On The spot
Tavleen Singh
Every time I return to Delhi from my election travels I meet political pundits, hacks, academics, bureaucrats, politicians and socialites who assure me that there is ‘no Modi wave.’ Usually the person who says this expands on the theme and usually what he or she tells me, with a conspiratorial smile, is that the Congress Party still has a trump card up its sleeve and this trump card is Priyanka Gandhi. The denizens of Lutyens’ Delhi cannot believe that there can be an India that is not held together by the pivot of our oldest and most powerful political dynasty and this is the main reason why they choose to remain blind to the possibility of a Modi wave despite poll after poll predicting that he is more than likely to be India’s next prime minister.
Last week I returned to Delhi from wandering about eastern Uttar Pradesh to find that the Congress Party was preparing to pull out its trump card. Priyanka Gandhi traveled to Rae Bareilli with a small army of TV journalists following in her wake and held meetings with local people that in TV jargon are called ‘road shows.’ I switched from channel to channel to see if she had something to say that would change the mood of the campaign. But, she stuck to the same script that has been prepared for her mother and brother emphasizing that in this election we are seeing a fight between two ideologies. Our ideology, she said as her brother and mother have repeated endlessly, is to empower ordinary people by giving them the right to information, employment, education and cheap food grain. Their ideology (read Modi) is to give only a small handful of Indians rights. And, we believe in uniting people they believe in dividing people.
She said other things as well. While vilifying her cousin Varun for taking the ‘wrong road’ she said she would not support anyone, not even her own children, who went against the values of her family. The ‘values’ she listed were secularism and secularism adding that her father had died to save the unity of India. It was shortly after she made this particular remark that someone from Headlines Today rang to ask for my comments and I was forced to point out that secularism was not a gift to India from the Gandhi family but a fundamental characteristic of the Indian constitution. As for Rajiv Gandhi having died for ‘India’s unity’ this could only be true if he thought Sri Lanka was just another Indian state. He was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber, I reminded my Headlines Today interlocutor, because the Tamil Tigers were deeply offended by his Sri Lanka policy. But, let that be for a moment because the point I am trying to make in this piece is that Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi seem to be surrounded by the kind of people who I run into every time I return to Delhi. These are people so removed from what Gandhiji used to call the ‘real India’ that they appear to have misled the Dynasty’s two heirs.
In Delhi’s corridors of power and political intrigue there have been for a long while rumours that Rahul Gandhi’s war room is manned by whizz kids who plot his political strategy on computers. In the words of one frustrated Congress leader from Bihar, ‘You cannot win elections by computers…but nobody seems to have told Rahul this so he has surrounded himself with close advisors who sit in front of their computers all day working out caste combinations and voting percentages.’ It is hard to know for sure if this is true or not but what is true is that Rahul’s campaign has so far failed to strike the sort of chord that Modi has managed to strike and so it is that his mother and sister now play a more active role.
Rumour has it that Priyanka plans to personally visit temples in Benares in the near future to show her support for the Congress Party candidate, Ajay Rai. He himself has gone around telling reporters in Benares that he has the blessings of Priyanka and her cell phone number. Before deciding to settle for Rai, famous locally for being a gangster, Benares was awash with rumours that Priyanka would herself be the Congress candidate against Modi. But, as a local elder, in this most political of political cities, reminded me her name was Mrs. Vadra and if she did decide to enter electoral politics Mr. Vadra would become some pretty heavy baggage. So instead she appears to have decided to campaign more forcefully and more visibly than she has done in past elections to halt the supposedly non-existent Modi wave.
What confirmed for me personally that the talk of there not being a wave is mere bluster in the drawing rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi was Sonia Gandhi’s decision last week to make a televised appeal to voters. In the ten years she has been India’s de facto prime minister she has never felt the need to do this before. In her televised appeal she said the same things that her daughter did in Rae Bareilli without noticing that this attempt to change the subject from ‘minimum government, maximum governance’, which is Modi’s message, to secularism is likely to resonate only with Muslim voters. And, even with Muslims the dislike of Narendra Modi does not translate into fears that India will be destroyed if he becomes prime minister.
Would the campaign have turned out differently if the Gandhi family had paid attention earlier to rumours of a Modi wave? Would they have managed to come up with a more convincing campaign? It is hard to say but what can be said is that while the other main political parties in this election have identified clear causes that they have associated themselves with the Congress campaign has been unable to find a single one other than to paint Modi as a Muslim-hating bogeyman. When this failed the party was forced to rely on what it clearly sees as its biggest asset: the dynasty with Priyanka as its shining, new face. Will it change the way the winds of this election are blowing? I think not. Based on what I have seen on my travels I can tell you that I saw a wave that is stronger than I have seen in any election since the Rajiv Gandhi wave in 1984. It is the sort of wave that is always unstoppable.
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