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Waiting for the Gujarat verdict

— PHOTO: PTI

Children hold Narendra Modi masks at a recent election rally in Ghatlodiya, Gujarat.

In another 24 hours, the ballot box will declare the winner in Gujarat, bringing the curtain down on easily the most keenly watched election campaign in recent times.

If so much national interest in a State election was unusual, the election itself was unusual. Narendra Modi’s electoral fate would decide the course of politics in Gujarat, of course. It would also decide the course of politics in New Delhi, af fecting both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the latter perhaps in greater measure considering how it had come to view the Gujarat Chief Minister: As a figure more to be feared than admired.

Gujarat 2007 will be remembered for the way Mr. Modi fought it — like a war that could not be lost. Predictably, the means were more foul than fair, with him transiting from development to shrill and shriller sectarianism, scaling the peak with the Sohrabuddin speech, and then the final salvo: Mr. Modi as a brave warrior on the side of Gujarat and against its enemies. The Chief Minister’s biggest props in this battle? An army of ferocious supporters and the Modi masks they wore. The picture they produced was scary and intendedly so: Mr. Modi magnified a thousand times, fighting not just the Congress but also sections of his party, the larger sangh family, the Election Commission, the Supreme Court, and last but not the least, his own administrative support system.

But Gujarat 2007 would reveal other paradoxes too. If Mr. Modi’s unapologetic self-projection pitted him against his own his party, parivar, and government, in the case of the Congress, the paradox was of a party that brought secularism into the campaign, but so late in the day that its own rank and file remained disconnected from it. If from her high pedestal, Sonia Gandhi called Mr. Modi and his henchmen “maut ke saudagar” (merchants of death), on the ground her party workers bizarrely attacked the Chief Minister for diluting Hindutva. Ms Gandhi’s speech was lost on her party but it was seized by Mr. Modi, who typically turned it into an assault on Gujarat and its five and a half crore people. From here on, this would be his running theme.

Ms Gandhi had labelled all Gujaratis “merchants of death,” he thundered, just as Digvijay Singh earlier had likened all Gujaratis to terrorists. (The Congress general secretary had called the perpetrators of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom terrorists).

Yet all was not lost for the Congress, which would find in the course of the campaign that it had more supporters than it had cared to count — some of them bringing it embarrassment rather than comfort. This was an election where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — or at least significant sections of it — fetched up on the same side as Ms Gandhi, whom it has always vilified and slandered for her membership of the dynasty and even more for her Italian antecedents.

A consistent feature of the election was the police support to the Congress. As I hopped from rally to rally, I made it a point to check the crowd strength with those on bundobust duty and discovered a pattern: The men in uniform would underestimate Mr. Modi’s rallies and overestimate Ms Gandhi’s rallies. At one of Ms Gandhi’s rallies in north Gujarat, two eager policemen had lifted me on to a chair to show the “two lakh” crowd. At Mr. Modi’s meeting in Umreth in central Gujarat, policemen emphasised that only 3,000 people had turned up to hear the Chief Minister as against a ground capacity of one lakh. At a market place in Anand, I found two policemen on a motorbike, returning from another of Mr. Modi’s rallies. “Kitna bheed? (how many people?)” I asked. They whizzed past me shouting “zero,” making a circle with the thumb and the forefinger to underscore the point. (One among these men would later phone me and tell me not to believe the exit polls, saying, “Hitler and Goebbels are losing.”)

If all this was decidedly strange, stranger still was the reaction of the RSS pracharak to whom I related the incidents. The pracharak was sitting with the local BJP MP, both of them furiously calculating the number of seats the Congress would win. The RSS man heard me with unconcealed glee, and then said, “Ben, isko box item banao (sister, make this into a box item in your newspaper). In many places, RSS and Vishwa Hindu Parishad men, as also the BJP rebels, boasted that they were fighting the Congress’ battle. At the market square in Rajkot in Saurashtra, a Leuva Patel shopkeeper compared the Congress to the laggard who opened his mouth to yawn only to find someone had slipped a laddoo into it.

In the same league as the embittered policemen were teachers and the lower Gujarat bureaucracy, all of whom complained of harassment by Mr. Modi. Added to this was the voter shift towards the Congress — not huge shifts judging by the still formidable popular support enjoyed by Mr. Modi but nonetheless shifts that, together with the frustration evident in the saffron camp and the Modi administration, pointed to the possibility of a BJP defeat.

In 2002, it was a sweep for the BJP (127 of 182 seats), with voters cutting across castes and switching to the saffron camp, swayed by the post-Godhra communal mood. In the 2004 Lok Sabha election, with the frenzy well behind them, tribal and Dalit voters returned to the Congress, giving the party a 91 to 89 lead over the BJP in the Assembly segments. The return of normality was borne out by the results in central Gujarat, which bore the brunt of the 2002 pogrom. In 2002, the BJP had won 42 of 49 seats, including all tribal-dominated seats. In 2004, it was down to 14 against 34 for the Congress. Today, in theory if not in practice, the Congress has consolidated its position, with the perceived entry into its fold of sections of Kolis and Leuva Patels — both staunch BJP supporters.

Yet there are ifs and buts. Suffice it to say that if the Congress cannot win this election, it will forfeit its right to fight another election in Gujarat. There will never again be circumstances as favourable to the party as in 2007 — with arithmetic on its side and help coming from least expected quarters. By the same token, if Mr. Modi wins, he will have won not just against the Congress but against those that should have been on his side but landed up in the opposition. The victory will establish that he can supersede the formal structures to connect with the people. It requires no wisdom to see just what such a victory will do to the cult of Modi.

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