on the spot
Tavleen Singh
It is that time of year in Delhi when everyone goes to weddings almost every day. The streets are filled with the sound of Bollywood songs as wedding processions with grooms on white horses went their way to wedding venues in ‘farm houses’ on the edge of the city. Since I live on the edge of the city I am surrounded by streets that seem dedicated only to ‘band, baja, baraat’. All night I hear the sound of celebrations and firecrackers from my bedroom window. I do not mind this much because the sounds add joyousness and festivity to increasingly cold winter nights. And, I myself have been embroiled in recent days in a family wedding that was so traditional that every ceremony took place on a different day and there were many ceremonies. But, this is Delhi and politics is mixed up even with celebration so during these ceremonies I found myself talking more about politics than about the bride and groom. The latest political game in town is a game of numbers. How many seats do you give Congress? How many more seats do you think the BJP will get with Modi? How many seats are you giving a third front?
Those who ask the questions immediately give you their own answers. So in an elegant garden full of fairy lights and the sound of Qawwals, where guests gathered after the ‘milni’ to drink and make merry I was first accosted by a political friend, whose sympathies lie with a third front, who said he was certain that a regional leader would be India’s next prime minister. ‘You see the BJP can at the outset get no more than 160 to 180 seats and the Congress no more than 100 so the Congress is already making plans to support a prime minister from a regional party.’ He had barely said this when a Congress sympathizer joined us and gave us his assessment. ‘The Congress is losing the election,’ he said ‘but the Congress will retain power…be prepared for another Deve Gowda or Gujral.’ Incidentally, in Delhi there is more interest in what will happen in the general election than in the results of the state elections in December.
The next day at the lunch party held after the Anand Kaarij the political chitchat continued. I found myself in conversation with a young Lok Sabha MP and I asked him what he thought the mood was among Congress MPs at the moment and this is what he said. ‘They are despondent. They know that chances of a UPA-III are dim but what they all seem to be working towards now is ensuring that Modi doesn’t become prime minister. They are prepared to go to any lengths to make sure that he doesn’t get to Delhi.’
I found the observation particularly astute because it is what I have personally observed whenever I have come back to Delhi after a short absence. This time I returned after three weeks and was astounded to find how much more gloom there is in Congress ranks and how much more determination to defeat Modi. It is not the BJP that is seen as a threat, it is Modi himself, and this has intensified because it appears to have become clear to even the politically illiterate that he is attracting much larger and more enthusiastic crowds than the ‘Shahzada’.
This is why no opportunity to denigrate Modi is allowed to go waste. After the Cobrapost revelations that a young Gujarati woman was being stalked by the Gujarat government, the Congress Party put forward a quartet of physically mighty, middle-aged women MPs to express their horror. These ladies who never expressed any horror after Nirbhaya was brutally raped behaved as if this mysterious Gujarati lady, who has never come forward herself, had been violated in every possible way. They were helped by congress-friendly TV networks who put together special programmes and chat shows to discuss the subject and remained undeterred even after the mystery lady’s father released a letter saying that he had asked for special security for his daughter and that he wanted the subject closed now because it was upsetting his family.
No sooner did ‘Snoopgate’ collapse than fresh charges against Modi were leveled over his decision to share a stage with his party’s MLAs from Muzaffarnagar despite them having been arrested for allegedly stirring up violence during the recent riots. And, then came a fusillade from Rahul Gandhi who announced at one of his campaign rallies that the BJP (read Modi) was against the poor and proof of this was the party’s alleged opposition to MNREGA on the grounds that ‘poor people become lazy if you give them free food’. The truth is that BJP governments across the country have embraced MNREGA despite it having done almost nothing to reduce unemployment in rural India. Rahul Gandhi perhaps forgot that the venerable L.K. Advani actually praised this scheme at the United Nations last year without once examining if the thousands of crore rupees poured into it could not have been better spent on creating real jobs in the villages. But, I digress so let us return to the numbers game that is currently being played in Delhi’s corridors of power.
Those who are playing it are mostly people who hardly ever travel outside the civic limits of Delhi so when you tell them, as I do, that I have seen some of Modi’s rallies first hand and wandered about rural parts of the country and seen the huge response to them they tell you that they know better. In the words of one senior member of the Rajya Sabha, ‘Have you traveled in South India? Have you been to eastern India? Have you seen that these are places where Modi’s name is not known so when you talk about his popularity you need to be careful. There is no wave at all it is just a media myth.’
Well, we shall all know in the next four months if there is a Modi wave or not but what we know already is that there is an anti-Modi wave in the highest bastions of Lutyens’ Delhi. Modi has caused such panic that the Congress Party has the willing support of senior journalists and bureaucrats in its campaign to keep him from becoming prime minister. If you ask them why they have decided to throw their lot in with Congress they give you a standard answer. ‘If Modi comes to power he will destroy India as we know it. Muslims will never accept him.’
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