2014: The Election That Changed India (3 page)

The next time my path crossed with that of Modi we
had both, well, moved a step up in life. I was now a television journalist while Modi was a rising
star in the BJP in Gujarat. It was March 1995 and I was covering the Gujarat assembly elections for
NDTV. It was the early days of private news television and we had just begun doing a daily news
programme for Doordarshan called
Tonight
. For the BJP, too, the assembly elections were
new, uncharted territory. For the first time, the party was in a position to capture power on its
own in Gujarat.

As the results began to trickle in—and this
was the pre-electronic voting machine era, so the counting was much slower—there was an air of
great expectancy at the BJP party headquarters in Khanpur in Ahmedabad. By the evening, it was
becoming clearer that the BJP was on its way to a famous win. The party eventually won a two-thirds
majority with 121 of the 182 seats. The leaders were cheered as they entered the party office.
Keshubhai Patel was the man anointed as chief minister; other senior leaders like Shankersinh
Vaghela and Kashiram Rana all shared traditional Gujarati sweets and
farsan
. In a corner
was Modi, the man who had scripted the success by managing the election campaign down to the last
detail. The arc lights were on the BJP’s other senior leaders, but I remember an emotional
Modi telling me on camera that ‘this is the happiest moment in my life’. The almost
anonymous campaign manager seemed to sublimate himself to his party with the fierce loyalty of the
karyakarta.

On 19 March 1995, Keshubhai Patel was sworn in as
the first BJP chief minister of Gujarat at a function in Gandhinagar. Again, Modi wasn’t the
focus, but already the whispers in party circles projected him as the ‘super-chief
minister’. The sweet smell of success,
though, would quickly evaporate.
The Sangh Parivar in Gujarat became the Hindu Divided Parivar and the party with a difference began
to weaken because of internal differences. By October that year, a rebellion within the BJP led by
Vaghela forced Keshubhai to resign. A compromise formula was evolved—Suresh Mehta was made the
chief minister of Gujarat, and Modi, who was accused by his detractors of fomenting the politics of
divide and rule in the state, was packed off to north India as the national secretary in charge of
Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.

These were Modi’s years in political
vanvas
(exile). He could have dived into his new challenge, but his heart was always in
Gujarat. ‘He still wants to be the chief minister of Gujarat one day, that is his ultimate
ambition,’ a common friend told me on more than one occasion. If that was his final
destination, Modi kept it well concealed. Once ensconced in Delhi, Modi liked to speak out on
‘national’ issues. Private television was just beginning to find its voice and political
debates on television had just begun to take off. Modi, as an articulate speaker in Hindi, was
ideally suited as a political guest for prime-time politics on TV.

Modi took to television rather well at that time in
the late 1990s. I recall two telling instances. Once I was anchoring a 10 p.m. show called
Newshour
on NDTV with Arnab Goswami. (Arnab would later anchor a similarly named prime-time
show on Times Now with great success.) At about 8.30 p.m., our scheduled BJP guest, Vijay Kumar
Malhotra, dropped out. We were desperate for a replacement. I said I knew one person in Delhi who
might oblige us at this late hour. I rang up Modi and spoke to him in Gujarati (I have always
believed that a way to a person’s heart is to speak to them in their mother tongue, a tactic
that every reporter learns while trying to charm the power food chain from VIPs down to their PAs
and PSs).

‘Aavee jao, Narendrabhai, tamhari zarrorat
chhe’
(Please come, Narendrabhai, we need you). Modi hemmed and hawed for all of sixty
seconds and then said he was ready to appear on our show but didn’t have a car. Modi at the
time lived in 9, Ashoka Road, next to the BJP office along with other pracharaks. I asked him to
take a taxi
and promised that we would reimburse him. Arnab and I sweated in
anticipation as the countdown began for 10 p.m. With minutes to go, there was still no sign of Modi.
With about five minutes left to on-air, with producers already yelling ‘stand by’ in my
ear, a panting Modi came scurrying into the studio, crying out, ‘Rajdeep, I have come, I have
come!’ He was fully aware he was only a last-minute replacement but so unwilling was he to
give up a chance at a TV appearance, he made sure he showed up, even at the eleventh hour. As far as
Arnab and I were concerned, we had our BJP guest and our show was saved.

In July 2001, when General Musharraf came visiting
for the Agra Summit, Modi came to our rescue again. We were on round-the-clock coverage of the
event, and needed a BJP guest who would be available for an extended period. Modi readily agreed to
come to our OB van at Vijay Chowk, the designated site for political panellists outside Parliament.
But when he arrived, it began to rain and the satellite signal stopped working. Without creating any
fuss whatsoever, Modi sat patiently through the rain with an umbrella for company and waited for
almost two hours in the muddy downpour before he was finally put on air.

At one level, the determined desire to be on
television perhaps smacked of a certain desperation on Modi’s part to stay in the news and in
the limelight. This was a period when he had lost out to other leaders of his generation. Mahajan,
for example, had become prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s right-hand man and a leading
minister in the government. Sushma Swaraj was a great favourite with the party’s supporters
for her oratorical skills, and her decision to take on Sonia Gandhi in Bellary had given her a
special place as a fearless political fighter. Arun Jaitley was also slowly emerging as one of the
party’s all-rounders—a crisis manager, a highly articulate legal eagle and a credible
spokesperson on TV.

Modi, by contrast, was struggling to carve a
distinct identity. He had been virtually barred from Gujarat, a state where a theatre of the absurd
was being played out with four chief ministers in four years between 1995 and 1998. In Delhi, Modi
was being accused
of playing favourites in Himachal Pradesh and mishandling
the political situation in Haryana. Moreover, as a pracharak, he was expected to remain content as a
faceless organizer and a backroom player. I would meet Modi often in this period, and sometimes over
a meal of
kadhi chawal
(he ate well but liked to keep his food simple), I got the sense of
a politician struggling to come to terms with his seeming political isolation. For an otherwise
remarkably self-confident man, he often gave way to a creeping self-doubt over his immediate
political future. I remember we once did a poll in 1999 on who were the BJP leaders to watch out for
in the future. Mahajan, Swaraj, even another pracharak-turned-politician Govindacharya, were
mentioned; Modi didn’t even figure in the list.
‘Lagta hai aap punditon ne desh mein
bhavishya mein kya hoga yeh tay kar liya hai!’
(Looks like you political pundits have
decided the country’s future), was Modi’s sharp response.

Which is why news television became an ally, almost
a political weapon, for Modi in this period. It gave him a national profile in a crowded political
space. It also ensured that he remained in public memory, both in Gujarat and in Delhi. He was a
good party spokesperson—clear, direct, aggressive, often provocative. He did not pussyfoot
around the party’s commitment to Hindutva and never shied away from a joust.

When the Twin Towers were attacked in New York in
September 2001, I was looking for a guest for my weekly
Big Fight
show to discuss the new
buzzword—Islamic terror. The BJP leaders in the Vajpayee government were for some reason
reluctant to appear on the programme. Modi had no such compunctions as he came and spoke out
strongly against what he said was one of the biggest threats to the country. ‘It has taken an
attack like 9/11 for India’s pseudo-secular media to finally use a word like Islamic terrorism
and wake up to the reality of how some groups are misusing religion to promote terror,’
thundered Modi in the programme.

Little did I know then that Modi’s position on
Islam and terror would subsequently come to define his political identity. I also could not have
foreseen that the man who was one of my ‘go to’ BJP netas
for a
political debate would never again appear on a television show of this kind. Life for Modi, the
country and even for me as a journalist was about to take a dramatic twist.

Less than four weeks after appearing on
The Big
Fight
show on the 9/11 terror attack, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Gujarat’s chief
minister. It was a remarkable change in fortune for a leader who had found himself on the margins of
national politics till then. The change in leadership in Gujarat had been in the offing for some
time. Keshubhai Patel’s second term as chief minister had been disastrous. The BJP had lost a
series of municipal elections and assembly by-elections in the state in the 2000–01 period. On
26 January 2001, as the country was celebrating Republic Day, Kutch and Ahmedabad had been shaken by
a devastating earthquake. Instead of seeing this as a wake-up call, Patel’s government became
even more somnolent. The relief and rehabilitation measures were widely criticized. Modi himself
once told me in March that year, ‘Yes, we need to do more, else people will not forgive
us.’ Nature had delivered its verdict—the political leadership of the BJP was left with
no choice but to heed the message. It wasn’t easy—a strong section of the state
leadership remained opposed to Modi. In the end, it was the Advani–Vajpayee duo who pushed the
decision with the support of the RSS.

On 7 October 2001, Modi became the first full-time
RSS pracharak to be made a state chief minister. It hadn’t been an easy ride. Born in a lower
middle-class family in Vadnagar in north Gujarat’s Mehsana district, Modi came from the
relatively small Ghanchi community, an OBC caste involved in oil extraction. This was a state whose
politics was dominated by the powerful landowning Patels. In early conversations, I never heard Modi
speak of his caste background or his years in Vadnagar. He did speak, though, of his RSS mentors
with great fondness. ‘Lakshman Inamdar, or Vakilsaab, is a Maharashtrian like you, he guided
me
always,’ Modi told me. ‘You should then speak better
Marathi!’ I teased him.

A few days after he became chief minister I
interviewed Modi on the challenges that were now before him. ‘We have to rebuild Gujarat and
restore confidence in the people in our leadership,’ he said, sounding almost sage-like. I
sensed that he had been waiting for this moment for years. Some of his critics have suggested that
Modi ‘conspired’ to become chief minister. Veteran editor Vinod Mehta has claimed that
Modi had met him with files against Keshubhai which he wanted him to publish. Clearly, this was one
pracharak who was adept at the power game.

A pracharak, or ‘preacher’, is the
backbone of the RSS-led Sangh Parivar. Mostly bachelors, they are expected to live a life of
austerity and self-discipline. Modi wasn’t a typical pracharak—he was intensely
political and ambitious. I had met several Gujarat BJP leaders who insisted Modi was constantly
plotting to ‘fix’ them. Modi was also a loner—when I met him in the BJP central
office in his wilderness years in the late 1990s, he was often alone. His contemporary,
Govindacharya, would be surrounded by admirers; Modi preferred to be in the company of
newspapers.

Which is why becoming chief minister was a major
transition point in his life. As an organizational man, Modi had proved himself as hard-working,
diligent and passionate about his party and its ethos. Now, he needed to show that he could actually
be a politician who could lead from the front, not just be a back-room operator who had never even
contested a municipal election.

Modi’s big chance came on 27 February 2002. I
was showering that morning when a call came from an old journalist friend from Gujarat, Deepak
Rajani. Rajani managed a small evening paper in Rajkot and had excellent contacts in the police.
‘Rajdeep, bahut badi ghatna hui hai Godhra mein. Sabarmati Express mein aag lagi hai. Kaie
VHP kar sevak us train mein thhe. Terror attack bhi ho sakta hai’
(There’s been a
big incident at Godhra. The Sabarmati Express with many kar sevaks aboard has caught fire. It could
even be a terror attack). In the age of instantaneous breaking news, it
isn’t easy to separate fact from hyperbole. What was clear, though, was that a train
compartment had caught fire and several kar sevaks (volunteers) were feared dead.

A few hours later, as the information became
clearer, it was apparent that this was no ordinary train fire. A mob of local Muslims in Godhra had
attacked the train, a fire had started and several people had died. The backdrop to this tragedy had
been an attempt by the VHP to reignite the Ram temple movement by launching another
shila
pujan
(foundation stone-laying ceremony) in Ayodhya. Several kar sevaks from Gujarat had joined
the programme and were returning from Ayodhya when the train was attacked. That evening, Modi,
visiting the site in Godhra, suggested that the kar sevaks had been victims of a terror conspiracy.
The VHP was even more aggressive—a bandh was called in Gujarat the next day.