks in the three Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, concerned party leaders got into a huddle with Shah to discuss ways to troubleshoot and turn things back in their favour ahead of the General Election. It emerged from a meeting on Chhattisgarh that BJP had earned the wrath of some caste groups that felt they were not paid their due in allocating seats. Reparative measures were taken on a war footing. A particular caste group called Sahu and other tribals were immediately ‘appeased’ and their grievances addressed besides denying seats to incumbents. Similar measures were taken in Madhya Pradesh to address such worries. In Rajasthan, the central leadership of the party made sure that Gujjars, Jats and Meenas were well-represented to avoid any erosion of votes. As luck would have it, the BJP has surged ahead in these states in the Lok Sabha polls.

Congress had grossly underestimated the strengths of the BJP, Modi's popularity, the network of its key opponent and its own weaknesse

BJP, formed in 1980 as a successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, has often worked towards championing the cause of the Hindus, but several Hindu groups still were politically inclined towards backing other parties like the Congress. In that context, the BJP had a lot in order in terms of winning support from a large section of Hindu civil society that includes various sects, saints, pilgrim centres, temples and so on. In fact, the idea of extending the influence of the BJP to these influential entities had struck Shah when he and his wife were on a pilgrimage shortly after a court order that disallowed him entry to Gujarat. By 2013, he had visited some 40 mutts in that long tour discovering India. He came to realise on becoming president shortly after the BJP was elected in 2014 that the party had to reach out to 7,600-odd mutts and centres that had inherited the legacies of saints of yore, including Kabir, Sant Ramdas and so on, besides those of Dom Rajas who burn the dead in Varanasi. Presently, Shah and his team began the endeavour to establish links with them. It was done systematically and with perfection. Very soon, the BJP was able to make friends with people who had a great following among various class and caste groups, including those of Yadavs of north India and Matuas of West Bengal, a Scheduled Caste comprising 17 million to 30 million, according to estimates.

It was with the view of attracting new segments of voters to the BJP that Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched his Lok Sabha campaign from the border constituency of Bangaon and met ‘Boro Ma’, the matriarch of Matuas, who were traditional Trinamool Congress voters. In fact, Modi, in the fallow years after he was ‘boycotted’ by mainstream media, had done this on his own terms as Gujarat chief minister, befriending various religious sects to bypass the media and still reach out to a great chunk of people through influential figures. It also gelled well with the BJP’s strategy of breaking caste affiliations that kept political parties afloat and dominant by wooing communities that had felt left out in the social engineering and political empowerment exercises of the past.

Closer to the elections, the BJP realised, to its delight, that the warmth it had for such groups was mutual and useful.

The New Matrix

JUST AS ASPIRING INDIANS WHO BROKE OUT OF BPL status looked up to a strong leader to deliver and the poor who felt obliged thanks to the much-needed social security they were provided with, the dominant theme in this election was the hope for more if the Modi Government continued for an other term. While the opposition Congress appeared to squander away chances for alliances in crucial states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bengal, and announcing welfare schemes that looked like a knee-jerk poll gimmick, the BJP was able to dominate debates that included the Balakot strikes on Pakistan. Chandana Bhakt, a homemaker from Singur which falls in the Hooghly Lok Sabha constituency, had told Open that her family, traditional TMC voters, would vote for the BJP this time around. She was upbeat about the “befitting” response to Pakistan’s misadventures in Kashmir. She also had another grouse, she said in an interview: “Hindus haven’t been treated well enough by successive governments.” Open correspondents had found while such display of Hindu identity was not uncommon in private earlier, it was increasingly becoming a publicly-voiced opinion in several states in India.

As Shah said, the perception about Modi as a strong leader who deserves another term in power runs deep, contributing to this emphatic win. In Uttar Pradesh’s Bansgaon, Ashwini Kumar, a dealer in building supplies, shared the view that that the Modi Government had done a lot for UP. “I had voted for other parties in the past. But now that we are more aware of what our leaders are doing, we are convinced that Modi is the leader to trust. Earlier, people were not very aware of politics, but now thanks to TV and social media, people have become intelligent,” he said.

In Chandigarh, for instance, even JK Khattar, who averred to be voting for the Congress, said that he was doing so by force of habit and that most people he knew were voting for the BJP because they love Modi, not the local BJP/NDA candidate. Modi had appealed to voters that a vote for the lotus symbol was a vote for him directly. “That is the advantage that the BJP had. Local factors were hardly a concern in the elections in many places in the country. Modi has no rival who could challenge him and his party made the most of that appeal,” Khattar told Open. In Deoria in Uttar Pradesh, Parmendar Bahadur Sahi, a banquet-hall manager was impressed with the BJP’s “positive intentions”—which for him meant that BJP stood with the poor of all castes, buttressing the argument that BJP while wooing lower castes managed to keep its upper-caste loyalists happy.

A Study in Contrast

PRAVEEN CHAKRAVARTY, WHO HEADS THE CONGRESS’ data analytics department, said sometime last year that Modi is a one-term Prime Minister and repeated an argument he had made in 2014—that the electoral outcome of 2014 was ‘a complete outlier and unrepeatable’. He used the famous expression ‘Black Swan moment’ to speak of Modi’s victory. He poked fun at what some pundits used to refer to as his ‘invincibility’.

Chakravarty is an honourable man, but his statements and forecasts have been proved wrong. For someone very close to Rahul Gandhi, his line of thinking probably reflects what the Congress party was thinking—and therefore it isn’t wrong to assume that the main opposition party had underestimated the challenges it faced in taking on its powerful rival. That the Congress missed the plot was also evident from its overestimation of the Priyanka Gandhi impact, with some suggesting that she being made the in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh under which fell Modi’s seat of Varanasi, would hurt the BJP. The logic was that by pitching her in the region, the Congress could eat into the upper-caste vote base of the ruling party. The calculations, now it is clear, have gone awry, as is evident from the resounding defeat of her brother and Congress President Rahul Gandhi from Amethi, a family pocket borough, to Smiti Irani of the BJP.

It requires no knowledge of game theory to realise that the Congress had grossly underestimated the strengths of the BJP, Modi’s popularity, the network of its key opponent and its own weaknesses. Rahul who lost in Amethi will make it to the Lok Sabha only because he also contested polls from Wayanad in Kerala. Not only was 2014 not a Black Swan moment, but Modi also improved his 2014 tally this time around and made inroads into new turfs. It comes as no shock then that several renowned Congress leaders besides Rahul suffered a humiliating setback at the hustings. They include Congress veteran Mallikarjun Kharge, often referred to as ‘solillada saradara’ (a leader without defeat) in Kannada, who suffered his first defeat in this election; Sheila Dikshit, the longest-serving Delhi chief minister; Bhupinder Singh Hooda, former Haryana chief minister; Harish Rawat, former Uttarakhand chief minister; Ashok Chavan, former Maharashtra chief minister; Sushil Kumar Shinde, former Union Minister; Veerappa Moily, former Union Minister; Nabam Tuki, former Arunachal Pradesh chief minister; Mukul Sangma, former chief minister of Meghalaya; and Digvijaya Singh, former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh.

Among the 11 Congress dynasts who fought the election, including Rahul Gandhi, only two bucked the trend. Jyotiraditya Scindia, Congress leader and scion of the Scindia royal family, Jitin Prasad, Milind Deora, Lalitesh Tripathi, Vaibhav Gehlot, Sushmita Dev, Bhavya Bishnoi, Priya Dutt and Deepender Hooda all lost. Those who managed to win are Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath’s son Nakul Nath and former Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s son Gaurav Gogoi. From other opposition parties, notables who bit the dust include HD Deve Gowda from Tumkur, Mehbooba Mufti from Anantnag and Kanhaiya Kumar from Begusarai.

A lot of theories will be bandied now about why the Congress failed to unseat Modi based on hindsight wisdom. There were still indications for all to see that the Congress party seems to have missed, adopting an over-confident mode of campaign. One of its spokespersons has now admitted that its failure was thanks to poor organisation, which its president and other leaders had said were in good shape until May 22nd. In comparison, it is no secret the BJP had relied on continuous feedback from the lower rungs of the party, ensured seamless communication between select grassroots-level workers and the top leadership, and distributed tickets after much soul-searching and discussions. As regards the rigour behind arriving at decisions, Shah himself told Open that except in the case of 12 leaders who include Modi himself, Rajnath Singh and so on, the parliamentary party of the BJP spent 86 long hours to finalise other Lok Sabha candidates. “Each and every seat was thoroughly discussed,” he said. Tickets were denied to unpopular leaders and top- level functionaries of the party were given the charge of choosing winnable candidates based on local feedback. The party also kept the RSS in the loop to make sure there is total coordination with the parent organisation who complemented the efforts of booth-level workers.

The BJP, which sees the national security plank as a mere value-add in the elections held this time, has continued to make a presence in new states, the most important being West Bengal. Five years ago, TMC had won 34 of 42 Lok Sabha seats while Congress won four and the CPM and the BJP, two each. The rise of the BJP in the state, replacing the CPM as the main Opposition party, has been rapid. Historically, Bengal is one region in India where the roots of Hindutva politics run deep thanks to a raft of reasons. The state is home to various revivalist movements that overlapped with reformist ones more than a century ago. The long-term influences of the 1905 partition of the province largely along communal lines cannot be ruled out. Add to that hostilities triggered by bloody communal riots that crippled Bengal in the run-up to the second partition of the province when the country became independent in 1947 and East Bengal became part of Pakistan. Wounds tend to fester through word of mouth and propaganda. Open had reported earlier that the BJP had been improving its vote share in local polls in the state thanks apparently to the RSS’ long-term work, especially in the tribal belt and Hindi-speaking areas. This year’s campaign saw pitched street battles between the TMC and BJP cadres in a state known for political violence and quelling of Opposition with the use of police. Recently, a statue of Bengal’s legendary reformer and educationist Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was vandalised during Shah’s Kolkata rally. The Election Commission ordered restrictions in campaigning in the state the day after the incident.

The greater tragedy that perhaps awaits TMC is what has already happened to the Left in West Bengal. The CPM-led Left Front, who had ruled the eastern state for straight 34 years until Banerjee came to power in 2011, won not even a single seat in the state this time. In Tripura, where the CPM had won both the seats—Tripura East and Tripura West—last time, it lost both. In these seats, the CPM was pushed to the third position. In Kerala, where a CPM-led government is in power, the party won only a single seat out of 20 Lok sabha seats and the rest were cornered by the Congress, in a major consolation for the latter. The rise of Modi also meant that the Left has been on a decline. Tripura has a BJP government and though Kerala is an outlier electing no BJP candidate to the Lok Sabha ever, the Left parties are on the wane nationally. From 43 seats in the Lok Sabha in 2004, the CPM was reduced to nine in the last Lok Sabha. In 2019, it won three seats including two seats it secured in Tamil Nadu thanks to an alliance with the winning DMK. Professor Sumantra Bose of London School of Economics tells Open, “What a tragic fate for the CPM, which until the panchayat elections of 2008—that started its downslide—had dominated rural West Bengal, an 80 per cent rural state, for 30 years. The CPM has abysmally failed to provide an effective opposition to the post- 2011 Trinamool regime in the state which from 1977 to 2009 gave the party its limited clout in national politics, and post-2014, it has ceded that Opposition space to the BJP.”

With the BJP now looking to replace TMC in West Bengal and storm into new turfs, the political fortunes of many others—including TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu—look extremely bleak. In Odisha, where the BJP has made significant gains, the party hopes to crack the winning code next time.

With Modi riding a wave of immense popularity that is on a par with the 1950s India dominated by Nehru, rules of engagement in Indian politics and society are set to change further and in a way that is difficult for pundits to gauge. That various loud slogans raised in this election turned incongruous with the aspirations of the masses, confirm just that.

As of now, Modi, who wears his common man’s credentials on his sleeve, continues to be in the saddle in the world’s largest democracy that hopes to become a global superpower, and comfortably so.

Also Read

‘The Southern Frontier’ by V Shoba
Other stories of General Election 2019

EVERY ELECTION GENERATES a wave of recriminations in the ranks of the defeated. Where and why did we go wrong? Who should take responsibility? What is the way forward? These are some of the legitimate questions that are asked, not merely in India, but the world over. The unity in the ranks that was presented to the electorate has a tendency to abruptly disappear as disappointed supporters fall back on bloodletting.

In India, the second successive decimation of the Congress has produced an almighty crisis. Rahul Gandhi, the man chosen by the party—without any opposition, I may add—to lead the charge against Narendra Modi has gone into a sulk. He has expressed his desire to resign and seems adamant that he no longer wants to continue as leader. By itself this is a perfectly honourable response. All over the world it has become customary for the leader to step down if the defeat has been particularly resounding. However, the Congress operates on the dynastic principle and the belief that only a member of the Nehru-Gandhi can and should lead the party is very deep-rooted. The family is seen as the glue that holds the disparate elements of the organisation together. This is more so because the Congress is more a machine than a party—the loose belief systems have been grafted on to the machine to give a semblance of coherence.

On their part the Gandhis too view the party as a jaagirdari. Although competence is not altogether absent as the road to advancement, personal preferences of the first family play a disproportionate role. Those who get on the wrong side of the family have no choice but to look elsewhere. On its part, the members of the family have a very strong sense of entitlement and believe in a curious form of divine right. The combination of noblesse oblige and imperiousness is very marked. This may explain Priyanka Gandhi’s outburst in Raebareli after the election and her profound sense of betrayal. There was no admission of contrition or even a cursory acknowledgement that the party had got it all wrong and totally misread the popular mood. Nor was there a recognition that the people in constituencies the family viewed as pocket boroughs were fed up being taken for granted.

But why blame the Congress dynasty alone for its sense of haughty disgust? I think we saw a very similar response from Mamata Banerjee who blamed her party’s indifferent performance of having done too much for the people. Of course, Mamata has subsequently regained her political instincts. And although she appears to be losing her temper a bit too frequently, she appears to have decided on a strategy to contain the rising BJP. Whether this invocation of sub- nationalism works or not, amid rampant allegations of high-handedness, corruption and inefficiency, is another matter altogether.

The Gandhis, it is said, are never wrong; they are invariably misled. This semantic difference invariably allows them to be insulated from the blame game that accompanies any serious political setback. In recent days, the blame is being sought to be pinned on the Congress’ in-house pollsters and data analysts that had given the leadership a highly exaggerated picture of the party’s prospects. It is understood that the Congress leadership was misled into believing that it should start preparations for a non-BJP coalition government. If true—and there no apparent reason to disbelieve the reports—it suggests that the only source of feedback for the party was the pollsters and data crunchers. The traditional source of political feedback—the qualitative assessment from the constituencies—seems to have been totally missing.

Pollsters fulfil an important function: as a supplementary source of information, especially in areas where the organisation isn’t subjected to checks and balances. However, they can also be terribly misleading. My own experience suggests that there is often an inclination of the pollsters to provide their clients good news rather than accurate information. Many pollsters are inclined to tell parties what they want to hear—that the support levels are encouraging, when clearly they are not. In 2009, a section of the BJP leadership was deluded into thinking that the party was performing fantastically and mopping up seats. No wonder the outcome came as a big surprise and even generated a bizarre campaign to highlight electronic voting machine (EVM) manipulation. This silly campaign is now being flung in the face of the Modi Government by the present-day opponents of EVMs.

In the coming days we are likely to witness even more examples of silly behaviour.

THE RENAISSANCE MUMBAI Convention Centre Hotel is a white stately five-star with a USP boasting a location on the banks of the Powai lake, the main water body of Mumbai. It belongs to the Marriott chain and anyone who goes to their website can book a room for a little over Rs 8,000. It is not season time given the monsoon, and rooms are available. For everyone except DK Shivakumar, that is. He is a Congress leader and minister from Karnataka and had a booking early this week. And then suddenly he received an email from the hotel saying that it had been cancelled. Their notice leaked to the media said: ‘As per our conversation we wish to inform you that we have reservation in the name of DK Shivakumar:REZ775665D2. Due to some emergency in the hotel we need to cancel the reservation. No charges will be applicable’. The reason given— ‘some emergency’—was disingenuous. No one is in any doubt as to what it is.

It is in Renaissance that the key to the next government in Karnataka is lying in wait. Rebel MLAs of the Congress and JD (S), the coalition government in the state, are now being housed there, sequestered because the BJP, which is almost certain to get to power using them, wants no temptation or threat thrown their way. And DK Shivakumar’s intention to book a room in the Renaissance was precisely that. He is a powerful character in Karnataka politics, a sort of enforcer for the party. To round up a few puny MLAs back into the stables is not an impossible order for someone like him. But to do that contact has to be made and there the hotel put a spoke in the wheels. That the BJP chose a hotel in Mumbai to keep the rebel MLAs is also unsurprising. They rule Maharashtra and no hotel management in their right mind is going to disobey an order to not allow someone like Shivakumar to get close to the MLAs. Essentially a five-star hotel has through the curious turns of Indian politics become a prison or fort, depending on the point of view of the MLA in the room inside. It protects him till he casts his vote in the Assembly and at the same time also prevents him from further auctioning his vote and moving to another resort of another party.

Lest you feel sorry for Shivakumar, note that it was just a year ago, that the shoe was exactly on the other foot. Soon after the Karnataka state election results, he had been the one herding MLAs into resorts after the governor invited BJP leader BS Yedyurappa to prove his majority. As a Mint article at the time noted, ‘When it became clear that the BJP will need legislators from the Congress or Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), to cross-vote or abstain from Saturday’s confidence vote, Shivakumar bussed the legislators to Eagleton Golf Resort in Bidadi, where they were kept under watch till the House assembled. None of them switched, leading to Yeddyurappa resigning without facing the vote.’ And a year before that when Ahmed Patel was in a desperate struggle to keep Gujarat Congress MLAs together to vote for him in the Rajya Sabha election, it was Shivakumar who flew more than 40 MLAs from Gujarat to a resort in Karnataka and Patel won in one of those rare occasions in recent times that the Congress outmanoeuvred the BJP.

Though south India, especially Karnataka, holds the crown when it comes to placing the hotel resort at the centre of government formation, it seems to be the north that first got off the block. One of the earliest instances was in 1982 in Haryana when all the elements of the political thriller that leads up to the phenomenon were present: an unclear majority for any party and partisan governors or speakers. In this case it was the Congress under Indira Gandhi trying its best to ensure that Lok Dal leader Devi Lal’s stake to government formation would be blocked. He had a chunk of MLAs of his own, outside support plus a breakaway block from the Congress. And yet the Haryana governor at the time, GD Tapase, was trying to sabotage his claim as the Congress tried to win MLAs over. An India Today report of the time tells us how Devi Lal handled it: ‘Within hours of receiving the go-ahead in the sweepstakes from Tapase, Devi Lal’s son Om Prakash, aided by Akali Dal leader and former Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, had succeeded in shepherding most of the coalition’s MLAs into the swank Hotel Shivalik at Parwanoo in Himachal Pradesh, right across the border from Kalka. Designating himself the ‘independent- in-chief’, Lachhman Singh strutted around the holiday resort, supervising the hideaway’s creature comforts. It was all very hush-hush, a scenario Mario Puzo could base his next novel on. As a big group of colourful Nihang Sikhs and a contingent of other Badal-assigned guards, armed to the teeth with swords and guns, kept intruders away and the precious legislators inside the hotel, Devi Lal frantically tried to rope in more men on his side.’

Since then the resort has been a mainstay of Indian politics when the verdict is not loud and clear. In 1983, the very next year after Devi Lal, Ramakrishna Hegde did a repeat. He formed the first non-Congress government in Karnataka by getting outside support from the BJP, the communists and independents and kept MLAs secure in a resort. The year after that, in 1984, the Congress did a resort coup on NT Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh, hosting his Telugu Desam Party MLAs until they voted against him. In the 1990s, the resort was central to governments being formed by different parties in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh. The new millennium began with Bihar seeing Nitish Kumar losing his trust vote after he couldn’t get through to Opposition MLAs who were ensconced in a resort. Two year later, Maharashtra Congress MLAs were kept in a resort till Vilasrao Deshmukh asserted his majority. In recent times, after the demise of J Jayalalithaa, during the struggle for AIADMK’s reins, the resort was in vogue.

It would be easy to think that resort politics is a modern dilution of the politics of conviction which legislators don’t have anymore. But that wouldn’t be true. Except for blink-and- miss moments in history, politics is about ideology and not power. The MLA who seeks to play both sides is merely looking to optimise his own power. The party’s response is to imprison and temper his greed and fear until his vote is no longer needed. As with everything else, the practice gets a free hand because political institutions easily twist the law and the judiciary is reluctant to act with speed and decisiveness. There have been a number of Supreme Court judgments which spell out the process but it is circumvented with abandon whenever a party sees the possibility of power. Meanwhile, there is the enormous expenditure involved in putting people up indefinitely in five- stars which leads to corruption and ultimately becomes a bill passed on by varying degrees to the taxpayer.

I remember visiting Harkishan Singh Surjeet’s ancestral home in Bundala in early 2005. It was a long drive from Delhi and we got lost more than once after reaching this large village in Jalandhar district of Punjab. But thanks to a couple of cheerful young men who were

ready to accompany us to our destination late at night, we managed to wade our way through ill-lit roads barely wide enough for an SUV to pass. As expected, the CPM General Secretary had gone to sleep, but a few members of his family were waiting for us. They served us dinner despite our protests. Warm beds were ready and, exhausted by the drive and the unfairly cold weather, I went to sleep immediately.

The next day, after a rich breakfast that consisted of ghee-laden paranthas stuffed with mashed potatoes and several tall glasses of lassi, some of us journalists sat down to interview the 89-year-old leader who exuded power and influence. He knew my family well. He remembered meeting my father, the late CPM leader Pattiam Gopalan, for the last time at the Jalandhar Party Congress of the CPM in 1978. The meeting with him was warm and cordial. It also helped that I was in the company of comrades from his party who included a senior journalist affiliated to the CPM.

Surjeet spoke to us as though he was in power at the Centre. He spoke with conviction that the policies of the Federal Government would be pro-poor and pro-worker. He was, of course, the kingmaker, having helped Congress President Sonia Gandhi form a Government with her party colleague Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister. The rainbow coalition was backed from outside by Surjeet’s party that at the time had 44 seats in the Lok Sabha. The Left Front, led by the CPM, had 59 lawmakers in the Lok Sabha. Congress, which had 145 seats in the House, was being steered by the Left. As Surjeet had forecast, over the next few years, the ruling coalition launched key welfare schemes confirming that the economic policies of the otherwise pro-reforms Congress was dictated by the Left.

Such was the power Surjeet enjoyed in the household of Sonia Gandhi, who was the real power behind the throne, that even senior Congress leaders thought it wise to cultivate a good rapport with the CPM chief. Shortly later that year, when Surjeet stepped down to make way for Prakash Karat, even corporate tycoons of the repute of Swraj Paul and Lakshmi Mittal visited AKG Bhavan in Delhi’s Gole Market to meet him. Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries also visited the CPM’s Central Committee office, where the rooms are only slightly better than a concrete bunker, to meet Sitaram Yechury, then a senior Politburo member, who is now the General Secretary of the CPM, which has only three seats in the Lok Sabha.

The slide in electoral fortunes of the Marxists began shortly after the death of Surjeet in 2008 when Karat first threatened and then withdrew the Left’s backing for the Congress-led UPA Government over its opposition to Singh signing the India-US nuclear deal. Marxists, caught in a time warp, found it impossible to align with a party that had anything to do with an ‘imperialist’ force like the US. As luck would have it, the Congress survived the threat posed by the Left and completed its full term in office. Manmohan Singh, in a historic speech in Parliament before the trust vote, thanked Surjeet and another party veteran, Jyoti Basu, who had by then retired from active politics, for helping the Congress in 2004, making it clear that their younger comrades were toeing a dogmatic path of confused idealists.

In the next General Election, Congress tied up with the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal where the CPM-led Left Front had been in power for 32 uninterrupted years. The election of 2009 was an indication of what was in store for the Left. Of the 42 seats, it won only 15, while the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress won 19 and Congress 6. It was an upset verdict for the Left. Two years later, Trinamool dislodged the CPM from the state in the Assembly elections, ending 34 years of Left Front rule. Mamata Banerjee would go on to win yet another Assembly election by a resounding margin despite Congress tying up with the Marxists. She also won the 2014 Lok Sabha poll by a huge margin, and by 2019, the BJP replaced the Left as the contender for power.

Such was the power Harkishan Singh Surjeet enjoyed in the household of Sonia Gandhi, who was the real power behind the throne, that even senior Congress leaders thought it wise to cultivate a good rapport with the then CPM chief

Clearly, the Left has been decimated in its citadel. And the party that dominated the national agenda in the age of coalition politics finally lost the plot. After all, its national prominence was reinforced by its electoral prowess in West Bengal compared with Tripura and Kerala which send much fewer MPs to the Lok Sabha. Currently, it is in power only in Kerala where the trends from the recent Lok Sabha polls suggest an erosion of traditional Marxist votes in favour of others. In this year’s election, the CPM won only one seat from its stronghold of Kerala, none from its erstwhile bastions of West Bengal and Tripura, and two from Tamil Nadu where it is in an alliance with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

PERSONALLY, IT HAS been a disheartening experience for me to see the Left shrink to its lowest levels in its electoral history. Born to a Marxist family in Kannur, northern Kerala, I had begun reading communist classics in Malayalam at a very young age, including, besides The Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s polemical works, autobiographies of the likes of P Sundarayya, the first General Secretary of the CPM, AK Gopalan, EMS Namboodiripad, and so on. I remember listening to “study classes” that my departed father took on a range of subjects for his party comrades that, later I figured out in detail, included Gramsci’s hegemony, Chinese communism, Palmiro Togliatti’s works and on the so- called “Indian revolutionary path”. I was also lucky to interact with many communists who went on to become senior leaders of the CPM in Kerala. My father worked closely with the likes of AK Gopalan, EMS and others. When he passed away aged 41, he was a legislator and a prominent leader of the CPM in Kerala. He had been a member of the Lok Sabha when he was in his early 30s.

After my father died when I was very young, I strove to become a scholar of Marxism just as he was. Though there was pressure to perform well in studies, I still found time to gorge on as many books on communism as I could, both in Malayalam and in English. The names that were familiar from the time include Christopher Lasch, Godavari Parulekar, BT Ranadive, M Basavapunnaiah, P Ramamurthi, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Mikhail Bakunin, Louis Althusser, and so on. I don’t think I ever understood many of their works at that age, but I read a lot about their lives and was determined to be one like them.

Later, when I was packed off to Sainik School in Thiruvananthapuram, I carried with me some books from my father’s library. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Engels was one of them. What is to Be Done by Lenin was another. Though I never ended up reading it, there was another book with a yellowish cover I longed to read, The April Theses, again, by Lenin. I kept them all inside my trunk box so that they could not be seen by my new classmates and friends in the dormitory. I kept one book inside my cupboard hoping that it was okay to be seen reading it: In the Cause of the People by AK Gopalan, which the great communist leader himself had signed and was addressed to my mother. I had also some editions of ‘Soviet publications’, such as Soviet Land, Soviet Woman, Sputnik, and so on. In school, whenever I got an ‘out pass’, the approval to go out of the school on Sundays, I made it a point to visit Prabhat Book House in the city, looking for books on Marxism. One of the many books that I still remember buying from there is Lenin’s Comrades-in-Arms.

It was around this time that I also started reading anti-Leninist books from my school library. Though I hated them, I devoured them like caviar, and one such was Inside the Soviet Army by Viktor Suvorov, a defector from the former Soviet Union to the UK. It was in that book that I came across terms like dedovshchina (constant bullying of junior conscripts) and what I thought back then were blasphemous remarks on Lenin. Reading Leon Uris like an addict also made things worse. Is there more to the Soviet Union than meets the eye? I was one who was taught not to believe in rumours against the Soviet Union, and yet books by Ernst Nolte (who is a fine commentator on fascism) blew my mind. Mikhail Gorbachev had already introduced perestroika and glasnost to help the Soviet Union cope with an economic crisis. Soon, winds began to buffet faster and led to the fall of the Soviet bloc. To say it was a huge disappointment was an understatement.

Jyoti Basu was offered the post of Prime Minister by a coalition cobbled together by communists, socialists and backed by the Congress. His party shot down the idea saying it would not be part of a Government in which it didn’t have dominance

The fall of the Soviet Union didn’t upset the communist stalwart EMS Namboodiripad as one would have expected. He came up with the proposition that it was the excesses and anti-communist tendencies of the leaders that led to the debacle. The idea, he exhorted, was to focus on India and expand the footprint of the Communist Party through electoral politics. As a young man, I went with the flow and found gratification in small pleasures—poll victories for the Left in India or return of pro-Left parties, either in Latin America or Europe. Deep inside, I began to respect pro-democracy activists who became heroes of former Soviet bloc countries—people like Lech Walesa of Poland. Meanwhile, Indian communists continued to win in West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala even as we continued to debate on why communism failed people globally; on Stalinism; on Fidel Castro and Cuba; on China and how it managed to weather the storm (some of us attributed it to the spell of Confucian philosophy); on the benefits of liberal democracy.

IT WAS AROUND this time that we young Leftists began to re-read and learn to unlearn. One of the theories that did the rounds back then was that communism failed because the Communist Party that Lenin created in Soviet Russia resembled the rigid hierarchical and centralising structure of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, was incompatible with the idea of the Soviets, or workers’ councils, a highly decentralised entity. The discussions never seemed to end and most of us began to realise there is no point in fretting about the past. What has happened has happened.

And then 1996 happened.

Jyoti Basu was offered the post of Prime Minister by a coalition cobbled together by communists, socialists and backed by the Congress. His party shot down the idea saying it would not be part of a Government in which it didn’t have dominance. I felt it was a foolish decision approved by a majority of party leaders. They were out of touch with reality. A handful of the old guard, including EMS, Surjeet and Basu backed the idea of joining the Government, but the young leaders put their foot down. Surjeet refused to attend party meetings for a while calling the younger lot—Karat, Yechury, etcetera—Naxalites. The older generation knew only too well that it was smart politicking and not the theories of Karl Marx that helped them gain as much as they did so far. Wherever they were in power in India, communists did work towards enhancing the powers of local bodies, promoting grassroots governance and reducing corruption.

By 1997, I had shifted base to Delhi. There were hopes still. Although it was demoralising to watch top Left leaders in Delhi head for party offices as though they were in a 9-to-5 job. After 2004, when the Left reached its prime, it was a downhill ride. Between them, Karat and Yechury, both opposed to Basu being PM, presided over the decline of the Left over the past decade. Historically, the communists had raised great hopes, especially with the Telangana Rebellion of the late 1940s and the early ’50s, of coming to power over large tracts of India. Communists did very well in Andhra Pradesh in the 1952 elections. In 1957, in Kerala, EMS created history by becoming the third elected communist ruler of a state in the whole world—after San Marino and British Guiana. Among communists, the excitement was contagious, but more than 60 years later, the Left is largely marginalised in India. In a country where there is poverty amidst plenty, communists do have slogans to fall back on and grow fast, yet they seem to be hobbled partly by their own mistakes and partly thanks to the changing political culture of India.

As a former insider and now an outside sympathiser, I feel crestfallen. But then, without great architects, no movement can prosper. Communists didn’t have a Gandhi. Now, they don’t have a religion.

For the first half of the ‘Open Decade’, between 2009 and 2019, India was governed with a closed mind.

History does not measure time by the feeble pages of a calendar. It shapes our lives through the churn of events. The 20th century,

to cite a relevant example, did not begin when one hour slipped into another during a liquid midnight on December 31st, 1899. The course of that century, with its dynamic upheavals, was set in August 1914 with the beginning of the First World War. The past had created the war, but the war created the future.

Age-tested empires wobbled and collapsed, creating space for a reinvention of the world order based on the rise of a republican and democratic spirit which demanded political rights and economic gains for those who had never enjoyed them before, the impoverished masses. Empires grew enormously rich at the cost of subjugated nations, but elites transfer the wealth of conquest to their own pockets: the poor of London were perhaps only marginally less hungry than the poor of India at the pinnacle of the British Raj. Russia’s nobility under the Tsars had as much contempt for its serfs as the mandarins had for Chinese villagers. This process of socio-economic liberation led to revolution across the world; and if nations like Britain managed to avoid class war, it was because they heard the approaching thunder in the echo chambers of democracy and hurried through preventive reform.

Communism could not find an anchor in India, although the objective conditions were ideal, because Mahatma Gandhi turned India’s freedom struggle into a mass movement inspired by India’s ethos. It is no coincidence his leadership extended from the First World War to the Second, four decades which saw more change than in the previous 2,000 years. Colonialism was buried in the debris of a people’s rage against injustice. That, however, was only half the battle. Gandhi’s Ram Rajya was a metaphor for individual rights and collective prosperity. Indians got the first. But till the end of the first decade of the 21st century, more than half-a-billion Indians were still waiting for the second.

The economic stagnation, if not collapse, induced by the hybrid confusion of Jawaharlal Nehru’s quasi- socialism during the 1950s is rarely mentioned. The dreams that emerged with freedom took barely fifteen years or less to dissipate into frustration and nationwide anger. Nehru’s first political challenge came from an armed Communist rebellion in Telangana born of bare-subsistence poverty. That rebellion was brought under control, although the Communist Party remained powerful enough to emerge as the strongest Opposition force in the elections of 1952.

But such was the economic despair by the 1960s that a second Communist revolution sparked off by 1963, and this time on a far wider scale than Telangana. It was quickly named after the place from where it began, Naxalbari in north Bengal. The Naxalites not only wreaked havoc through the 1960s and 1970s but also abandoned nationalism and declared that Chairman Mao Zedong was their chairman. Their strength lay not in Chinese-sourced weapons, or the Red Book, but in the support they found across India from the dispossessed. Half-a-century after the spectacular bonfires of Naxalism, we were still debating, in 2014, whether Rs 32 a day was enough to calm the needs of half-a-billion Indians.

By the end of this century’s first decade, India, spurred by its young, was anxious to join the 21st century. The meaning of this aspiration is not complicated. You cannot be a modern nation with the complete elimination of poverty. It means an economy sustained by equity.

In 2009, voters placed the Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, at the head table of the Last Chance Saloon. It was both a warning and an opportunity. Instead of seizing the opportunity, Congress leaders shut their minds, opened their hands and went to sleep in the smug cocoon of self-satisfaction. The Congress-led UPA coalition offered boring, tendentious and venal repetitions of familiar indifference. Government was intellectually barren, and fecund only in corruption. It confused a lottery victory in 2009 with legitimate earnings. This, in turn, induced a cynical conviction that India had no alternative to its chalta-hai ideology and milta-hai governance.

The Congress-led UPA coalition offered boring, tendentious and venal repetitions of familiar indifference. Government was intellectually barren, and fecund only in corruption. It confused a lottery victory in 2009 with legitimate earnings

By 2014 India was exhausted.

The country was going nowhere because there is nowhere to go in a swamp. Corruption had become an odorous partner of inert government. The poor correctly interpreted corruption as the loot of the nation’s wealth which should have been used for their welfare. Even media, traditional guardians of the public interest, seemed complicit, thanks to a Delhi-centric clique which was caught on tape while being on the take.

Citizen rage was devastating. Here is a statistic that might help clear any leftover cobweb. The Congress tally in two general elections, of 2014 and 2019, which is 44 plus 52 seats, is less than half of what the party got in just one General Election, that of 2009. This is the same party which humiliated and drove out then party president Sitaram Kesri in 1998 for winning 141 seats, silently looked the other way in 1999 when Sonia Gandhi took this down to 112 seats, and then praised her as saviour and saint when the Congress won just 145 seats in 2004. But, of course, Sitaram Kesri came from an ordinary Indian home rather than the glittering palace of a dynasty.

A full analysis of the range of disillusionment with the Congress and its dynastic leadership is far beyond the scope of a magazine article; corruption alone would occupy a book. But if I had to trace the pivotal centre of India’s national anguish, then it would surely be India’s continuing poverty and the absence of any credible answer to this crisis.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was simply too much a creature of the past to find answers for the present and solutions for the future. He therefore either lived in the era of the British economist John Maynard Keynes or, for a more contemporary touch, advisors minted by the World Bank. The latter were advocates of the infamous ‘trickle- down theory’ which, as the phrase indicates all too evidently, engineered policies which piled up wealth at the top in the expectation that some of it would trickle down to the ‘deserving’ poor. It was a mindset which believed in economic patriarchy.

In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought one unique advantage over his immediate predecessors, who took a patronising view of this historic curse. He sought, and found, answers from the practical perspective of the impoverished.

What does this mean? Once again, there is nothing complicated about the reply. The establishment, which bought refrigerators in the 1950s, air conditioners in the 1960s, generators in the 1970s, air tickets for holidays abroad in the 1980s, and personal cars in the 1990s, generally congratulates itself on the accepted statistic that the number of those living below the poverty line came down from circa 60 per cent in 1947 to around 30 per cent in 2010. Those living on the nervous edge of subsistence have a different view of the same numbers. Their existential question is: If it took you 70 years to reduce 60 per cent to 30 per cent, is it going to take another 70 years before 30 per cent became zero?

They were not ready to wait for another two generations.

PRIME MINISTER Modi offered the radical difference that India wanted, and needed. First, he shifted gear from poverty alleviation to poverty elimination. There is a significant difference between the two objectives. The first is open-ended, the second has a deadline. Prime Minister Modi set a deadline: 2022, or 75 years after Independence. 2022 is set to mark Gandhi’s meaning of independence, which means freedom from hunger, homelessness, anxiety, insecurity and the helpless silence that consumes those who have no money for medicine.

Prime Minister Modi offered the radical difference that India wanted, and needed. First, he shifted gear from poverty alleviation to poverty elimination. There is a significant difference between the two objectives. The first is open-ended, the second has a deadline

In a famous talisman, Gandhi advised the first set of Congress ministers, who took office in the Interim Government of 1946, to think of the face of the poorest person before taking any decision and ask themselves if the decision in any way helped him. Prime Minister Modi took personal charge of schemes that concentrated on deliverables that the poor could experience, and which raised the quality of their lives in quantum leaps. The toilet mission is deservedly the most famous of these schemes.

VS Naipaul is surely a name familiar to readers, not least because he won—albeit after much huffing and puffing—the Nobel Prize for literature. In our country, Naipaul became infamous after the publication of his travelogue, titled An Area of Darkness, in 1964. One powerful reason for India’s darkness was the stark sight of men and women squatting in the open for their morning ablutions. What did we do? The Government in 1964 banned the book. It did not try and end open-air defecation.

Narendra Modi was the first Prime Minister to declare this abject failure a national shame, and he did so from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day. If there was a message in his speech, there was a signal in the location. Today, there is worldwide recognition of his achievement, but that is far less important than the fact that countless impoverished women across India can live with a little more dignity.

Narendra Modi also knew what his forebears did: that the poor were victims of an unusual, systematic nationwide heist. Their welfare benefits were being ripped off by layers of middlemen. Rajiv Gandhi had famously said that only 15 paise of every rupee actually reached the poor. Once again, no one knew what to do about what had become a generic disease.

No one had ever envisaged the Modi solution. He saw that the only way to end this corruption was by bringing the poor into the fiscal system through bank accounts. When in January 2015 he launched the innovative Jan Dhan mission to open 300 million accounts for those without money, there was derisive laughter from the Congress and its pipe- smoking acolytes. I doubt if there is much laughter left in the Congress now. Mudra, gas cylinders, homes, medical insurance, pensions; the list is long.

Toilets and gas cylinders in the homes of the poor may not add to India’s gross domestic product, but they add immeasurably to India’s gross domestic happiness. This is the touchstone of the Prime Minister’s driving objective: prosperity for all. When he talks of a $5-trillion economy, it means raising the living standards of the poor to the middle-class category. The base line of New India is the middle class.

This brings us to a parallel truth: we cannot grow to that and higher levels without security. Security was the second biggest failure of the first half of the ‘Open Decade’.

The most serious threat to our security no longer comes from nation states threatening full-scale war, because the nuclear option has made this mutually destructive. The danger is from terrorism.

No wake-up call could have been louder than the terrorist assault on Mumbai in November 2008. India watched, gripped and horrified, as this barbarism was covered live on television. Details of arbitrary, faith-based murder, and the links with masterminds and handlers in Pakistan became common knowledge.

Indians did not punish the UPA in the 2009 elections for the frail initial reaction. They were ready to give the government time. What India did not bargain for was the craven behaviour of the Congress over the next five years.

In retrospect, the extent to which Sonia Gandhi and Singh misread the public mood is astonishing. Perhaps they concluded that their victory in 2009 was endorsement of their weak-kneed Pakistan policy. Indians do not support unilateral aggression; but they are not ready to accept a supine reaction to savage terrorism. Singh never voiced the anger that India felt. Instead, he continued engagement with Pakistan in the mistaken belief that the wish for peace would bring peace. All it did was to embolden those within the Pakistan power belt who had calculated that the cost of such invasive terrorism would be minimal, and the rewards high.

Prime Minister Modi’s security doctrine is calibrated. India has a defence policy, not an offence policy; but it understands the meaning of defence. Not one inch of land shall be vulnerable to incursion. There shall be accountability for every Indian casualty in cross-border attacks and zero tolerance for any form of terrorism on Indian soil. No sanctuary is either safe or beyond reach. What is remarkable is the support from the international community to Prime Minister Modi’s radically different approach. It is a tribute to the rise in his stature and India’s credibility as a responsible power.

Those who have created careers out of media commentary never recognised this, exceptions apart. The Indian people did, and said so during this year’s election campaign.

The promise of prosperity, security, stability and the revitalisation of the country makes the period between 2014 and 2019 the first five years of India’s 21st century.

ON JULY 23RD EVENING, after 14 months as Karnataka Chief Minister, HD Kumaraswamy’s luck ran out. His own prayers, his brother HD Revanna’s magic lemons, even a lucky room at the Taj West End—all failed to arrest the ineluctable fall of the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government, which had run athwart of the aspirations of 19 of its Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs). Twenty legislators, including Congress Ballari (Rural) MLA B Nagendra, reportedly unwell, were absent on the day of the long-anticipated trust vote, whittling down the numbers of the coalition, which had come to power after the Assembly elections in May 2018 with a strength of 118 in a house of 224. Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its 105 MLAs intact and more slated to join its ranks, flashed victory signs after bringing down a government that was birthed only to keep the party out of power in the state. For the BJP, which coasted to a second term in power at the Centre, 2019 has been an annus mirabilis. Close on the heels of the party’s sweep of 25 of the 28 parliamentary constituencies in Karnataka, BS Yediyurappa, the 76-year-old state party president and a man of antic conceits, may finally be able to put the ignominy of his 55-hour stint as chief minister on the back of a fractured verdict in the Assembly polls last year behind him.

While former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who was also the Chairman of the Coalition Coordination Committee, has accused the BJP of indulging in “wholesale” skulduggery, the party maintains that the hollowing out of the Congress-JD(S) combine is the result of internal upheavals. “The rebels felt they were being dictated to. The government was not letting them function as individual legislators and ministers. Most of them, if not all, including Vijayanagara MLA Anand Singh, will shortly support us in our bid to form the government. There will be no need to go for fresh elections,” said B Sriramulu, the BJP’s Tribal leader from Ballari, and the Molakalmuru MLA, speaking to Open on July 24th. “Some of them may be given ministerial berths but what is wrong with that? Didn’t the coalition government undertake Cabinet expansions to accommodate some of the disgruntled MLAs? Even after that, they remained unhappy because coalition leaders failed to address genuine grievances,” Sriramulu said.

THE CONGRESS AND the JD(S), which had spared no effort over the past month to win back the renegades, stressed they wouldn’t welcome them back “even if the sky fell”. “I am very hurt by the actions of rebel MLAs, who were my friends,” said DK Shivakumar, the Congress’ redoubtable arbiter and chief minister-in-waiting, ahead of the no-confidence motion on July 23rd. The minister for irrigation in the Kumaraswamy government quoted Voltaire: “Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.” Amid the high-tension debate and the dramatic sleepovers in the House over the past few days, Shivakumar—with his hard- edged practicality, irrepressible wit (“The way KR Puram rebel MLA Byrathi Basavaraj ran to the Speaker’s office would put even Ben Johnson to shame”) and displays of after-hours camaraderie with opposition leaders (“There is nothing wrong with making you deputy chief minister, but the BJP won’t do that, they will choose someone else,” he joked to a smirking Sriramulu)—emerged as the face of resilience in the Congress in its hour of despondency. In debating the trust motion, even as the BJP’s silence betrayed its gross hunger for power, Congress and JD(S) leaders, including Siddaramaiah, Priyank Kharge, Krishna Byre Gowda and KM Shivalinge Gowda, demonstrated an understanding of constitutional law and the grace to face their own fallibility.

BS Yediyurappa, the 76-year-old state BJP President, may finally be able to put the ignominy of his 55-hour stint as chief minister last year behind him

The odds, of course, were heaped against the embattled government. Governor Vajubhai Vala, allegedly a BJP sympathiser, wanted a trust vote without delay. The Supreme Court had ruled that rebel MLAs could defy their party whips without being disqualified, thereby paving the way for the fall of the government. More worryingly, it has set a precedent for judicial interference in a crucial legislative matter. “We all go home knowing we tried the best we could. For all the charges of disunity in the coalition, all of us were more than willing to compromise for the sake of stability,” says JD(S) leader and higher education minister in the outgoing Cabinet GT Deve Gowda, who tried, in vain, to convince rebel JD(S) MLAs to return. Deve Gowda, who had vanquished his bête noire Siddaramaiah in Chamundeshwari by over 36,000 votes in the 2018 Assembly elections, said earlier this month if the coalition coordinators thought that installing the latter as chief minister would quell rebellion, he was all for it. Among the first wave of rebels who left the coalition early in July were supporters of Siddaramaiah, leading to speculation that it was the former chief minister who had instigated them—a theory that has since lost currency.

“There are two kinds of leaders who have quit: veterans who felt incapacitated as part of a shaky and ineffective coalition and MLAs whose popularity has been declining and who cannot win another election on their own,” says a senior BJP leader who did not wish to be named. “Once they join us, it is Narendra Modi who is the candidate. The results of the Lok Sabha elections have made it clear to everyone that people want a strong leader.” Many of the rebel MLAs, including Pratap Gowda Patil, a former Yediyurappa loyalist who won from Maski on a Congress ticket by 213 votes, and actor-politician BC Patil from Hirekerur, had scraped by with slender margins in the 2018 Assembly elections.

Holed up in a hotel in Mumbai, rebel legislators repeatedly invoked their disenchantment with the government to justify their desertion. The word ‘interference’ was often used in connection with the state Congress and JD(S) top brass. Indeed, it has emerged as the trigger for the resignation of senior leaders like R Ramalinga Reddy, the BTM Layout MLA, who cited differences with Deputy Chief Minister and in-charge of Bengaluru G Parameshwara. Though Reddy eventually returned to support the government in the trust vote, the damage had been done. His dissent emboldened other MLAs—Basavaraju, Munirathna, ST Somashekhar and MTB Nagaraj—from the Congress stronghold of Bengaluru to break away. They had all complained of ‘internal problems’ emanating from the high-handedness of the top leaders of the coalition, especially Parameshwara and Public Works Minister and brother of Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy, HD Revanna. While wads of cash may or may not have eased their journey across the aisle, there can be little doubt that the rebels—13 from the Congress, three from the JD(S), two Independents and the lone Bahujan Samaj Party MLA—felt compelled to withdraw support. AH Vishwanath, a four-time MLA and Kuruba leader who was made JD(S) state president a year ago and resigned after the Lok Sabha polls assuming responsibility for the party’s poor show, abandoned ship reportedly because he felt sidelined in a rapidly shrinking party. His exit, along with that of Narayana Gowda, the Krishnarajpet MLA who said he was forced to resign because of constant interference from former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda’s family, leaves a gaping hole in the JD(S) bastion of Mysore- Mandya. Up north in Bombay-Karnataka, Ramesh Jarkiholi, the Gokak MLA and a powerful sugar baron who was dropped from the Kumaraswamy Cabinet in December, had been working to engineer a defection in the Congress for months. Shivakumar’s interference in local politics in Belgaum was reportedly the last straw.

“This is a wake-up call for parties pitted against the BJP,” says psephologist Sandeep Shastri. “The BJP has, of course, fished in troubled waters, but the disarray in the Congress national leadership after the Lok Sabha elections and the fact that the Karnataka alliance was filled with untenable contradictions paved the way for the BJP’s eventual victory in the state.”

In a heart-on-his-sleeve farewell speech ahead of the trust vote, the outgoing chief minister peddled the tired trope of the wronged, self-effacing politician and launched a screed against political poaching and the threat to democracy that it posed. He closed, however, with a practical warning to the BJP: if the party, which now enjoyed a frail majority, rushed to stake claim to form a government, a hostage situation may soon repeat itself. Stability may well be the unobtainium of Karnataka politics, but the BJP sees pure potential in uprooting the Congress from the state. “Many years ago, a weed began to sprout all over the lawns of Bangalore. It was so rampant and vile that people were paid per kilogramme for uprooting it. That weed was called Congress grass,” says a senior BJP leader. “It is time to employ the same strategy in politics.”

HER GLASS-WALLED living room facing the 16th century Humayun’s tomb was slowly getting filled with Congress leaders and workers. It was about a week to go for Lok Sabha elections in Delhi this May. In a small room, a few steps down, over breakfast, former Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit exuded confidence that her government’s three terms “changing the face of Delhi” would stand her in good stead. It has, forever. But she and her party lost the battle in a Modi wave sweeping across states.

One wonders if she had sensed that day the writing on the wall for Congress. It neither manifested in her calm demeanour nor her wholehearted campaigning as the 81-year-old leader stepped out into the heat and dust to take on Bhojpuri singer-turned-BJP politician Manoj Tiwari and Aam Aadmi Party’s Dilip Pandey in North-East Delhi. For Delhiites who saw the capital change over 15 years of her rule, Dikshit remains the most memorable chief minister. Her appeal went beyond politics in a city where several centuries live simultaneously. When Delhi’s longest-serving chief minister and the country’s longest-serving woman chief minister passed away last week it was no surprise that opponents, right from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, set aside politics to pay homage to her.

It was at a time that Delhi was facing an onion crisis, with prices of the vegetable rising, that Dikshit defeated the BJP to take over the capital’s reins in 1998. Over the next five years, she focused on development, making it her governance mantra and the bedrock of her political journey. From being a city in distress, hankering after an effective public transport system, roads and clean air, Delhi opened up the throttle making way for Metro rail, CNG vehicles and flyovers criss-crossing the city, which is perpetually bursting at its seams.

Metro man E Sreedharan recalls how she left all technical decisions to him and never interfered in the work on the Delhi Metro. “I found her extremely elegant, never played politics and always supportive of the Delhi metro. I consider her an excellent administrator,” says Sreedharan, who joined the Delhi Metro in November, 1997, less than a year before Dikshit became chief minister. In his 14-year tenure, she was chief minister for over 13 years.

When a compartment in the train was reserved for ladies, Dikshit was disappointed and asked why the Metro was not enforcing gender equality. “When I explained the reasons, she accepted the decision gracefully,” says Sreedharan. Last month when the AAP government proposed making travel in public transport in Delhi free for women, Dikshit dismissed it as a move which should be seen politically. Sreedharan recalls another instance, soon after she took over as chief minister, when the alignment of line number one from Tees Hazari to Pulbangash was changed by him to reduce the number of structures to be acquired. Those affected were up against the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) and demanded that the original alignment be restored. Dikshit called a meeting in which Sreedharan explained the reasons. After listening to him, she said, “I will not question the technical decision taken by Mr Sreedharan as I feel he is the best person to decide on such matters. So the new alignment will stand. I understand your problems and will take necessary steps to resolve them.” The protestors accepted it and dispersed.

“I had access to her any time of the day whenever I had a problem with the state government. She highly appreciated my emphasis on punctuality and cleanliness of trains and stations,” says Sreedharan. It was during Vajpayee’s regime that Delhi got its Metro. Dikshit made sure political differences did not come in the way of governance, her constant refrain being people choose leaders to deliver on promises.

JUST LIKE SHE left the Metro to Sreedharan, she encouraged arts in the city but left its creative pursuits to the artists. Filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, who directed Umrao Jaan, says it was rare to find a person like her responding to ideas in a huge space like Delhi. When he came to Delhi from Lucknow in 2000, she met him and asked if there was anything she could do. He said Delhi was a city of Sufi saints. Dikshit was supportive of any effort to bring out the essence of Delhi, an amalgam of diverse cultures. That is how Jahan-e-Khusrau, a three-day annual World Sufi Music Festival held at Humayun’s tomb, took off. “Even after she was out of power, she came to attend it, as anyone else in the audience. She was always warm and humble with the artists. She saw the artist behind the art. She didn’t curate, but she felt the art,” he says. Last year, the theme of the festival ‘Yamuna—Dariya Prem Ka’ revolved around the river that cuts through the capital. Ali says the artist community was always associated with government and in Dikshit’s absence, they would feel bereaved. “She knew that if she asked for anything from anyone even in another party, she would not get no for an answer. I wanted to see her in a role beyond politics,” says Ali.

Dikshit did pursue writing, bringing out an autobiography Citizen Delhi: My Times, My Life in which reminiscing her campaigning in Uttar Pradesh’s Kannauj parliamentary constituency in 1984, she says that on some days ‘I certainly felt as if, like Alice in Wonderland, I had fallen down a rabbit hole. Being new to the scene, I found myself being borne away by the insistence of well-wishers around.’ Her rivals in UP dubbed Dikshit, an English-speaking political greenhorn, an outsider. She won the election, entering Parliament for the first time, and became a minister in the Rajiv Gandhi Government.

It was in Delhi that she spent most of her life after she left Kapurthala in Punjab where she was born to an army officer. She studied at the Jesus and Mary Convent and Miranda House and married Vinod Dikshit, the son of Union Minister Uma Shankar Dikshit. At the helm in Delhi, she realised that the city had to be administered and responded to with a deep sense of understanding.

“We could honestly tell it to her face that she was wrong. She would hear us, however contrary it would be to her line of thinking. She would generally go ahead and do what she thought was right,” recalls Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) director Shakti Sinha, who was principal secretary of finance and power during her tenure. Sinha was earlier private secretary to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and joint secretary in his PMO. Dikshit took that as an added advantage saying she would be able to utilise his experience of working in the PMO.

“Her concern for another human being dominated her politics. No matter what her own stress was, she would ensure a visitor is being properly looked after. Her own troubles would be forgotten if somebody else’s problem had to be solved,” says Congress leader Pawan Khera, who had joined her in 1998, when she was made president of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee.

By the end of her third term, Dikshit started facing allegations of involvement in irregularities in contracts for equipment for street lighting during the 2010 Commonweath Games. The charges were denied by Delhi Chief Secretary PK Tripathi. What saddened Dikshit, according to those who have closely known her, was that the CWG did not get its due credit. Her concern for the environment, in a city where pollution levels have risen menacingly, reflected even in her last wish. She was cremated in a CNG crematorium, introduced in Delhi during her tenure. She wanted a “full stop” to her political career after 15 years in power in Delhi, only to realise “there are full stops in other spheres of life. But there are no full stops in politics.”

What do you say about the entitled leadership of the country’s oldest political party except that they seem to have a tendency to perennially shoot themselves in the foot? In May, when he finally decided to quit as party president, Rahul Gandhi seemed overwhelmed by defeat, disillusionment and bewilderment. The ground has been shifting on the socio-political front, calibrating public sentiment closer to the Right, plunging the party into a grave crisis after its decimation at the hustings. The news from the states was no better on Gandhi’s watch. Its boat had sailed in Goa, with MLAs abandoning the ship for the BJP. In Andhra Pradesh, the Congress sank without a trace in the state polls and, in Telangana, the party suffered a political meltdown. The desertions from the rocky JD(S)-Congress coalition and the ensuing drama in Karnataka ended this week finally with the HD Kumaraswamy government losing the trust vote, even as Gandhi vacationed on foreign shores. The Congress was headless.

Gandhi’s quitting ended the worst-kept secret in the Congress: there was a severe leadership crisis in India’s grand old party even as the 2019 electoral landslide for the BJP threw it into complete disarray. With the meltdown of the Nehru-Gandhi family super glue that kept the Congress together for decades as a multi-interest platform, no single leader was capable of stepping into the vacuum created by Gandhi’s exit. Urgently patch-worked, over and over since the 1990s, to stall imminent crumbling, the Congress now faces the threat of being made redundant. The party had, after all, splintered in PV Narasimha Rao’s time, led by regional leaders such as Sharad Pawar, ND Tiwari and Arjun Singh, as well as GK Moopanar in the south. In January 1998, Mamata Banerjee formed the All-India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. Many of them had risen to powerful positions on account of their perceived proximity to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The recent developments have also exposed the second worst secret: Rahul Gandhi was a moody and reluctant party president at best, needing constant hand-holding by his mother Sonia Gandhi. Sonia Gandhi herself appears to have been afflicted with a compelling vision of her son as a future prime minister, following in the footsteps of his father, grandmother and great-grandfather. Also, she has remained the driving force behind his survival this long as president, fuelled by the desperation of a party leadership that is aware that without the family, the Congress would fall apart.

Increasingly, Rahul Gandhi is being seen as out-of-depth, with even people who are charitable acknowledging that he is inconsistent. Gandhi has himself admitted in private to a stubborn streak that would not allow him to change his decision once his mind was made up, as on the recent occasion. He is a reluctant politician and his frequent trips abroad, besides the way he winked in Parliament even as he professed love for the Prime Minister, had further diminished him.

Rahul Gandhi is being seen as out-of-depth, with even people who are charitable acknowledging that he is inconsistent. Gandhi has himself admitted in private to a stubborn streak

Rahul Gandhi, at 49, has been singularly clueless about the radical changes on the ground that have impacted the Congress’ political fortunes. In a nation dominated by youth below 35, a new generation is not enamoured of the idea of dynastic leadership. To them, Rahul Gandhi smacks of someone who has benefitted from his pedigree with nothing to boast of as his personal achievement. Two of the party’s worst-ever performances have been on his watch, in 2014 and 2019. The party has lost power in state after state. After his resignation, things have taken a turn for the worse even in the few key states where it has been in power, including Karnataka, Punjab and Rajasthan. In Madhya Pradesh, where it won by a slim majority, a daily threat hangs over Kamal Nath’s government.

That disconnect between the family leadership model, purveyed by the Nehru-Gandhis and their loyalists, and the New India has only served to highlight how much voters today despise, and refuse to subscribe to, such entitlement. That leaves the Congress in a dilemma that it will find extremely difficult to extricate itself from: the leader seen as the only one who can keep the party together has been unable to perform that role with any degree of efficiency, but the leadership refuses to think beyond the family when it comes to the political rejuvenation of the party. Paralysed by this dilemma, there is now a very real risk of the party sinking deeper into the morass of uncertainty.

Rahul Gandhi has been singularly clueless about the radical changes on the ground that have impacted the Congress' political fortunes. In a nation dominated by youth below 35, a new generation is not enamoured of the idea of dynastic leadership

Rahul Gandhi’s tweets on his resignation, made after his announcement at the Congress Working Committee meeting, served to emphasise his political immaturity. It partly pinned the blame for the Congress’ devastating show in the 2019 General Election on his own colleagues, claiming that they had not given him total support in the ideological battle against the BJP and its leader Narendra Modi. In his battle against the BJP, he maintained, he had often stood alone but was proud to battle on nonetheless. The Congress had consequently lost badly and, as party chief, he took the blame and had resigned. But now, he maintained, so should others. Sources in the Congress say that he virtually extracted resignations from Jyotiraditya Scindia and Milind Deora as they refused to follow suit.

This was defeatist to the core—a victim card being played overtly and a victimisation syndrome being showcased that was pinned on a thinly veiled reference to his campaign on the Rafale fighter deal and his imagined charge of the Prime Minister’s involvement in it. Fuelled by the slogan ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ the campaign received the cold shoulder from leaders within his own party. It was a campaign that directly pitted Gandhi against Modi in the popularity stakes and sought to take the latter down by a direct assault on his personal integrity, which still notched up the highest ratings.

Aside from Gandhi himself and his data analytics team, most party leaders were of the view that there were very few takers for the campaign on the ground. They were aware that Gandhi was being misled by some among his chosen team into believing that the Congress stood more than a fighting chance at forming the next Government at the Centre, ousting Modi. And that Rahul Gandhi would be either prime minister or, at the very least, kingmaker. During the campaign, Gandhi is known to have got upset with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister and senior party leader Kamal Nath because the latter did not join the ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ chorus. It is such stubbornness which refuses to acknowledge the reality on the ground–instead of getting curious as to why this veteran of so many electoral battles, and one with a lot at stake in this one, was lukewarm to the Rafale campaign—that highlighted Gandhi’s inexperience.

Till date, not a single Congress leader has come on record— most prefer to say it privately—on the possibility that Rahul Gandhi’s aggressive campaign against Modi, targeting him for imagined breach of propriety, had boomeranged on the party. Talk to any Congress leader of consequence and he/she will tell you that it did not go down well with the voters. Gandhi himself reacted with anger at the Election Commission and even at his own colleagues, choosing not to acknowledge that voters rejected his campaign and that he had come up short in a presidential contest where he pitted himself against the more popular and trusted Modi.

Many compared Rahul Gandhi’s resignation to a captain deserting his ship in stormy waters. In the weeks of confusion that followed his refusal to reconsider his decision, Gandhi’s acolytes floated the ‘demolish the headquarters’ theory, by which they maintained that the party organisation had been the big liability on the Congress’ path to electoral success. Echoing Gandhi’s own sense of hurt and desertion, they hold that it was the party ‘organisation’ (euphemism for a host of other party leaders) that was a burden on him and that blocked Gandhi’s attempt to leverage his popularity. Espousing this view, Sachin Rao, strategic adviser to Gandhi in the Youth Congress and the NSUI, and an integral part of his handpicked team, was heard telling people that “the party will rise, once again, like a Phoenix from the ashes”.

UNDER SONIA GANDHI, the party outsourced all of its intellectual content to the Left. Rahul Gandhi’s acolytes—who have argued that the party organisation has become unwieldy—are now keen that the party carry out a drastic restructuring through a purge. This, amid repeated questions about the exact ideology the Congress espouses and its inability to spell it out. It is their case that though the organisation would suffer from the widespread slash and burn in the short run, it would finally emerge much stronger, empowered by a new crop of leaders with ideological clarity and clear objectives. An organisation cast in Rahul Gandhi’s image that would be in sync with his instincts and worldview. This is a course of action that Gandhi reportedly backs, one that would give him a free hand to keep his favourites in the revamped organisation.

The Congress' 2019 defeat was influenced by the twin factors of Rahul Gandhi's leadership and the Hinduisation of the polity. The Congress was unable to respond to either issue and what followed was a sharp decline

The irony couldn’t be sharper: here was an argument that the president of the biggest opposition party would have done much better at the hustings as a free agent rather than by leading his flock into battle. This, despite the fact that it was clear–especially after the Balakot air strikes–that Narendra Modi looked invincible.

Meanwhile, a section of the party’s senior leadership has been making a desperate effort to keep the Congress pulling together against the imminent danger of its falling apart. While veteran Karan Singh suggested four working presidents from different regions to avoid infighting and chastised the top leaders for wasting a month pleading with Gandhi to take back his resignation, others favoured a CWC decision favourable to the Nehru-Gandhi family on a leader with his or her feet firmly on the ground.

The quest for new leadership is fraught with contradiction. A strong section of the party, which believes in the indispensability of dynastic rule, would not like to take a risk and would prefer that someone like Mallikarjun Kharge kept the seat warm for Gandhi until he could be ‘persuaded’ to return to office, after a decent cooling-off period.

THERE IS ANOTHER school that feels somebody young should be given a chance. Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot and the like were automatically ruled out since they suffered from a major handicap: they were entitled and intrinsic to Lutyens’ Delhi, making them risky replacements for Rahul Gandhi. There was, crucially, also the danger of their overshadowing the reluctant prince. Someone like Mukul Wasnik, who rose from the Youth Congress ranks, has been favoured by others as an alternative to Kharge or Sushil Shinde. He is considered safe and is the leadership’s man with no base of his own. So he can’t be much of a problem. On the other hand, this relatively young leader from the Dalit community could prove problematic in the larger caste calculations.

Collisions are expected among those putting forth these various calculations once the Monsoon Session of Parliament ends, exposing the farcical arrangement of leading the party through an amorphous office called president of the AICC as a completely unworkable proposition.

There is, however, a larger issue beyond the leadership crisis that should be a worry for the Congress. It is whether the party is at all likely to course-correct the manner in which it conducts its politics. If it persists in its politics so far, the party can only hope to fixate on the rearview mirror, savouring the glories of the past, while the ground shifts significantly towards a Hindu polity. The Congress leadership’s response to that transformation has been leaden-footed to say the least. Erratic ‘soft Hindutva’ on the one hand (‘janeudhari Brahmin’, temple visits by Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, for instance) and heavy reliance on minority votes on the other, representing knee-jerk, old-school secular politics, whereby the leadership conceded to the demands of conservative or hardline Muslim clerics.

The problem that confronts Rahul Gandhi is that the majority community is no longer willing to accept the old-fashioned secularism. The demands of the Muslim community, unlike in the decades immediately after Independence, have now acquired an ‘in your face’ dimension that upsets the majority community. And a significant section of the Hindus sees a parallel between Islam’s global intransigence and its local manifestations.

What is also complicating matters for the Congress is the fact that Hindus have pruned the space for parties to engage in appeasement gestures. In fact, the Congress’ 2019 defeat was influenced by the twin factors of Rahul Gandhi’s leadership and the Hinduisation of the polity. The Congress was unable to respond to either issue and what followed was a sharp decline.

That the party has not learnt any lesson was evident last week in the Lok Sabha when its leader in the House, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, had to struggle to get his party MPs not to rush to yoke themselves to AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi’s wagon on forcing a division on the anti-terror National Investigation Agency Bill. The current crisis in the Congress mirrors the developments in the Democratic Party in the US, where the Left-Liberal ideology of the ‘Squad’ represented by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar is pushing the party to take positions against homeland security and in favour of cancellation of all student debt. Just as this could make President Donald Trump’s second run easy, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress is helping the BJP gain more heft with its support for the so-called ‘Tukde Tukde Gang’, with its call for thinning down the Army’s presence in Kashmir and with its opposition to anti-terror legislation.

The Congress has Himalayan battles ahead of it, if it wants to survive and remain relevant in a rapidly changing polity. By all indications, the party is in no position to challenge the BJP in the coming round of state elections. Rahul Gandhi will once again be in focus, for both voters and pundits. To little or no avail.