How

the BJP Wins

1. Cover
2. Preface
3. Introduction
4. The Modi Hawa
5. Shah’s Sangathan
6. Social Engineering
7. Sangh: Source, Supplement, Shadow
8. The ‘H–M’ Chunav
9. Beyond the Heartland
10. The Future of the Hegemon
11. Chapter 9
 Preface
To

Ruhi

for being my anchor,

for the long walks in North Campus,

and

for the life ever since

 Introduction
2014: The Turning Point

If central Delhi is the power centre of the Indian state, then the Windsor Place
roundabout is its nerve centre.

Take Raisina Road, the avenue on the west, and you will soon be in front of the
Parliament of India. Janpath which runs through the circle leads on one end to
the iconic Rajpath, India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhawan; on the other end it heads
towards the old city-centre, Connaught Place. Ferozeshah Road will take you
past the residences of many politicians, ending at the Mandi House circle, a hub
of Indian theatre and arts. A short walk away is Shastri Bhawan, home to key
ministries.

On the evening of 12 March 2017, Narendra Modi strolled up from the circle on
to Ashoka Road, towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters, greeting
supporters on both sides of the road. In the previous month, five states had held
their elections. Four of the five were now in BJP’s kitty. The previous day, the
party had won a spectacular victory in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections,
winning over three-fourths of the seats. The BJP had also swept Uttarakhand and
would form the government in Goa and Manipur. Only in Punjab, after two
terms in office, had the BJP and its ally, Akali Dal, lost power.

The ‘Modi-Modi’ chant extended from the streets to the party office, where the
prime minister was to address the leaders, cadre and the nation, in his moment of
victory.

He began by greeting everyone on the occasion of Holi. Elections, he said, were

not just an instrument for forming governments but helped deepen the faith of
people in Indian democracy. And then he delivered his big takeaway from the
election.

‘I see the results of the five states – particularly that of Uttar Pradesh, which has
the capacity to give India a new direction, strength and inspiration because of its
size – as laying the seeds of a New India.’ This was, Modi declared, the ‘golden
period’ for the BJP. He acknowledged the role of four generations of leaders,
thousands of cadres and party president Amit Shah and his team, whose work
had placed the BJP in the position it was in today.

This is indeed the BJP’s golden period. Less than ten years ago, the party was
being written off. Many declared it had little prospect of returning to power in
Delhi. Even five years ago, it seemed inconceivable that the BJP would not only
win an outright majority in the national elections, but also have thirteen chief
ministers across Indian states.

Today there is talk about whether it can be displaced at all in the foreseeable
future. It has achieved this dominance through the tested ritual of Indian
democracy – elections – and this may just be the beginning. Under Amit Shah,
the BJP aims not just to expand its footprint across the country but to win every
level of elections – from Parliament to the panchayat.

This book tells the story of how the BJP wins these elections, why it has lost
when it has and what lies in the future.

***

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections redefined Indian politics. Since 1984, no party
had won an absolute majority in the national elections. India, it was now widely
assumed, would continue to have a fragmented polity, two weak national poles
around which regional parties coalesced, and coalition governments.

One election changed it all.

The BJP won 282 seats, contesting 428 of the total of 543 seats, leaving the rest
for its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners. This meant that not only
had the party achieved a decisive majority on its own, it had won two out of
three seats where it was directly in the fray. This was a remarkable strike rate.

Nationally, its vote share was 31.1 per cent, but its vote share was close to 40 per
cent in the seats where it had put up candidates. This was the first time since
1991 that a party had won more than 30 per cent of the vote share. The average
margin of victory in constituencies that the BJP won was 17.9 per cent – spelling
a huge gap between the winner and the runner-up. So not only did the BJP win
the majority of the seats, it won them with a resounding mandate.
Geographically, the BJP won 44 per cent of the vote, and 190 out of the 225
seats, in the Hindi-speaking states of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, UP, Bihar,
Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi. With
its NDA allies, it won 201 of these seats. In the non-Hindi-speaking states, the
BJP won 22 per cent of the vote share, and 92 of the 318 seats, but along with its
NDA partners, it was able to garner 42 per cent of the seats. It also went beyond
its original areas of influence in urban India to win support from semi-urban and
rural India.

This staggering scale of victory was possible because one man, Narendra Modi,
stitched together a rainbow coalition.

***

Narendra Modi was the Hindu leader. He was the development man responsible
for the ‘Gujarat model’. He was the strong administrator who had thirteen years
of experience running a state, compared to Rahul Gandhi, who had no personal
governance experience and the baggage of the scam-ridden, paralysed United
Progressive Alliance - 2 (UPA-2). Modi was the leader who would fulfil the
nationalist dream of ‘teaching Pakistan a lesson’.

To the upper castes, Modi represented a party which was most in tune with their
aspirations and would bring in stability, order and progress; to the deprived
castes, Modi was one of their own who would deliver justice and jobs. To the
upper middle classes and middle classes, his strongest base, Modi was the man
who would make them richer, like he had made Gujarat richer, through liberal
economic policies; to the disadvantaged, he was the chai-wala who had made it
big, yet was being hounded by the elite. To all of them, he represented hope.

While there was ‘unparalleled consolidation of the upper castes and middle
classes behind the BJP’, for the first time ever, nationally, the BJP got more Dalit
and Scheduled Tribe votes than the Congress. In fact, more Dalits and tribals
voted for the BJP than for any other party, and out of the total votes received by
the party, 40 per cent came from other backward classes (OBCs). This is an
important milestone in Indian politics.

All this offers some explicit pointers, and some intriguing hints, about the
formula behind the BJP victory in 2014 – and its success, and failure, since then.
When it gets this right, it wins. When it does not, it fails.

Modi’s multiple avatars worked in 2014. But they did not work in 2015, as the
BJP lost two major state assembly elections – Delhi and Bihar. Rahul Gandhi, in
his sharpest political intervention in the past three years, called the Modi sarkar a
‘suit-boot ki sarkar’. Suddenly, within a year, Narendra Modi had gone from
being a leader of all Indians to a man who was perceived as batting for the rich,
and spending all his time outside India.

But clever and astute politician that Modi is, he recognized the dangers of falling
into this image trap, and reinvented himself. Through a set of policy moves and
pronouncements, and focusing back on the welfare state, he now positioned
himself as a ‘garibon ka neta’, a leader of the poor.

This book tells the story of how this image transformation took place; how Modi
is becoming the first choice of a section of India’s poor and lower-middle class,
even as his original constituents of upper-middle classes continue to stay with
him; and how, in the process, the BJP’s class base is slowly expanding. This shift
enabled the BJP’s tremendous success in more recent elections, including Uttar
Pradesh.

***

Twenty-six per cent of the BJP’s total seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha came from
Uttar Pradesh, giving the party an outright majority on its own, the first time any
party had won that in thirty years.

The man behind the UP victory was Modi’s closest aide, Amit Shah. Shah
brought to UP his Gujarat experience of managing and fighting elections for over
two decades, spent time understanding the state and its complex caste matrix,
took over absolute control of the UP unit while managing the existing leaders,
weaved together alliances and, most crucially, laid the blueprint for a new
organizational apparatus.

The 2014 success led to Shah’s elevation as the BJP’s national president. In this
capacity, Shah now had an opportunity to create a robust organizational network
across the country. He wasted no time.
Shah expanded the party machinery, brought in new members, focused on
consistent mass contact, and made the lowest level of organizational structure –
the party unit at the booth level, where voting takes place – its heart and soul. In
the process, he has instituted what can be called the Amit Shah school of
election management.

This book tells the story of how Shah has transformed the BJP; the invisible
organization men who have driven these efforts on the ground; and how the
machine operates on the ground during campaigning and elections – and it looks
at how the BJP is advancing in new areas using similar methods. Long after
Amit Shah has gone, his abiding contribution to the BJP will be in making it a
national party, creating the most formidable election apparatus in the country in
recent times and redefining how polls are fought.

***

As Modi has reinvented his image, so has the BJP.

Today, anyone who sees the party only as an upper-caste party is living in the
past. The BJP is becoming an inclusive Hindu party, winning the support of
various communities, including the subaltern, which inhabit the broad Hindu
fold.

In 2014, the party was able to capitalize on the support of these marginalized
segments – backward classes and Dalits – primarily because of the appeal of
Narendra Modi and the promise of representation. The challenge for the party
post 2014 has been to sustain this by transforming its own character, through its
policies, statements and organizational structure, to reflect the diversity of Hindu
society.

When it has failed to do so, it has lost elections. In Bihar’s state elections of
2015, the party came across as hostile to backwards and Dalits when the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or the Sangh) chief Mohan Bhagwat
suggested that reservations should be reviewed; marginalized communities did
not see in the BJP their own faces and leaders. In UP in 2017, by contrast, the
BJP’s spectacular success stemmed mostly from its ability to become a party of
backwards and Dalits.
This book tells the story of the party’s ongoing transformation into a more
inclusive Hindu party, open to all castes. Neither has it been easy nor is it a
linear process, for entrenched upper-caste interests within the party are not
entirely comfortable with this shift. The BJP’s big test will be its ability to
reconcile the contradictions that exist between its old and new supporters.

***

The Sangh’s support for the BJP has been a feature of most electoral contests.
But rarely before had the RSS deployed its entire infrastructure, resources,
personnel and sangathan, organization, in the aid of the BJP on the scale that it
did in 2014.

Collaborating in the pursuit of power is one thing; having a degree of

convergence after power has been acquired is another. In the previous NDA
government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, there were visible differences between
the Sangh leadership and the prime minister. This had an impact on the ground,
for the Sangh often went inert – or did not invest as much energy as the BJP
would have hoped – during elections. This was also a possibility when Narendra
Modi came to power, for he had a majority of his own, and there was a
personality cult around him, something which is said to make the Sangh
uncomfortable.

Yet, the Sangh and the BJP – despite differences on personalities, issues and
election management – have broadly remained on the same page. The BJP may
need the Sangh more before it wins elections, and the Sangh may need the BJP
more after it comes to power, but they have worked well together.

This book tells the story of how Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat have
ensured a smooth relationship between the sarkar and the Sangh; how, like the
BJP, the Sangh has begun to recognize the need for a more inclusive approach
towards Hindu castes, but remains cautious and conservative in its instincts; and
how the Sangh machinery – its cadres but more crucially its wider ecosystem of
supporters – supplemented the efforts of the BJP on the ground during elections
and campaigning in UP, glued together by a common goal: Hindu unity.

***
In 2014, Modi appealed to Hindu sentiments but was careful not to be explicitly
anti-Muslim himself. He adopted a subtle approach, from distinguishing between
Hindu migrants and migrants of other religions to decrying what he called the
‘pink revolution’, alleging an increase in cow slaughter and meat export.

But, as anyone covering the rallies during that Lok Sabha election would testify,
many speeches of second-rung BJP leaders in the run-up to Modi’s speeches
were laced with BJP’s old messages of ultra-nationalism, association of the
nation with one religion and attacks on ‘appeasement’ of Muslims. Since the
nation watched only Modi’s speeches on television, the build-up was often
missed.

The party also exploited the Muzaffarnagar riots in western UP, with Amit Shah
explicitly saying this election was about ‘revenge’. The entire BJP machinery in
this belt relied on Hindu, particularly Jat, consolidation, with the message that
this was about ‘teaching Muslims a lesson’. It worked. The BJP, according to
data of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, won over 77 per cent of
the Jat vote.

Since 2014, the BJP has played, in varying degrees, the Hindu card. The Hindu
card did not work for it in Bihar – showing that the politics of polarization is
only one element in a larger matrix and cannot work in all contexts. But it did
succeed in UP, where the BJP – going up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi –
sharpened the rhetoric of how the regime had ‘appeased’ Muslims.

This book tells the story of how, in Uttar Pradesh in particular, the BJP slowly
from the bottom to the top constructed a narrative of the majority as victims
while portraying minorities as pampered; and how it tapped into underlying
prejudice, deepened it and stoked hostility and hatred through a web of
falsehoods and deception. In this the BJP was helped by opposition parties and
their policies and rhetoric around Muslims. Indeed, UP 2017 may, arguably,
mark the death of the term that has for so long defined Indian politics –
‘secularism’.

***

Since 2014, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have been clear that while they had
to retain their strength and consolidate in their areas of success, they had to
expand in the rest of the country. Just as the BJP is no longer an upper-caste
party, it is also no longer a North Indian party.

Beyond its heartland, it has spread in the most unlikely of spaces, from Jammu
and Kashmir to Manipur. These efforts have been shepherded by yet another
leader who can trace his roots to the Sangh, Ram Madhav. As the Delhi-based
spokesperson of the Sangh, Madhav played a key role as an interface between
the RSS and the BJP, before making a transition to the party after the victory of
2014.

The expansion of the party has rested on three key strategies – co-option of
existing political elites including former rivals of the Congress; dilution of its
ideological core and an attempt to reposition itself as a party that respects
diversity and does not seek uniformity; and adaption to specific realities of
different regions. This book tells the story of how Madhav has helped the party
become truly national, and how the distinct strategies have led to the installation
of saffron governments in Srinagar, Guwahati and Imphal.

***

A running thread through this book is the multiple failures of the opposition. No
leader has been able to counter Modi and Rahul Gandhi’s feeble efforts have
gained little mass traction. No party has been able to build an organization to
match that of Amit Shah. No other party has expanded its social coalition
beyond one or two primary castes. No party has gone beyond the old ‘secular–
communal’ binary which, in reality, ends up meaning excessive reliance on the
‘Muslim vote’ and thus only helps the BJP. Most of them have fought the BJP
separately, and when the index of opposition unity is low, the BJP is hard to beat.

When the opposition has got its act together, the story is different. In Delhi, the
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had a leader with wide appeal, a narrative, an
organization, a social coalition. It was also aided by the collapse of the Congress,
whose votes shifted to AAP. The BJP, to be fair, retained its vote share but was
left fumbling. An even better example is Bihar, where the opposition alliance
firstly spoke to a wider social base and secondly was careful not to create any
grounds for communal polarization.

When these two factors are combined with a credible incumbent like Nitish
Kumar, the formidable machinery of the BJP can crumble. It is another matter
that in July 2017 there was a realignment in Bihar politics. Nitish Kumar
dropped Lalu Prasad and allied with his old partner BJP – and the party was back
in power despite losing the election. It revealed Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s
hunger, but this book largely confines itself to the story of the 2015 electoral loss
and the lessons the BJP drew from it.

***

To understand the macro success of the BJP, this book focuses on the party’s
micro transformation in Uttar Pradesh. There is a compelling reason to focus on
the political churn in India’s largest state.

Uttar Pradesh defines Indian politics. Clichéd as it is, there is more than a grain
of truth in the view that the road to Delhi lies through Lucknow because of the
sheer weight it has in Parliament.

The state has also been central to the rise of the BJP as a national outfit.
Whenever the party has succeeded in UP, it has flourished nationally. Whenever
it has faltered in the state, it has lost power miserably.

The party’s political and ideological projects intersect here. Both its prime
ministers – Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi – have been elected from
the state. Its parent organization, the RSS, has, since the 1930s, focused on UP,
picking a large pool of recruits from institutions like Allahabad University and
Banaras Hindu University (BHU). The state is also home to Ayodhya, Kashi and
Mathura, associated with the three temple movements the BJP made its own in
the 1980s and 1990s.

The Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, in particular, helped the BJP rise from a paltry
2 seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984 to 120 seats in 1991. Fifty-one of these seats
were from UP.

In 1996, when Vajpayee came to power at the centre for the first time, the BJP
won 52 seats in the state. It improved on this performance and won 58 seats in
the 1998 general elections.

In the 1999 national elections, the BJP won 29 seats from the state, a rather sharp
dip. But do note it remained the largest party from UP. Once again, it formed the
government. In 2004 and 2009, the BJP won only 10 seats in UP, and it was
consigned to the opposition benches in the Lok Sabha.

But it was in 2014 that the centrality of UP was firmly re-established in Indian
politics. The BJP’s sweep of the state redefined the rules of the game and
allowed Narendra Modi to become India’s all-powerful prime minister.

And in 2017, with its spectacular victory in the assembly elections, the BJP
ensured that for the first time in almost three decades, the same party – enjoying
an absolute majority on its own at both levels – would rule both Delhi and
India’s largest state. The win has put the party in pole position to win the 2019
national elections; it has also introduced a new element of aggression in the
party’s political and cultural project.

All the major themes the book tackles – Modi’s appeal, Shah’s organization,
BJP’s social engineering, the use of communal polarization and hatred to build
political strength, the fragmentation and weaknesses of the opposition – have
played out in UP.

There is also a personal reason for focusing on UP. I extensively covered

elections in the state in both 2014 and 2017. In the run-up to the assembly polls,
for over a year, I returned to the state almost every month to track its changing
political contours. And as voting kicked off, I drove across UP – from
Saharanpur to the west to Mirzapur to the east, from the Tarai’s Shravasti to the
north, bordering Nepal, to Bundelkhand’s Chitrakoot, clocking 5000 kilometres
– for a month.

But this book also focuses on the party’s defeat in Bihar, another battleground
state I have reported out of for the past five years. It looks at how the party’s
expansion strategies worked in other pockets of north and west India. It also
examines how through a mix of innovative strategies the BJP today is becoming
the dominant party in the most unlikely of regions, the North-East.

***

This book illustrates how the BJP wins elections. It does not deal with what the
BJP does after winning elections, and so stays away from the more controversial
actions and events that have taken place under BJP rule in recent times.

It also makes no forecast for the future. Political processes in complex societies
with regular elections and multiparty competition are unpredictable. That the
BJP is dominant today does not mean that it is invincible. Indeed, even in the
past three years, there have been defeats, and enough vulnerabilities of the BJP
have come to the fore.

The BJP’s rise, through that quintessentially democratic practice of elections, is

one of the most fascinating stories of contemporary India. It has altered politics,
created new social coalitions, dissolved older fault lines, generated new
conflicts, empowered some, alienated others and is having a profound impact on
state institutions. When a charismatic national leader, a powerful strategist,
astute social alliances, a formidable ideological and organizational infrastructure,
religion and a ruthlessly ambitious, pragmatic and flexible culture merge,
politics, and democracy, can change, perhaps irrevocably and in unanticipated
ways.
 The Modi Hawa
It was not the Bharatiya Janata Party, it was not state leaders, it was not the
candidates and it was not the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Only one man won
the BJP the state of Uttar Pradesh – Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Except Muslims, members of every community of UP’s electorate embraced him

as their own, and trusted him with both Delhi and Lucknow. This trust was
visible in 2014 too.

It is striking that three years into his term, there is no anti-incumbency against
Narendra Modi. In fact, power has only added to his appeal. And this is how it
has always been in his career.

Modi entered the Gujarat Legislative Assembly as the chief minister at the end
of 2001 – and never lost an election in the state. He entered the Lok Sabha as
prime minister and, despite setbacks like Delhi and Bihar, has an electoral record
any leader would envy. Instead of power leading to complacency and eroding his
prospects, it has consistently enhanced Modi’s popularity.

In the towns, streets and villages of UP, many who supported Modi could not, or
did not, offer tangible reasons for their support. It was just extraordinary faith,
faith in the niyat, intentions, and the imaan, integrity, of a single man.

But driving that faith was a carefully constructed image, a new image. If he was
a Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) from 2002, Modi carefully
transitioned into a vikas purush, the development man, delivering a ‘Gujarat
model’, from 2007 onward. The combination of these two images led to his 2014
victory.

There has since been a third, under-appreciated, shift: Narendra Modi is today a
garibon ka neta, a leader of the poor, even as he retains elements of his other two
avatars. And with this image, he has decisively demolished the charge of leading
a ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’.

***
On 8 November 2016, Ram Sudhar was watching television in his house in
Mirzapur’s Jamui Bazar when he heard Prime Minister Narendra Modi declare
that Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes would no longer be legal tender from midnight.

It took him a while to absorb the implications of the move.

Ram Sudhar owned a small electronics shop in the bazaar, and his business –
procurement of material and sales – depended largely on cash. How would it
work out now?

Two days later, he went to his supplier in Varanasi to get wires, cables and light
bulbs. He offered him cash in what was now illegal tender. His supplier, an old
contact, refused, but told him he could take material worth Rs 50,000 and pay
him later.

But while the supply end was managed for now, the demand end of the problem
persisted. Jamui Bazar has only two banks, the new currency was not yet freely
available and ATMs were closed, all of which meant that people did not have
cash in hand. And this led to a sharp dip in Ram Sudhar’s shop sales. From
almost Rs 4000 a day, he was now selling goods worth Rs 1000.

So he was in a bind. He owed money to his supplier, but he was not earning
enough. The government had disrupted his life, and destabilized the economics
of his small enterprise. And yet Sudhar’s faith in the prime minister hadn’t
lessened.

‘It is not a ban, bhaiya,’ he told me. ‘If it was a ban, we would have got
destroyed. They have only asked us to deposit all the old notes in our accounts,
and given us time to do it. I think it is a very good move. If our jawans can risk
their lives at the border and protect us for twenty-four hours, can’t we stand in
the queue for a few hours in national interest?

‘Money will come back in banks,’ he argued. ‘Those with kaala dhan will be
caught. The economy will become swachh, clean.’ And then, with a smile, Ram
Sudhar added, ‘Modiji has asked for some time. All this pareshani,
inconvenience, will end in a few weeks. We trust him.’

Ram Sudhar was not an exception. Across Purvanchal – Varanasi, Mirzapur,

Azamgarh, Jaunpur – in November 2016, there was a common pattern in the
narratives of ordinary citizens of one of India’s poorest belts. Demonetization
had caused inconvenience, but they supported it.

An elderly woman in a long bank queue in Jaunpur said she was feeling
troubled. ‘I have no money. Modi sarkar has started new money.’ Yet she felt that
the government had done the right thing. ‘If big people are troubled, how does it
matter if I am troubled?’

A small businessman in Mirzapur’s Rajgadh was busy organizing a family

wedding. He made some payments in cheque, while relying on credit for other
needs. Yet, he was an admirer of the policy initiative. ‘This will reduce interest
rates. It will force people to use cheques. Real estate prices will also come down.
This is a good move.’

A Dalit farmer, with small landholdings, needed cash to buy seeds for the
upcoming planting season. But he was not complaining. ‘This is temporary pain.
In a month or two, notes will come back. People are saying that the money that
has been taken from the rich will be invested in the poor.’

In recent Indian economic history, no move has been as disruptive to the

everyday lives of ordinary citizens as demonetization. No move has caused job
losses or logistical inconvenience to such a degree. Yet, there was palpable
enthusiasm for the move.

From the expectation that the move would clean the economy to the pleasure at
assuming that the well-to-do were suffering more, from hopes that the additional
resources would be transferred to the poor to the desire for a more equal society,
a range of motivations drove the support. Over subsequent months, this
enthusiasm slowly dissipated, but it never translated into outright hostility.

Few other democratic – or authoritarian – leaders would have managed to

withstand the inevitable public fury this scale of disruption could have
generated. But not only did Narendra Modi soothe the rage, he came out much
stronger from it, as a man whose primary commitment was to the poor, as a man
who had taken on a crusade of honesty against a corrupt, rich establishment.

***
As people dealt with the aftermath of demonetization, Modi addressed six rallies
across Uttar Pradesh, including one in Moradabad.

In a speech that lasted close to 50 minutes, Modi must have used the term garib,
and garibi, dozens of times. It is a speech worth deconstructing in detail for its
political messaging, the manner in which the prime minister deployed his
political capital and how he was able to strike a chord with the thousands of
people on the grounds.

Modi held forth on why he had contested the election from UP: because he
wanted to wage a battle against garibi. The way to end India’s poverty was to
end UP’s poverty first.

And then, in his characteristic style, Modi involved the crowds and asked them if
they would, with raised fists, with an honest heart, answer his questions.

‘Has corruption destroyed this country? Has it led to loot? Has it caused
maximum loss to the poor? Has it taken away the rights of the poor? Is
corruption the root of all problems?’ he asked.

The crowds roared yes.

‘Now, you tell me. Should corruption stay or go? Jaana chahiye ki nahin?’

Jaana chahiye, it should go, came the response.

‘Then tell me – will it go on its own? Will it say Modiji you have come, I am
scared, I will go?’

Nahin, no.

‘Then will we have to use the stick to defeat corruption or not? Will we have to
use law or not? Will we have to tackle the corrupt or not?’

Yes.

‘Should we do this work or not?’

Yes.
‘If someone does this, is he a criminal, a culprit? Is fighting corruption a crime?’

No.

‘So then, I am perplexed. In my own country, people are calling me the culprit.
Is it my crime that bad days have come for the corrupt? Is it my crime that I am
working for the poor?’

No.

Modi delivered another punch.

‘I am fighting a battle for you. At most, what can these people do to me? Tell
me, what can they do to me?’ After a pause, he replied, ‘I am a fakir; I will take
my bag and leave.’ This was met with resounding applause and chants of Modi.
‘And it is this fakiri which has given me the strength to fight for the poor.’

But it did not end there.

Modi said that when he began a campaign to open Jan Dhan accounts for the
poor, people mocked him. But today, the rich were coming to the homes of the
poor, recalling past associations, and asking them to deposit two–three lakh in
their accounts.

‘Had you ever seen the rich come and bow at the feet of the poor? Today, the
corrupt have queued in front of the homes of the poor people.’

He then gave an open call to the poor.

‘I am telling all the Jan Dhan account holders – whoever has given you their
money, don’t take out one rupee. You will see, he will come to your house every
day; you don’t say anything. Tell them not to bully you, or you will write to
Modi. Tell them – show me proof that you gave me money. They are trapped . . .
You keep the money and I will find a way. I am thinking of ways [to ensure] that
those who have illegally deposited money go to prison, and the money stays with
the garib.’

With a mischievous laugh, he said that the rich used to say ‘money, money,
money’ through the day. ‘Now, they only say Modi, Modi, Modi.’
A thread throughout the speech was his recognition that demonetization had
caused suffering.

‘When people of this country get to know that intent is good, effort is honest,
and they have faith, then this country is ready to bear anything. Did anyone think
that all 125 crore people will bear the responsibility of this battle against
corruption? I salute you.’

It’s easy to pull apart the speech. Would corruption end with demonetization?
Wasn’t only a small proportion of the black economy in cash? Wasn’t this a false
way to present a complex policy decision? Was the scale of economic suffering
really worth the benefits? Who was treating Modi as a criminal? Was it right to
encourage people to break a contract they had voluntarily entered into with
others by telling them not to return money?

But that is not relevant here. Look, instead, at what he does in the speech.

He distils the most important policy decision of the times in simple, accessible
terms. He frames it as a binary between right and wrong. He projects himself as
the man fighting the good battle, on the side of the people, victimized by the bad
guys. But while willing to fight, he also positions himself as a leader who can
throw it all away, for he has no vested interests, nothing to lose. He also
acknowledges the pain, but taps into the sense of righteousness, the sense of
sacrifice and makes citizens feel they are participants in a great national mission,
distinct from the prosaic and the banal.

Then he goes beyond that.

He expresses delight that the corrupt rich are suffering, and he prods the crowd
to join in to mock them. He taps into envy, he taps into latent anger and he
implies the loss of the rich will be the gain of the poor. He neutralizes the present
suffering by promising a rosy and equitable future, where a few would not be
able to appropriate wealth.

Modi did this through all his public rallies from November to January. It had two
major implications.

For one, it helped manage the public mood. A senior government insider told
me, ‘Each time he spoke, we knew we had bought a few more weeks. There is
no way the government machinery could have implemented this without facing
deeper public anger and riots, if it was not for his credibility. The bureaucracy
was astounded by the scale of challenge that the system had to deal with.
Whether the decision was right or wrong is a different matter. But he took the
decision, he owned it and he created the political climate for us to operationalize
it.’ The power of Modi’s narrative was so much that one found many citizens
repeating, almost verbatim, what he had said when they justified the move.

But the second implication was deeper, for the prime minister’s speeches were
not merely meant to manage the short-term discontent. To understand where it
was coming from, return to 2015.

In April that year, on the floor of the Lok Sabha, Congress vice president Rahul
Gandhi had launched a scathing attack on the government. ‘Your government is
ignoring problems of farmers, not listening to labourers. It is the government of
industrialists. Yeh tu suit-boot ki sarkar hai.’ For someone who had built his
image on austerity and detachment from material interests, Modi caused deep
damage to his image with a suit plastered with his name, as he hosted US
President Barack Obama in January 2015. The barb hit him personally.

The government’s early push to amend the Land Acquisition Act had also come
across as ‘pro-rich, anti-farmer’. The Modi sarkar was suffering the traditional
BJP handicap – of being perceived as a party of only the well-to-do.

The narrative had percolated down to the villages of Bihar.

You could call him a rural doctor, or you could call him a quack. Amresh Kumar
was sitting right off the highway in Basudevpur in Bihar’s Samastipur district,
outside his clinic. After a six-day training at the district hospital, Kumar and
others like him got a certificate from the civil surgeon to offer basic medical care
in rural areas. At the end of August 2015, two months before assembly elections
in the state, he was contemplating the political choice that lay ahead.

‘Yeh Modiji jo hain, bada ghoomte hain. This Modiji travels a lot. He has gone
to sixteen countries in fourteen months, and by the end of five years, he will
hand over the country to bideshis. Every product in India will be foreign-made.’
In travels across north Bihar during the elections, what was most startling for
those who had seen the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in the region was the rapid dip
in Narendra Modi’s popularity. He was no longer a man of the masses.

Veteran journalist and an authority on Bihar, Sankarshan Thakur captured this

most aptly.

From Raghopur, admittedly a Lalu Prasad stronghold, he quoted Raju Yadav.

‘Bewakoof banaya garib ko. Vote le gaya, mehangai de gaya. Har Har Modi se
Arhar Modi. He befooled the poor. He took away our votes and gave us inflation
in return. From Har Har Modi, he has turned into Arhar Modi.’ Dal prices had
indeed skyrocketed, hurting each household, and turning the narrative away from
the BJP.

A course correction was needed. Indeed, in the speech where Rahul Gandhi had
used the suit-boot ki sarkar jibe, he had also offered advice to Modi. ‘Sixty per
cent people are farmers and labourers. The PM will gain politically if he changes
sides.’

What demonetization did, and the content of Modi’s Moradabad speech makes it
clear, was help crystallize this change in sides. It ended once and for all, as a BJP
spokesperson told me, the perception that this was a ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’. And
that is why even though Gandhi repeated the same strategy through the UP
elections – claiming that demonetization was a huge conspiracy to transfer the
hard-earned money of the poor into the accounts of the rich, that Modi only
worked for fifty corrupt families – the charges carried little credibility.

The prime minister was ahead of the curve, he had noticed a potential gap and
addressed it, and he had already cultivated a new image, and a new constituency
of voters among the most marginalized in society.

***

You can tap into class envy temporarily, but there is something more tangible
you have to be seen as offering to translate the goodwill into votes. Much before
demonetization, the Modi sarkar had turned its focus on rural India.

Independent agencies commissioned by the BJP to gauge public mood in 2016

and early 2017 came back with a common insight. Three central government
initiatives were very popular, especially with women – gas cylinders (Ujjwala
scheme); toilets (Swachh Bharat); and Jan Dhan accounts.

UP’s Balia was chosen as the site to launch the Ujjwala scheme in May 2016.
The scheme is simple. Five crore LPG connections would be provided to
families below the poverty line, with a support of Rs 1600 per connection. These
are to be registered in the name of women of the households.

Arun Singh, a block pramukh in Unnao district near Lucknow, was an influential
local leader of the Samajwadi Party (SP). He, however, was not too hopeful of
the prospects of the SP–Congress gathbandhan, alliance. The constituency had
fallen in the Congress kitty, and local SP activists were resentful that they had
not got a chance to put up their own candidate. A group of village pradhans loyal
to Singh were complaining to him about the poverty of political choices, when a
Muslim pradhan said, ‘I will never vote for the BJP. But if my people and I were
to vote for the BJP, the one reason would be gas cylinder.’ He added, ‘I don’t like
him. But the fact is Modi will transform rural areas this way in ten years. Those
who need benefits are getting them directly.’

While the UPA had recognized the need for improving delivery systems and
spearheaded a number of pro-poor schemes, Modi has run with many of these
initiatives, reinvigorated a lethargic bureaucracy, used the network provided by
Aadhaar and deployed his own political capital to add urgency to
implementation.

The Modi sarkar initiatives also extensively used the data found in the Socio-
Economic and Caste Census (SECC), set in motion during UPA-2, to identify the
most deprived households requiring government intervention. The SECC is
arguably the most detailed accounting of India’s poor. Not released in full yet,
only the central government has complete access to this data.

In the census, households are defined as deprived (or not) depending on a

number of carefully defined criteria. Being a census outside the Census Act, this
data identifies the person by name and address, and not just a number.
Eventually, about ten crore rural households across India were identified as
deprived. These are India’s poorest citizens, and government interventions
would now target them.
It’s debatable whether the BJP’s welfare schemes will ultimately have more real
impact than the UPA’s but there’s no question that Modi understands their
political importance and uses them astutely. Welfare delivery may or may not be
sharper, but it is, as an observer put it, louder. Modi made it a point, in rally after
rally, to evoke his own roots and to attribute the Ujjwala scheme to his desire
that other mothers do not go through what his mother went through while
cooking for him in unsafe, unhealthy settings.

Or take Jan Dhan. A young Dalit man, who drove an auto in Mirzapur town, told
me, as we made our way to a Modi rally towards the end of the election
campaigning, that he would vote for the BJP. His reason – ‘Modiji has opened
accounts.’ He didn’t mind that there was no money in these accounts. ‘Paisa to
hamein kamana hai, we have to earn the money.’ He was happy with possessing
an account. It made him feel empowered, and he did not expect the government
to come and do his work for him.

As a BJP strategist in UP said, ‘Ujjwala, toilets, Jan Dhan are so popular because
they offer the poor dignity. And they give credit to Modiji for these schemes. Or
take the MUDRA scheme, which funds non-corporate small businesses. It is the
barbers, paan-wala who are taking small loans. No one saw these people as a
constituency at all in the past.’

In the perception battle of who is delivering to the garib, the BJP has scored. In
the process, there has been an expansion in the BJP’s class base, and it has given
the party an entry into constituencies it had traditionally never reached.

***

This transformation, however, may have been incomplete but for one promise
that Modi agreed to, albeit reluctantly.

The surveys that highlighted the popularity of these ‘pro-poor’ schemes also
showed to the BJP leadership that farm-loan waiver was a major demand of the
electorate. The surveys suggested this had the ability to swing close to 3 per cent
of the votes. Rahul Gandhi had, through a yatra in 2016, mobilized public
opinion around the demand – he, however, did little to follow up on the ground.
But citizens had got a whiff of what was possible.
Many bureaucrats point out that Modi thinks of himself as different from his
predecessors, particularly the UPA regime, on the question of welfare. He wants
to treat the poor not as victims in need of relief and dole, which is how he views
the UPA’s approach, but as independent agents who need to be empowered and
enabled enough to compete on their own. A farm-loan waiver did not quite fit
into that framework. It was the kind of ‘freebie’ the BJP and Modi were
contemptuous of.

But the political push was too strong. The state unit and the surveys convinced
Amit Shah, who then persuaded the prime minister. And both a loan waiver and
a promise of interest-free loans were eventually incorporated as part of the
party’s sankalp patra or election manifesto. Modi’s only instruction to the team
was to keep only those elements which were implementable. ‘Don’t make
promises we cannot meet,’ he told the political leaders involved in its drafting.

Virender Singh ‘Mast’ was one such leader who made the push for a farm-loan
waiver.

The tall Thakur leader, and BJP MP from Bhadohi in east UP, is the national
president of the party’s Kisan Morcha. He had shot to fame in the 1990s, once
when he lost to Phoolan Devi and again when he defeated her in parliamentary
elections. Mast had got to know Modi during this period, when Modi was a party
functionary in Delhi. Internal BJP politics, and the rise of another Thakur leader,
Rajnath Singh, saw him getting marginalized. But he made a comeback in 2014,
winning his seat. In the run-up to the UP elections, Shah had given him charge of
the farmers’ front.

Soon after the elections, at his central Delhi residence, opposite the Le Meridien
hotel, Mast was entertaining visitors from his constituency. On the wall were
images of Guru Golwalkar, the second sarsanghchalak, or chief, of the RSS, and
Dattopant Thengdi, who pioneered the Sangh’s labour front.

Mast began by pointing out the centrality of the farm economy, and farmers, in
UP. ‘From Ghaziabad to Ghazipur, the entire Ganga–Yamuna belt, is the kisan
belt. Modi understands the power of the kisan. The farmers, unlike big
companies, pay back their debts. They don’t like being in debt. But it is
important to stand up for them when they are facing a dire situation.’ He claimed
this was just one of the many initiatives of the government aimed at farmers –
citing the push for irrigation, rural electrification, crop insurance, rural roads and
subsidy for livestock farming as other examples.

‘I have never seen a leader who evokes as much faith as Modi. And when he
promised a loan waiver, when he promised that he would change the face of UP
agriculture, the kisan believed him.’

The ‘gaon, garib, kisan’ – villages, poor, farmers – focus would pay rich
dividends to the party in the elections. It would help reinforce Narendra Modi’s
image as a man of the grassroots. But it would end up creating a huge policy
challenge for BJP state governments in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh within
months, for it triggered similar demands among farmers for a loan waiver. But in
UP, the mix of demonetization with the perception that the central government
was delivering on pro-poor schemes would position Modi exactly where he
wanted to be – as a leader of the poor, an image that had also been assiduously
cultivated over four decades ago by another strong prime minister, Indira
Gandhi.

***

The Modi hawa is also in part because of a fractured, and discredited,

opposition.

A close friend from my undergraduate days in Delhi University’s Hindu College

is today a rising business figure in Lucknow. From a traditional Bania family
with old business interests in central UP, he has branched off to emerge as an
entrepreneur in his own right. His family has traditionally supported the Sangh
and the BJP.

We were having dinner at a Lucknow hotel on the evening of 8 November. My

friend began receiving messages and calls and we switched on the television.

Demonetization – the term hadn’t yet gained currency – would have major
implications for his business. But he was calm, and even comfortable with it, for
he felt that this would force businesses – including his own – to streamline their
practices.

‘In the long run, this is good, yaar. How long will all of us keep worrying about
the dark part of our businesses? This will force old businesses to go legal,
become modern, adapt. It is worth it.’

This was not how the rest of his family felt.

Over the next two months, I was to hear of the resentment and the anger they
had begun harbouring against Narendra Modi, as they looked for ways to
manage their cash holdings. ‘They all thought the BJP was their own party, and
could not understand how Modi betrayed them,’ my friend said with a laugh.

After the assembly elections, when I asked how his angry relatives had voted, he
replied, ‘BJP.’ I was curious and wondered what had changed. ‘Aur kisko dete?
Who else could they have voted for? Rahul Gandhi?’

They were not alone in thinking so.

In February and March, ThePrint, a media start-up, reported on the mood among
the young. It conducted video interviews in two colleges – in Kanpur with
students largely from urban centres and in Bhadohi with students from rural
backgrounds. Students were asked which leader they admired the most. The
majority of the hands went up for Modi; a few students liked Akhilesh Yadav; in
Bhadohi, one hand went up for Mayawati. In neither of the places did any
student admire or support Rahul Gandhi.

India’s citizens do not accept Rahul Gandhi as a credible leader. In UP, the state
where Rahul has spent maximum time in his political life so far, no social group
other than Muslims saw the Congress vice president as its leader – even as Modi
built his multi-class appeal.

Rahul Gandhi did not appeal to the Lucknow Bania, he did not appeal to the
Gorakhpur Thakur, he did not appeal to the Moradabad Dalit, he did not appeal
to the Mirzapur Kurmi, he did not appeal to the Bundelkhand Brahman, he did
not appeal to the Allahabad Kushwaha, he did not appeal to the Muzaffarnagar
Jat, he did not appeal to the Saharanpur Saini. He did not appeal to the rich
trader, he did not appeal to the middle-class teacher, he did not appeal to the
young man who works as a taxi driver in Delhi and had returned home to vote,
he did not appeal to the farmer with marginal landholdings, he did not appeal to
the woman who was below the poverty line, he did not appeal to a college
student now ready for the job market.

In state after state, this pattern gets replicated. Rahul Gandhi appeals to no
particular social group or class. Nor is he an overarching leader across classes
and communities – which is what made Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and
Rajiv Gandhi distinctive national leaders and gave them an edge over other
leaders associated with their own region, caste or religion. He has no core base
to rely on, and he has not been able to construct a wider appeal like others in his
family.

One reason Rahul Gandhi has not been able to build his appeal is that, in the
public perception, he has done nothing of consequence.

No one is interested in organizational reforms he may have brought into the

Youth Congress – which, to digress, do not seem to have brought any benefits to
the party either. No one is interested in his father or his grandmother or his great-
grandfather either – most Indians do not have any memory of any of these
leaders and are increasingly contemptuous of inherited privilege.

What the electorate is interested in is his record. And he has no record to show.
He has been a poor parliamentarian; he has never been a minister and has no
administrative skill to market; he does not have a landmark initiative which he
can take credit for, unlike his mother who is seen as responsible for the National
Rural Employment Guarantee Act; and his criticism of the government’s
failures, including unemployment, seems to ring hollow, for people turn to ask –
wasn’t Rahul Gandhi in power for ten years? Wasn’t his family in power for
much of the time India has been independent?

It may have been possible to offset some of these weaknesses with a strong
organization.

But Rahul Gandhi seems to be no organization man either. Even as Amit Shah
has transformed the BJP in the last three years, as we shall see in the next
chapter, Rahul Gandhi’s rise has been accompanied with the hollowing out of the
Congress party over the past decade. The Congress vice president could well
offer an excuse – he did not have full control, and the ‘old guard’, and
entrenched interests, of the Congress party would not allow him to do what he
would have liked to. But that, once again, is the failure of leadership. It was up
to him to use the natural position of dominance he has in the party, wrest control,
assert himself and build an organization and a pool of leaders at all levels in all
states. None of this has happened.

It would have been possible to work around the absence of a core social base, the
lack of any personal record or even an organization, if Rahul Gandhi had
charisma and oratory skills. But sample this.

In February 2017, Rahul addressed a rally in Bareilly during the UP election

campaign. The crowd had started trickling in around 2 p.m., but it never
escalated to a wave, and after two and a half hours, when Rahul Gandhi’s
chopper arrived, rows of empty chairs remained.

Rahul had come to canvass for the Congress candidate from the Bareilly
Cantonment seat, Nawab Mujahid Khan. The constituency had over one lakh
Muslims. The Congress, in alliance with the SP, thought it had more than a
fighting chance here.

Polling was in two days, and in accordance with the Election Commission
guidelines, campaigning had to end by 5 p.m. When Rahul arrived, there was
only half an hour to go before he would have to wrap up. It was clear he was in a
rush. Rahul began with a straight message – India’s biggest challenge is jobs.
‘Modiji had said they will create two crore jobs. I asked them in Parliament, how
many jobs have you created? One minister said they created one lakh jobs in the
first year. In the second year, they created no jobs.’ The crowd clapped, but the
energy was missing.

And Rahul lost his audience entirely when he went on to narrate a story that, at
first glance, seemed to have no connection to his first point. ‘I went to China and
met a local neta over lunch. I kept asking him about China; he kept asking me
about Himachal Pradesh. I said, arre bhaiya India is such a big country, why are
you only asking about Himachal? And he said we compete with apples from
Himachal and want to see a day when Made in China items are sold there.’

Rahul, then, it seemed, almost forgot about this story, and spoke about
demonetization. He asked the audience, ‘Do you know why Modiji did
notebandi? It was to take your money and hand it over to fifty rich businessmen.’
After explaining the economic consequences of notebandi, Rahul returned to his
story.

He said, in a confusing conclusion, that he wanted to see a day when ‘Obamaji,

now that he is free’ and his friend in China would see products with a Made in
Bareilly, Made in UP sign. ‘Bareilly is known for its manjha, kite strings. I want
to see a day when I go back to China, have lunch with the same leader and we
talk about Bareilly’s manjha.’

One could pick the broad thread in Rahul’s speech. He had identified jobs as the
key crisis. He believed that promotion of local industry and local manufacturing
was one way out of this employment crisis. He also wanted to send a message
that these local products could become globally competitive.

In itself, this was reasonable. But there were three problems.

Instead of keeping the story simple, he added too many elements to it and
complicated it for the crowd. After throwing in China, Himachal Pradesh,
apples, Obamaji, he focused on Bareilly’s own specialization – this was clearly
not the most effective way to explain a simple point. The speech also lacked the
emotional connect that was so palpable in, say, Modi’s Moradabad performance
after demonetization.

The second problem was that Made in Bareilly seemed like a poor replica of the
brand that Modi has already made his own – Make in India. A Congress leader
was to later explain, ‘Imagine if we had a real Made in Karnataka model, which
had gained recognition; it would have been possible for Rahul to sell that. But
right now, it seems like we are just imitating Modi, with nothing tangible to
offer.’

And finally, why would the disillusioned relatives of my businessman friend get
attracted to Rahul’s speech? Not only was he failing to retain the old base of
poor voters, he had nothing to say to the substantive middle class which may
have been weighing its options in this election because of demonetization.

A young BJP activist had a sharp diagnosis of the problem with Rahul’s speeches
and messaging. ‘The young today want the 5-4-3-2-1 formula in their lives – a
five-digit salary, a four-wheel car, a three BHK flat, two children and one wife.
That is their aim across caste groups and classes, especially among the lower
middle class, the educated and ambitious. Do you hear anything in Rahul’s
speeches that would give hope that he can help them meet this aspiration? Modi
may not have met it, but he provides hope and inspiration that it is possible.’

Besides his own weakness, Rahul’s Bareilly performance also reflected the
structural problems of the Congress party. The relatively low turnout showed
that the party’s organizational machinery and mobilizational capacity were
limited. The almost entirely Muslim audience may have been a function of the
composition of the constituency – but it also spoke poorly of the party’s reach
among other social groups, for Bareilly is a city with a mixed population.

In the event, the Congress lost the Bareilly Cantonment seat. Rahul led the party
to its worst-ever defeat in UP.

***

What explains Modi’s cross-cutting appeal?

K.N. Govindacharya was one of the most influential leaders in the BJP
organization through the 1980s and early 1990s, and has seen Modi evolve over
the decades. He is outside formal politics now, but remains a senior Sangh
ideologue. He says, ‘Narendra’s forte is political marketing. His mental matrix is
simple. Politics is equal to power. Power stems from elections. Elections are a
battle of images. And therefore, politics revolves around images, messages, and
signalling.’

For this, Govindacharya suggested, a leader needs three elements in place:

infrastructure to sustain oneself in an adverse situation, resources and
technology. ‘The infrastructure for adverse times is available through the Sangh;
they have adequate resources now; and they have technology in the form of
media and social media which play a huge role in amplifying the message.
Narendra has a natural talent for blending it.’

There is no doubt that the construction of the Modi image, or Modi images, is
central to the making of the hawa.

For the Sangh base, he remains the Hindu leader. For the urban middle class, he
is the man who would bring vikas and jobs and the nationalist who would teach
Pakistan a lesson – take the recent Delhi municipal elections as proof of his
continued romance with this constituency. Despite a poor record over multiple
terms in office, the BJP swept the city in the name of Modi. For the poor, he is
the man who has taken on the rich and thinks about their daily needs. For
hundreds of thousands of citizens who tune in to listen to him every month on
‘Mann ki Baat’, he is a man above politics, a moral science teacher, a life-guru
offering lessons. For the OBC, he is one of them. For the upper caste, he is
taking forward their dream of a strong India as a world power. Often, all these
lines intersect.

Selling these multiple images is however hard work. And that’s where the other
element of the Modi personality comes in – energy.

Varanasi – Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency – went to polls in the last phase of
the 2017 UP elections. The prime minister decided to campaign in the city, and
its adjoining areas, for three days. Many saw this as a sign of the prime
minister’s nervousness.

But this ignored the fact that Modi was not just a prime minister but also a mass
leader. A generation of Indians had stopped seeing this duality inherent in the
office. Let’s look at India’s prime ministers after 1991.

P.V. Narasimha Rao may have been a mass leader in his home state of Andhra
Pradesh, but he had no base beyond his state, and definitely no appeal in North
India. H.D. Deve Gowda was a Karnataka phenomenon. I.K. Gujral would just
about have been able to win elections at Delhi’s India International Centre. Atal
Bihari Vajpayee was the only prime minister after 1991 with charisma, mass
appeal and the zeal to reach out to the public directly – but he became prime
minister in his seventies, was not completely healthy and confined himself to
key elections. Manmohan Singh lost the only Lok Sabha election he contested,
and stayed away from the electoral fray, selecting a safe Rajya Sabha seat from
Assam where he had never lived.

And then comes Modi, who believes winning elections is his core dharma. He
begins campaigns early, and relies on extensive mass contact. His own
organizational background – he came to the BJP from the Sangh as the general
secretary handling sangathan in Gujarat – keeps him on top of the party
machinery. And he is not scared of defeat – the possibility that the party may not
do well in elections does not keep him away from the field, but makes him jump
into the fray with more zeal.

On the last day of the UP campaign, a leader from Purvanchal, who has known
the prime minister for two decades, mentioned to him that his Varanasi campaign
was being interpreted as a sign that the party was scared, and asked him why he
had decided to campaign now.

Modi replied, ‘Chunav jang hai, aur main senapati hoon. An election is a war,
and I am the commander. I am also the MP from the city, I have not been able to
spend enough time there, and this gives me an opportunity to connect with the
people. And in the process, if the party benefits too, it is all for the good.’ This
approach – of viewing each election as critical and as one which has to be won,
of taking responsibility for it and investing extraordinary energy – distinguishes
Modi.

It has also made him India’s tallest mass leader of contemporary times. The
flirtation of 2014 has turned into a full romance three years later. It is winning
the BJP elections from the panchayat to Parliament, and everything in the
middle, across the country. The future of Indian politics is dependent on whether
this love affair turns out to be a brief phase in the life of the nation or continues
for long enough to change the very nature of the nation. And whether it lasts will
depend as crucially on another man and the infrastructure he has created to make
the relationship flourish – Amit Shah.
 Shah’s Sangathan
At the BJP’s national executive meeting in Bhubaneswar in April 2017, a month
after leading the party to success in UP, Amit Shah declared that it was not the
time for complacency.

He laid out a new target for the party – winning every state, particularly in the
south and east; and winning elections from the panchayat to Parliament, at every
level.

The statement was symbolic of what distinguishes Narendra Modi and Amit
Shah from their predecessors, as well as their principal national rival, the
Congress of Rahul Gandhi.

Boundless, unlimited ambition.

A BJP insider, who has worked closely with the leadership, explained it
succinctly: ‘Atalji and Advaniji grew up at a time of Congress hegemony. They
were always reconciled to the territorial limits of the BJP. Both Modi and Shah
are different. They are ruthlessly expansionist, in terms of both territorial limits
and social base.’

This expansion is achieved through winning elections in traditional strongholds

where the party may have faltered in recent years, like UP; targeting newer
geographies where there is political space for an alternative, like the North-East;
and striving to become the principal opposition force in states where it has
historically been weak, like West Bengal and Odisha.

How has it happened?

If Modi’s mass connect is one part of the story, the fifty-two-year-old Amit
Shah’s work in transforming the BJP is an equally important element of the same
story.

Shah has energized the party sangathan; expanded its membership; carefully
made the booth committee the centre and focus of all activity; created a
centralized – yet decentralized – structure where information flows both from
the top to the bottom and the other way around, and decision-making is rapid;
instituted independent data-based feedback mechanisms to help identify core
issues the organization should be taking up; and ensured leaders at all levels are
made accountable.

Each of these required tremendous effort.

To unravel the puzzle of the BJP’s success, understand precisely these

components of the Amit Shah school of election management. But before that,
understand the man himself. This is the story of how one man has, arguably,
created the most formidable election machinery in contemporary India.

***

Amit Shah was born in 1964 in Bombay. But his family was originally from
Mansa, close to Ahmedabad. In one of the rare interviews where he opened up
about his early days, Shah told the writer Patrick French for the Hindustan Times
that his grandfather wanted him to be brought up in the village.

His great-grandfather had been an adviser to the ruler of Mansa on matters of

business, the family was prosperous, and Shah grew up in a haveli. He recalled
he did not like formal studies and preferred going to the Sangh shakha to play
games. ‘Most of the games were designed to give us physical strength. I was
taught deshbhakti. I was taught sanskar.’ He moved to Ahmedabad at fifteen,
studied biochemistry, and got involved in business by the time he was eighteen,
trading plastics and PVC pipes. But Shah was increasingly involved with Sangh
activities. He worked in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and
eventually moved to the BJP.

His political socialization began with the ritual of elections and his very first
assignment was that of a poll agent in Ahmedabad’s Naranpura ward. Before
long, he became the coordinator for L.K. Advani’s election bid for the Lok
Sabha in 1989.

From 1997, Shah himself began contesting elections from the Sarkhej assembly
constituency in Ahmedabad, increasing his winning margin from 25,000 votes in
1997 to 1.3 lakh votes in 1998 to 1.58 lakh votes in 2002 to 2.3 lakh votes in
2007. He won, once again in 2012, by 60,000 votes from a much smaller, newly
carved out Narayanpura assembly constituency.

Apart from winning his own elections, as a key strategist and organizer he
played a role in weaving together the larger BJP wins in Gujarat under Narendra
Modi. Modi’s image; the combination of Hindu assertion and regional pride or
‘Gujarati asmita’; the promise and rhetoric of vikas; and a wide social coalition
of upper castes, Patels, large sections of OBCs and a slice of the Dalit and tribal
vote were the key ingredients for the consistently successful run. But the
sangathan provided the glue. Many of the experiments that Shah was to later
replicate nationally – expanding party membership, constant travel of office-
bearers outside the capital, mass contact programmes, energizing all units of the
party – had already happened in Gujarat.

In the mid 1990s, Shah made a name for himself by breaking the Congress
stranglehold over cooperatives, a key source of political power in Gujarat. The
BJP suddenly began winning elections in cooperative banks, milk dairies and
agricultural market committees. A decade later, he would do something similar
with the Gujarat Cricket Association and win it for Modi.

But from 2010, Shah was to go through the most difficult years of his political
life. Accused of orchestrating extrajudicial executions, Shah was imprisoned in
his home state – where he had been home minister. The court subsequently
granted him bail, but also exiled him for two years from Gujarat. Shah moved to
Delhi, and travelled through the country.

He returned home in time for the assembly elections of December 2012, which
was to be a turning point in the history of the country. Narendra Modi won for
the third consecutive term, and let his national ambitions be known on the day of
the results. Battling resistance from the BJP’s old guard, particularly his former
mentor L.K. Advani, Modi would go on to become the party’s prime ministerial
candidate.

The 2012 victory also gave Shah a fresh lease of life.

Within months, in May 2013, he was appointed the general secretary in charge
of Uttar Pradesh. Shah did not know the state at all. Now he had, arguably, the
most critical assignment which would determine whether Narendra Modi would
become India’s prime minister. But his single-minded pursuit of acquiring power
through elections had prepared him well.

***

In January 2014, Amit Shah needed help. And he did what BJP leaders do when
they need help. He called up the Sangh and sought an assistant to help with the
UP campaign.

The RSS decided to send a young man, but a rising organization talent, the forty-
four-year-old Sunil Bansal.

Originally from Rajasthan, Bansal was then the Delhi-based joint general
secretary of the ABVP. This made him the third most powerful figure in the
student organization, meant to bring in a fresh pool of recruits to the Sangh and
influence their worldview across universities, year by year.

Bansal was taken aback when Suresh Soni – the RSS joint general secretary in
charge of the BJP – called him to a meeting in Hyderabad. Here, he was told to
pack his bags and join Shah’s team in the BJP. In the Sangh, an assignment is an
assignment. And you do not say no.

On 15 January 2014, Bansal met Shah for the first time, in Delhi. Shah asked
him about his family and organizational background; it was an informal
conversation. Bansal had spent time in UP for his ABVP work, but did not know
the state well enough. Shah told him to travel across the six zones of the state
that the BJP had carved out on its organizational map – Kashi, Gorakhpur,
Awadh, Kanpur–Bundelkhand, Braj and Paschim UP – and meet him in
Lucknow in three weeks.

On 5 February, Shah convened a meeting of 250 key people in UP – who would

be the heart of the BJP’s electoral machine – in the party office in Lucknow.
These included all BJP district presidents, those in charge of all 80 Lok Sabha
constituencies and prominent state-level figures.

Shah received reports from office-bearers, on a set template of twenty questions.

These included the number of booth committees that had been activated in each
constituency; the number of meetings that had been held targeting women,
youth, backward castes; and social media outreach. For twelve hours, Shah
listened as each district updated him on the progress. He gave feedback,
interrogated them when not satisfied and issued instructions.

At the end of the day, Shah introduced Sunil Bansal to the house, and said, ‘He
will oversee the management of the elections. And when he says something,
think that I am saying it.’

Bansal had officially arrived on the UP political landscape. He would go on to

become one of Shah’s closest aides.

***

UP was Amit Shah’s baby. Bansal, as his sahyogi, aide, got a ringside view of
the elections. No one saw the future party chief more closely at work.

How does the man now considered among the most ruthless and efficient
election managers India has known work?

‘The first thing Amit bhai does before an election is deep research. He only got
charge of UP in 2013. But within six months, he had travelled to every corner of
the state. He knew issues in each region. He knew which leader fit in where,’
Bansal explained.

This extensive travel and adhyaan, study, equipped Shah with the basic arsenal
to prepare for polls. He understood that the party organization was rotten – and
that is why he focused on building booth committees. This is the smallest of the
party organizational units, operating on the ground, where the vote is cast in any
election. This committee plays a role in mobilizing the community before the
election, getting voters to turn up on polling day and creating a favourable local
climate. In UP, there were 1.4 lakh polling booths across the state of over 20
crore people; strengthening committees would be no simple task. He saw that the
weak local leadership, deeply divided into factions, had led the party to
consecutive defeats. These leaders had to be sidelined, but also managed so that
there was no rebellion. He saw that Narendra Modi had appeal – but people did
not know Modi well enough. The only way to win UP was to relentlessly use
Modi. It was here that Shah’s machinery received invaluable assistance from the
sharp election strategist Prashant Kishor and his Gandhinagar-based team.
Through rallies, holograms, raths, chai-pe-charcha, media, WhatsApp messages,
Modi reached every home.

Bansal said that the second element of Shah’s approach to elections is a careful
study of social composition. ‘He knew the arithmetic, the caste dynamics of each
constituency.’

Shah realized the party’s arithmetic was all wrong. Muslims would not vote for
the party. Yadavs would stay loyal to the SP. Jatavs, among Dalit communities,
were fiercely loyal to Mayawati. Together, they constituted over 40 per cent of
the population. The BJP had the other 55–60 per cent to play with. And yet, in
the preceding decade, it had got primarily confined to the upper castes – less
than 20 per cent – and had not done enough to reach out to the other castes. He
focused on consolidating the upper castes, and expanding among the backwards
and Dalits.

‘Amit bhai also has an independent information network and knows what is
going on in each district. We used to speak every hour, and he often told me to
check what was going on in a particular place. I then checked and discovered
some development there,’ Bansal said, the awe palpable in his voice. This
information came from the party and ideological affiliates, it came from
independent feedback mechanisms and it came from professional teams who had
been hired to provide real-time ground information.

This trait gave Shah command over details, which helped him combine broad
strategy with a detailed micro picture. That he could sit through the day and take
specific information from each district in UP, process it, give precise feedback
and cross-check it with his independent network at any point was crucial to
election management.

The fourth element of Shah’s approach, which I gleaned from people who have
worked with him extensively in Gujarat, is his focus on disrupting the
opposition’s base by stealing away a section of leaders. In itself, this is a tactic
that any party uses before elections. But in the BJP, there is a school of thought
which views outsiders with suspicion, and as ideologically impure. For Shah,
however, electoral compulsions were supreme. He was confident that these
outsiders would accept, and internalize, the party’s ideological worldview.

Bharat Pandya is the BJP Gujarat spokesperson, who has been a member of the
Legislative Assembly (MLA) and office secretary of the party. He has worked
closely with both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah over the years. In 2014, he was
in charge of central Gujarat districts, including Vadodara, the second seat from
which Modi contested.

‘He believes in breaking the opposition’s strength. Amit bhai has always
wondered why is it that the BJP has been working hard for decades, yet we were
not been able to achieve the kind of success that we should have in the past. His
answer is it is because of the missing 5 to 10 per cent of the vote share. And to
get that, he is open to bringing in people from other parties. This will weaken
them, strengthen us. Compensate for the missing vote.’

And the final element of Shah’s approach is that seemingly simple quality we
take for granted – hard work and focus.

Ravindar Jaiswal, the MLA from Varanasi North, worked closely with Shah in
Modi’s Lok Sabha bid from the city in 2014. Jaiswal recalls that the party was
battling the district administration for permission to hold a Modi rally; it was
then decided that they would instead do a Modi roadshow across the city. ‘The
night before the roadshow, Amit bhai planned every element of the show. We
must have finished late at night. And then he told me to meet him at 7 a.m. at the
starting point of the road show so we could go through the route once, check
hoardings, see crowd mobilization. I said yes and went home.’

Jaiswal had thought in that true Indian tradition that 7 a.m. meant 9 a.m., and
was still asleep when Shah called him at seven and asked where he was. A
nervous Jaiswal said he was on his way. Fifteen minutes later, Shah called him
again. Jaiswal, still getting ready, lied again and said he was almost there. By the
time he got to their meeting point, it was almost eight. ‘Amit bhai was sitting in
his car, alone, waiting. He leads by example,’ Jaiswal told me in his expansive
home in Varanasi.

Bansal agrees, and says he has often got calls at 2.30 a.m. from Shah and then
again at 7 a.m. ‘I once asked him, when do you sleep? Amit bhai told me that he
practises yog nidra – where it is not just the body but the mind that is at peace,
and rests. Three to four hours of that is enough to keep the body fresh and
energetic through the day. He told me to do it too.’ And has he? ‘Bhai, Sangh
mein seekha tha humne bhi, we had learnt it in the Sangh too. Bas kiya nahin!
Just did not do it,’ he said with a laugh.

But beyond this, any election required careful management. And that is where
Shah turned to Bansal for help in 2014.

Bansal put together sixty people – many of them his colleagues from the ABVP,
from different states – as his core team. They were divided into nineteen groups.
One tracked the media; a second sustained a social media blitzkrieg on BJP’s
behalf; the third managed the war room; a fourth processed requests from
constituencies for certain leaders and coordinated their campaigns; one managed
aviation, meaning permissions for the choppers for all key campaigners; another
team was responsible for smooth ties with the administration and seeking
permission for events, a key but invisible activity behind each public meeting.

‘We were the back office, providing the support for the visible campaign,’
Bansal said. Through the period, he maintained a diary, and every night, jotted
down notes about what he saw, the party’s strengths and weaknesses, and the
lessons from the Amit Shah school of election management.

The Modi hawa, a 24/7 campaign, the meticulous organizational work, a broad
social coalition and the Sangh giving its blood and sweat led to a BJP tsunami in
UP in 2014. The party swept UP, winning 71 seats on its own, with an ally
chipping in with two additional seats.

***

After the results on 16 May 2014, Amit Shah got busy, helping manage the
power transition in Delhi and pick ministers for the Narendra Modi government.

Bansal went back home to Rajasthan for a short break.

In June, Shah called him back to Delhi, and told him to go as sangathan
mahamantri – organization general secretary – to UP. In the BJP, this is a critical
position, with the occupant exercising enormous power in the realm of party
functioning, behind the scenes. At the national level, the organization general
secretary was Ram Lal, making him central to party functioning. Narendra Modi
had been the organization secretary of the BJP in Gujarat. The post is reserved
for a former pracharak of the Sangh. The secretary often lives in the party
headquarter itself, and is often more important than the state party president.

Bansal was hesitant. UP was a big state; it had many senior leaders who would
perhaps not be comfortable with someone so young; it would be difficult to take
decisions and enforce them. He asked Shah to give him a smaller state instead.
Shah insisted. Bansal then told him, ‘I have only one condition. You should
remain my prabhari, the general secretary in charge of UP.’ Shah replied,
‘Bansal, you go, I will take care of you.’

Within weeks, Shah would no longer be the general secretary in charge of the
state, but the national president of the entire party. In June 2014, Bansal arrived
back in Lucknow, this time for good, with a clear mandate – winning 2017.

***

Amit Shah had to hit the ground running as soon as he took over as party chief in
July 2014. Within three months, two key states – Maharashtra and Haryana –
were scheduled to go to polls. Shah had long-term organizational plans for the
party, but the immediate priority was winning these states. And he had to work
with the cards that had helped the BJP do well in the Lok Sabha.

In Maharashtra, the challenge was enormous. The BJP had lost an important
leader from the state, Gopinath Munde, in an accident in early June. Recently
appointed minister for rural development at the centre, Munde was arguably the
most rooted BJP leader in Maharashtra. From an OBC background, he had been
deputy chief minister when the party was last in power with Shiv Sena.

Modi and Shah then decided to snap ties with their old ally, Shiv Sena, after
differences on seat-sharing. But it was not as much a technical issue as political.
After its 2014 Lok Sabha victory, and with Modi and Shah in charge, the BJP
would no longer accept being a pliant junior partner – the message was to all
allies to fall in line. This was also a state where the BJP was organizationally not
equipped to fight in all seats; indeed, in over half the 288 constituencies, it had
not put up candidates in preceding elections.

Sheela Bhatt, among the best-informed political journalists tracking the BJP,
reported that, once the decision to go alone was taken, Shah camped in the BJP’s
Mumbai office, appointed caretakers for Maharashtra’s thirty-six districts, held
workshops for district party chiefs, deployed one person in charge with a GPS-
equipped car in each of the 288 assembly constituencies and instructed them to
stay in their respective areas till voting was over. Shah then carefully planned
Narendra Modi’s public meetings in the state, for he knew that it was only the
Modi hawa that could see the BJP through. The prime minister addressed
twenty-six meetings. The BJP was also happy to co-opt defectors from other
parties in a bid to shore up its strength.

The BJP eventually emerged as the single largest party in the state, and went on
to form the government. The party’s astute social alliances, political messaging
and anti-incumbency had played a key role in the election, as did the Modi hawa.
But what was apparent was that Shah was willing to take huge risks – breaking
up with Shiv Sena could have boomeranged – and he had found a way to create
an election infrastructure even in states where the BJP was not very strong. This
was the case in Haryana too. Despite being confined to urban centres, and not
having a wide party organization, the BJP was able to sweep the state.

There was no doubt that the post-2014 honeymoon with Modi was still intact,
and this was a key factor driving the win. But the success had another
distinguishing feature. It was not how the BJP had conventionally worked or
succeeded. Swapan Dasgupta, the conservative commentator and now a BJP-
nominated Rajya Sabha MP, pointed out, ‘Rather than electoral success
following sustained organisational groundwork . . . a victory in elections has
preceded the creation of an organisational base.’ It was the timetable, he noted,
that had forced the BJP’s hand in both states. Shah had shown he could deliver
results riding on a wave and smart election management. But his ambition was
much larger – of expanding and transforming the BJP sangathan.

***

On 1 November 2014, Amit Shah launched the most ambitious membership

campaigns of any party anywhere in the world, calling the key organization men
from all states and setting membership targets for them. The Sashakta Bhajapa,
Sashakta Bharat campaign deployed every single functionary of the party – from
the prime minister to the booth committee worker – with the single objective of
bringing citizens into the BJP fold.

Many outside were sceptical of the BJP’s membership scheme, and thought it
was primarily a PR exercise. It led opposition leaders to derisively call the BJP a
‘missed call party’, for enrolment could happen by merely dialling a mobile
number. But it was a turning point in the party’s expansion. Take UP.

‘How many members will UP enrol this time under the drive?’ Shah asked Sunil
Bansal, who had come from Lucknow to Delhi for a meeting. UP had around 14
lakh members, enrolled through the old offline process of filling forms and
provision of a formal receipt. Bansal hesitated, and taking what he considered a
leap of faith, said, ‘Fifty lakh.’ Shah shook his head, and said, ‘No, aim for one
crore.’ Bansal said, meekly, it looked difficult, but Shah responded, ‘Karna hai, it
has to be done.’

In Lucknow, the party embarked on a four-pronged plan.

The first component of this strategy was to work at the booth level. Out of
1,41,000 booths in the 2014 elections, the BJP did not poll a single vote in
13,000 booths. Most of these booths, the party assessed, must be dominated by
Muslims – the constituency the party has quite comfortably excluded from its
electoral calculus. Instead of spending time on these, the party decided to invest
energy in the remaining booths. One lakh twenty thousand booths were
identified, and booth committee chairmen were told they had to enrol at least a
hundred members in every booth. The process was deceptively simple. Go door
to door, get interested people to give a missed call from their number, they
would then receive a membership number by SMS and become a primary
member of the party.

Within a month, in UP, Bansal told me, the membership campaign had
succeeded in one lakh booths. They had managed to enrol 80 lakh members,
close to the target Shah set.

Should we believe these numbers? Abhay Mohan Jha is a senior journalist in

Bihar’s West Champaran district, bordering UP. He wrote how he had received
both a call and an SMS welcoming him to the party. When he replied saying he
did not wish to be a member, he got a second text message, asking him to
encourage his family members to join as well. As a journalist, Jha had
connections and called up the BJP leader in Bihar, Sushil Modi, who sheepishly
told him that technology was both deaf and mute – and that he would make
amends. Jha’s name was struck off the rolls.
But these instances, BJP insisted, were aberrations.

The real utility of the exercise lay elsewhere. Bansal explained: ‘Think of what
the exercise did. It activated and energized our booth-level committees, which
usually stay defunct between elections. It forced our workers to go out, get
acquainted with people in their area and establish relations. And it made the BJP
visible.’

But the target was still not met.

The next component was to target individuals and enrol them into the party. The
booth-level campaign had confined activists to a particular spatial location. Now,
BJP workers were told that they could get anyone – family members,
neighbours, acquaintances – to join. Each of them was to, once again, aim to add
100 members.

The third element of the plan involved setting up camps at the block level. UP
has a high degree of intra-state migration. Women marry outside their villages
and shift homes; men move for jobs; students shift to bigger towns for college
education. A camp, with a BJP banner, was meant to woo these constituencies.

Besides the booth, individual and camp-driven efforts, the party launched the
Swasparshi campaign, meant to touch every section of Hindu society. Seven
hundred and eighty workers from the OBC and Dalit communities were
identified and sent off to places within the state which had a high concentration
of members of their own castes. This was to expand its base by reaching out to
segments of the population who were not the BJP’s natural constituency. By 31
March 2015, the BJP had 1.8 crore new members in the state, almost double the
target set by Shah. In the party, this came to be known as the UP model. It also
heralded the arrival of Bansal as an organizer in his own right. He had travelled
to every district of the state over this period; he had planned and executed all
four campaigns.

The UP experience gives a sense of how the membership campaign was

executed on the ground. Though UP contributed the most to the overall kitty of
new members, the drive was not UP-specific. The campaign played out in
different states with varying degrees of success.
For instance, in Jharkhand, which went to polls at the end of 2014, soon after the
membership campaign was initiated, Amit Shah read out the toll-free number at
rallies and exhorted people to sign up. In Bihar, it set a target of 50 lakh
members. In Maharashtra, leaders claimed they had enrolled over a crore
members by the middle of 2015.

By 30 March, a news report suggested that the BJP had been able to enrol nine
crore new members – it had extended the campaign for another month to hit its
target of ten crore. Sanjay Singh, a journalist, wrote, ‘The entire exercise has
been valuable to the BJP in other ways as well. The technology the party adopted
to implement its missed call membership drive also gives the BJP a huge data
bank that it can use for Narendra Modi’s future outreach programme. It will even
help the BJP reach out to states where its organizational strength was limited.’

By the time the campaign ended, the BJP had achieved its target. Some reports
suggested that the party’s claims were exaggerated. It is difficult to establish,
independently, the veracity of the party’s contention that it was now the largest
political party in the world, but there is little doubt that even if the numbers were
a few million less than projected, there had been a massive expansion of the
organization.

The real star of the exercise was Amit Shah. He had launched a membership
drive that most people had dismissed as theatre, but had ended up enrolling – at
least on paper – 10 crore members. This was a stunning figure, considering the
party had got about 17 crore votes in the Lok Sabha elections. Shah had
energized the party from the top to the bottom and given it a common mission.
The remarkable victory could have easily led the party machine to slide into
complacency and inertia. The membership drive prevented that.

But it did not end there.

In May 2015, the BJP decided that the membership drive had to be followed up
with a Maha Sampark Abhiyan – a contact campaign. Workers now had to go
back and meet the people they had enrolled, and get them to fill a detailed form,
which had columns for, among other things, age, economic status, occupation,
family members and gender. This would also be a verification process and help
the party cross-check whether there were large-scale inconsistencies.
Back in UP, Bansal himself had picked a booth in a Lucknow slum, where he
had enrolled a hundred members. Now, he went back to the booth to get people
to fill forms. He realized it was a long, tedious process, and filling each form
took 40 minutes or more. It was clear that the campaign to verify and contact
members would not be as successful as enrolling them had been.

Yet, the BJP was able to get 40 lakh forms in the state, with detailed information
of respondents. Data is the new weapon in elections, and the exercise was highly
valuable.

Together, the membership drive and the contact campaign revived the BJP
organization across states. Except in states where it was in power for a
considerable period of time, like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the
party structures had been decaying. After the 2004 Lok Sabha defeat, and the
2009 rout, no one had invested in the sangathan on this scale. The party had
barely been able to recruit new members. It was not visible on the ground. Its
vote share had shrunk in most states. It was barely even a party, but groups of
people in each district loyal to different factional leaders. The 2014 victory was
not so much a victory of the party organization as of Narendra Modi personally,
his independent campaign infrastructure and the backup support of the Sangh.
Through the organizational expansion, Amit Shah and his team expanded the
BJP base, revived the party organization, sidelined the older guard, amassed an
extraordinary amount of data and created a party structure to ensure that 2014
would not remain a fluke.

***

For the rest of 2015, the party decided to turn inwards. After expanding
membership and contact, Amit Shah’s focus was now on training.

If the membership campaign was meant to register the BJP’s presence across the
state, and project the message that it was a serious contender for power, the next
phase was brushing up internal mechanisms, developing skills and inculcating
ideology in the new members.

Training camps were held, exposing workers and new members to the party’s
ideology. Organizational elections were held – from the booth to the block and
then the district and state level.
In UP, to streamline the organizational structure, the BJP also worked on
strengthening one layer between the block and the booth. This would be the
sector-level committees. Each sector would be in charge of about a dozen
booths. In the process, the party activated 13,500 sector units.

Thus, a pool of leaders was created, ready to be unleashed in the campaign. The
most significant transformation, through the organizational elections, was in the
caste composition of the BJP office-bearers. From a primarily upper-caste party,
the UP unit turned far more inclusive (more on this in the next chapter).

But were organizational elections merely a facade, for the impression persists
that the BJP is a centralized party, with all decisions taken at the top by Amit
Shah? Sunil Bansal strongly rejected this contention, and told me that the very
structure of the organization lent itself to decentralized decision-making.

‘No one can run a party in a state of 24 crore people like UP on his own. See, I
follow a basic organizational principle I read in a book a long time back – get
involved in decision-making only one level below you, and report to the
authority one level above you. That is the broad structure of decision-making in
the BJP.’

Shah had once said that he can convey a message down to the village level in
UP, to millions of people, in one hour. Bansal elaborated: ‘If there is a message,
Amit bhai can talk to us. I can talk to six zonal heads, who can then talk to the
district chiefs under them, who can then talk to the block heads, who in turn talk
to the sector and booth heads. Amit bhai will not talk to the zonal in-charge; I
will not get involved with district or booth people.’ This, he argued, may seem
simple but had given a certain coherence to the party. It gave autonomy to the
lower levels, and introduced layers of accountability.

This may have worked in UP, primarily because of the smooth working
relationship between Shah and Bansal. But decision-making is more complex in
the party. There is indeed a new culture in the party organization, and this has
generated complexities.

Shah is the boss; central office-bearers in charge of their respective states have a
key role in managing affairs in the areas of their operation; the general secretary
in charge of the organization at the national level – Ram Lal – has a mandate
across states, working on all elements of the sangathan; within each state, the
national bosses interact with the chief minister if the party is in power, and with
the state president and the organization general secretary; these top state
functionaries then manage the regions, districts and booths under them.

But in practice, this structure works in uneven ways. The personal dynamic
between the central and the state functionaries is key. Does Amit Shah believe
that a state president can deliver on his own? Does the state-level sangathan head
have the same skill set that, say, a Bansal has? Is the state leader powerful in his
own right or has he been placed there due to the patronage of Modi and Shah?
All this determines the control the centre exercises and the autonomy the state
can have. What is clear is that with Modi’s support, and Shah’s track record,
Shah’s power has increased tremendously in the party; the era of multiple power
centres and fragmentation of authority has ended.

Undoubtedly, this hurts egos, disrupts existing hierarchies and generates

discontent. Scores of BJP leaders are unhappy with playing second fiddle to
Shah, many years their junior. Senior cabinet ministers, the buzz goes, have had
to receive orders from the party president and his confidants. Shah has a blunt,
often arrogant, style, which adds to the unease. His key aides are mostly leaders
who do not have a mass base of their own – and this generates anger among
those who think they are politically more experienced.

A reporter on the BJP beat, who has seen the party evolve over the years, says,
‘There is no doubt that many, many leaders – from elders like L.K. Advani and
Murli Manohar Joshi to former party presidents like Rajnath Singh and seniors
like Sushma Swaraj to chief ministers like Vasundhara Raje Scindia – are
uncomfortable with Amit Shah. But they have no choice. He not only has Modi’s
backing but is delivering in his own right. And as long as he delivers, they can
do little.’

But there was a year when even as he was instituting this new organizational
culture, Amit Shah was not delivering. For the party president, 2015 would turn
out to be a serious setback.

***

As the membership campaign was building up, the BJP fought the Delhi
elections in early 2015. As the membership, contact and training elements of the
BJP’s organizational calendar were drawing to a close, it fought the Bihar
elections in late 2015.

Why, despite creating this machinery – and winning elections in Maharashtra,

Haryana and even Jharkhand without this massive machinery – did the BJP fail
to win states like Delhi and Bihar?

The answer is simple. The sangathan is only one component of the electoral
matrix. It is not the core, but a supplement. The core, among other factors, is the
appeal of the leadership, the social alliances and the state of the opposition. In
Delhi, for instance, the selection of Kiran Bedi as the party’s chief ministerial
face had a negative impact on the organization – old cadres could not muster up
loyalty and work for her, and many went inert. In Bihar, there was an
overwhelming focus on the organization and deployment of massive resources –
but it lacked the other key elements of weaving together a wide social coalition
of castes and a strong local leadership.

It would have been easy for Shah to think that his organizational efforts of the
preceding year were futile; that he was doing something wrong; that this was not
the pathway to power. Yet, the organization was a necessary tool, even if it was
not a sufficient tool in itself. And so Amit Shah did not let Delhi or Bihar weigh
him down. He knew that the only way to salvage his reputation, and show the
2014 victory was not a fluke, was to get down to work in UP.

***

In early 2016, Shah arrived in Lucknow, with 40 points that the party had to
focus on. These included targeting new voters; ensuring booth-level committees
were operational; focusing on different segments including Dalits and OBCs;
finding ways to publicize the central government’s work; getting MPs from the
party to work on the assembly segments in their constituencies; and identifying
core issues which would become the party’s central platform.

Execution was left to the state team, with Shah closely supervising progress.
And they got down to it, one by one.

To identify issues that resonated with the electorate and their principal concerns,
the BJP hired, like most parties do in electoral politics now, independent survey
agencies. They returned with six issues that were dominant in popular
consciousness – law and order, women’s safety, corruption, jobs, migration and
‘appeasement’.

This wasn’t surprising, for at the end of the term of each SP government, these
were the issues uppermost in public consciousness. Anupam Mishra, the editor
of Prayagraj Express , a local paper in Allahabad, and one of the most insightful
analysts of state politics, offers an explanation. ‘Under SP, every district leader
thinks he is the CM. He uses his power and influences district administration. He
calls up Lucknow to put pressure on them, and he extracts rents and resources
from local businesses. And that is why there is democratization of corruption
and goondagardi under the SP, as opposed to the Bahujan Samaj Party [BSP],
where authority – and so corruption – is totally centralized.’

This meant that each citizen in UP was somehow affected by the poor
governance practices of the SP. To be fair, Akhilesh Yadav – it seemed to all of
us observing and travelling in UP through 2016 – attracted far less anti-
incumbency sentiment than Mulayam Singh did at the end of his various terms
in office. But there was a difference between the individual – seen in positive
light – and the rest of the party machinery – viewed as promoting lawlessness. It
was enough for the BJP to build a campaign around it.

Its core campaign would revolve around two broad themes, corruption and
goondagardi. Bansal said, ‘That is when we coined the slogan na goondaraj, na
brashtachar, is baar Bhajapa sarkar.’

The BJP also kicked off a voter registration campaign believing that most first-
time voters would opt for Modi. But instead of doing it under the party umbrella,
the BJP began a neutral-sounding campaign under a non-party umbrella. It was
branded ‘Yes, I am 18’. Six hundred workers were deputed under this campaign
to enrol new voters and get them to fill Form 6 to get registered in an electoral
roll.

Through the trial process, Bansal and his team picked up inputs on the best
practices and on what motivated younger voters to enrol, and then decided to
launch voter registration under the party platform. ‘Camps were put up in every
block; we enrolled about ten lakh new voters.’ A million votes in a state of UP’s
size may not mean much, but the focus on getting the new voter to their side, and
investing organizational energy in it, was remarkable.

Then came the most challenging part, and the central tenet of the Amit Shah
school of election management – ensuring booth-level committees are functional
and active. Do remember that through the membership campaign, and the
organizational elections, the party had kept the basic unit of booth committees
active.

The party ran an eighteen-member call centre through the election season from
the first floor of its office in Lucknow. From here, young men and women were
deployed to call up 1,28,000 booth-level chairmen of the party and cross-check
their identity, their contact details and their affiliation with the party. In the first
round, they discovered that details of only 76,000 booth heads were accurate.
For the rest, either the names or their numbers were incorrect.

This meant that over 50,000 names were not right – an alarming sign for the
organizational leadership. Was the work done over the past year futile? Were
these 50,000 units only on paper?

This needed immediate rectification.

The names were sent to the party’s district and block units, with the explicit
instruction to swiftly correct the names and fill in correct details. These were
sent back to Lucknow, where the party published a full booklet with details of
booth-level chairmen.

Just as the party was winding up the exercise, the Election Commission
increased the number of booths from 1,41,000 to 1,47,000. So the party had to
go back to the drawing board, create new booth units and publish a new booklet
with additional names. The process was tedious, but it gave the BJP granular,
micro-level data of party personnel, all a phone call away by the middle of 2016.

The next step was the direct interface with these booth-level units. And Shah
once again took personal charge of the exercise. He visited each of the six zones
the BJP had carved out in UP – West UP with its headquarter in Ghaziabad; Braj
with Agra as its centre; Kanpur–Bundelkhand with Kanpur as the hub; Awadh
with Lucknow at the centre; Gorakhpur; and Kashi.
In each zone, the national president interacted with over 20,000 booth-committee
chairmen. Bansal explained: ‘This was hugely empowering for the booth unit
leaders. Never had they thought they would meet the president. They all were
given badges, their position was recognized, and this added to their motivation.’

It was at one such meeting that Yogi Adityanath was first narrowed down as a
possible candidate for chief minister. Shah and his team sensed that Yogi was
popular among the cadres across the state. And in Gorakhpur, at the booth-level
conclave, Shah is understood to have hinted to Yogi he should start preparing for
a role to uplift UP from the sad situation it was in then.

But big meetings, with thousands in attendance, can only serve the purpose of
giving a big-picture message. In the run-up to the elections, similar interactions
were held at the constituency level; and then at the sector and the booth levels.
So a booth-committee chairman met his party bosses four times, receiving
instructions and giving detailed feedback on what was happening in his area.

The booth committees were tasked with listing out the caste composition in their
area, and identifying houses under the A, B or C category. A would mean that
the family were BJP voters; B that they could swing either way and were floating
voters; and C that they would not vote for the BJP at all. This gave the BJP
granular data on the entire state. Back in 2014, the strategist Prashant Kishor’s
team had attempted something similar and had handed over a booklet with
booth-level breakdown of strong and weak pockets to each candidate.

The BJP had a slogan, it had cadre presence on the ground, it had granular data
on voters and it had booth units and details of all these booth units.

It was now time to mount the campaign.

***

On 5 November, the BJP flagged off its parivartan yatra.

Setting off from four corners of the state – Saharanpur in west UP, Jhansi in
Bundelkhand, Balia and Sonbhadra in Purvanchal – the aim was simple.
‘Bhajapa ko chaa jaana tha, bas Bhajapa hi Bhajapa dikhna chahiye tha. The idea
was the BJP should dominate the landscape, only the BJP should be visible,’ said
Bansal.

It was also decided, almost simultaneously, to commence meetings centred on

OBCs, youth and women – three segments the BJP was targeting as independent
entities in the election.

Bansal explained the timing: ‘The idea was that in each district, every fortnight,
there must be one big activity. Either a yatra must pass through the district, or
one such meeting for women, backward groups or youth should be held. This
would mean that in the days preceding the event, on the big day, and for a few
days after the event, people would only be talking about the party in that
district.’

The BJP has a history of rath yatras, with its most famous charioteer being L.K.
Advani. Narendra Modi himself accompanied the then party president Murli
Manohar Joshi on his Kanyakumari to Kashmir yatra. But the parivartan yatra
was different, because it did not revolve around a leader. ‘It was a sangathan
yatra, and it reached each of the 403 constituencies of the state,’ Bansal said with
a touch of pride.

The timing was politically significant.

The yatra began on 5 November, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drastic
decision to demonetize Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes was announced on 8
November.

This meant that at a time of enormous social and economic disruption – when
every Indian citizen was inconvenienced to a certain degree, when the political
climate could have turned against the prime minister – the entire BJP machinery
was on the ground. Through the yatra, across every district, at every small public
meeting, party leaders big and small pushed through a narrative of why
notebandi was good for the nation, for the economy, for society, how Modi had
taken on the big black economy and how he had fulfilled his key promise. Many
state leaders or even cabinet ministers deployed for the yatra may not have
believed it themselves – indeed, some did not hide their apprehensions in private
– but they were out in the field pushing the narrative.

Modi himself addressed six public meetings, as a part of the parivartan yatra.
And at each stop, he made a firm pitch for notebandi, the sacrifices it entailed,
but the benefits it would bring to the nation. The political impact of
demonetization has been discussed elsewhere, but the point here is that the
organizational machinery of the BJP – which had arranged the yatras – provided
the platform for the prime minister to reach a large segment of people directly. It
enabled his political messaging. And this political messaging helped him tide
over what could have been a suicidal measure for any other political leader in
any democracy, or even authoritarian system, in the world.

The yatra ended with the biggest rally of the UP election season, with Modi
addressing hundreds of thousands of people in Lucknow on 2 January. The rally
itself was a symbol of the BJP’s organized strength. It was now time to head for
the final lap.

***

Having been involved in managing elections for three decades, Amit Shah
knows that you can draw up plans, you can have neat charts depicting a structure
in a war room in the distant capital, you can make calls and verify numbers, but
the real test of the organization happens on the ground, as elections draw closer.

I travelled to Amroha, in west UP, to understand how the BJP sangathan was
working on the ground.

Chandramohan is a BJP state spokesperson in Lucknow, and had been given

charge of the district. Originally from Bulandshahr in west UP, he was a Bal
Swayamsevak, and joined the ABVP back in 1993 in the wake of the Babri
Masjid demolition. In four years, he became a full-timer, serving as the
organization secretary of the Parishad, as the RSS student wing is called, in the
Etah–Kasganj area. Eventually, he moved to the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, rising
to become a member of its national working committee.

In 2013, the RSS sent him off to the BJP, where he became the media in-charge
for the party.

The party had deputed one mid-level activist as the prabhari for each district.
And from November, the focus – as the leadership had planned – was organizing
mass meetings, and enhancing mass contact.
Chandramohan recalled, ‘We merged two Vidhan Sabha constituencies for one
meeting of OBCs. The message there was simple – this government has been
unjust to backwards, we are fair, and Modiji believes in sabka saath.’ Women-
centred meetings were held in every district, and here the focus was on law and
order, kidnapping and harassment of girls. And youth-centred meetings were
held at every booth.

During the parivartan yatra, the prabhari also had a role in ensuring that the
district under his command mobilized enough people to attend Modi’s rallies.
‘Modiji held a rally after demonetization in Moradabad, next to Amroha. Our
workers were given targets.’ This was the rally where Modi had issued a clarion
call to the poor not to return money to those who had used Jan Dhan accounts to
manage their wealth during demonetization.

It is generally believed that the BJP pays people to attend rallies. But
Chandramohan rejects the contention completely. ‘Not at all. We arrange buses,
and ask party leaders at the district level to arrange private cars on their own. We
arrange group meals and tea, depending on how much time it has taken for
people to commute from their homes to the rally venue. For Modiji’s rally,
people want to come on their own. Our target was 30,000 people from Amroha,
but 80–90,000 people came, many on their own.’

The other key task of the prabhari in the run-up to the elections was to consult
local activists and district leaders and prepare a shortlist of candidates for each
constituency, who could be awarded the ticket. ‘The main criteria were
winnability, social equations and caste, the name recognition of the candidate,
his economic strength.’ For instance, the former cricketer and former BJP MP
Chetan Chauhan’s name was sent for one assembly segment of Amroha. He was
well known, had independent economic heft and fit into the social matrix of the
constituency.

‘We also listed out the top leaders that a possible candidate was close to, so that
if he did not get a ticket, we knew who to use to manage him,’ Chandramohan
explained. Managing the dissatisfied is a critical, but often underestimated, art of
elections.

This list of potential candidates was then sent up to the state leadership and
Bansal, who would then take it up to Shah. Bansal, however, was not just relying
on the district unit, but five other modes – the local MP, regional leaders, the
Sangh machinery, survey agencies and a feedback mechanism consisting of
volunteers deputed to districts – before recommending names for tickets.

Ticket distribution ended up becoming one of the most contentious issues in the
election, and at one point it looked as if this would jeopardize the BJP’s
prospects entirely.

Bansal brushed aside the controversies when we met during the campaign in
Lucknow and Varanasi. ‘It tells you about the appeal of the party, that in each
seat there were fifteen people wanting the ticket. It is obvious that those who did
not get it would feel angry and hurt.’

But that could not sufficiently explain the scale of anger we witnessed in districts
over tickets. Tied to Amit Shah’s strategy of breaking the opposition when
required, and ‘compensating’ for the missing vote, the BJP had almost
indiscriminately poached leaders from other formations, including well-known
names such as Rita Bahuguna Joshi from the Congress and Swami Prasad
Maurya and Brajesh Pathak from the BSP.

Bansal explained: ‘There were over sixty seats which we had never won, and
another twenty seats where we were vulnerable. For these seats, we just picked
leaders from the SP and BSP who had a base of their own. The idea was they
would bring in the votes, we would provide the organization. In those seats, the
BJP workers who had been there for long were unhappy. Those from the Parivar
who had been hoping for tickets realized that if the new candidate won, their
own prospects would erode for the next few elections. That is why the
unhappiness.’ Eventually, out of 67 such seats, the BJP would win 43. In thirteen
districts where the BJP had never won in the past, they would go on to register
electoral success, thanks to imports from other parties.

Was this at the cost of ideological purity? Bansal argued that the BJP was just so
vast that the new entrants easily merged into the party culture and ideological
framework. ‘I notice that many of these leaders have already started calling
some of us bhai saheb, they have already started emulating the way we greet
people. They merge into our culture.’

The BJP was also using the UP election to create a new generation of leaders. Its
older set of leaders was now on the brink of retirement. In each district, it was
aiming to give a ticket or two to people in their forties and early fifties. ‘Think of
the person in that age group, from that community, who has been in the party
and did not get a ticket. He would be dissatisfied,’ explained Bansal.

This is what happened in one of the most-watched constituencies of the election,

Varanasi South. The seat had been represented by Shyam Deo Rai Chaudhary, an
extraordinarily popular Bengali Brahman, also known as Dada. He was
immersed in the constituency, knew everyone, set out every day to address
concerns of his people.

Dada was dropped this time around in favour of a younger candidate, Neel
Kanth Tiwari. What explained the move? Was it age? A BJP leader said, ‘Age
was one factor but it was also investment in the future. Look, we needed a local
Brahman face, who would grow as a leader of his community and who UP’s
Pandits could relate to across the state. Murli Manohar Joshi is now irrelevant;
Kalraj Mishra is past seventy-five. We felt bad about Dada, but we have to look
to the future.’

What emerges from this account is once again a tale of rigour, and risk.

The rigour manifested in the wide-ranging exercise and multiple feedback

mechanisms in the selection of candidates. If a candidate was recommended by
the district unit, by leaders of that belt, by the Sangh, by the local MP, by the
survey agency, by independent volunteers, he would be a natural choice. Or if he
was pushed by most of these mechanisms, he would be picked. However, there
was room for discretion – for the ultimate authority remained Amit Shah, the
general secretary in charge Om Mathur, state president Keshav Prasad Maurya
and Bansal, who could accept or reject any of the recommendations.

But there was also risk because those who were outside the party framework
were brought in at the cost of antagonizing loyal activists; older and successful
candidates were dropped to create space for a new generation of leaders from
different communities; many people who had invested energy and money over
the past few years hoping for a ticket suddenly found themselves out of the race,
with nowhere to turn. This could all have come together to deliver the BJP a
setback.
It was a period of nervousness for the party. But it decided to bite the bullet.

***

Back in Amroha, the party organization was readying for the final lap.
Preliminary meetings were done, mass contact was established, Modi had
addressed rallies in the vicinity and tickets were finalized.

The party had handed over a diary and a pen drive to every candidate. This had
the booth-level data, so carefully created over the preceding two years. It had
names of members enrolled in the party at every booth, lists of committee
members, and a breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses in each booth,
Chandramohan told me over dosa at an Udupi cafe in Gajraula, on the main
highway off Amroha.

As the polls drew closer, Chandramohan said, the party created yet another
structure at the constituency level: the Chunav Sanchalan Samiti, the election
implementation committee, of twelve to fifteen members with specific
responsibilities.

One person would be in charge of the daily schedule of the candidate and his
constituency tours; one would assist with coordinating public meetings; one
would put in a request for national- and state-level campaigners to the zonal
headquarters and coordinate the campaigner’s schedule; one would aid with the
candidate’s social media campaign, particularly Facebook page and WhatsApp
groups; one would be in charge of the finances; one would coordinate with the
district administration for permits; one would be in charge of publicity material.

Every evening, the samiti would gather to evaluate the day’s developments.

There was also a chunav sahayak, who would monitor the booth committees.
Every constituency had about 350 booths. A meeting was held for every fifteen
to twenty booths within the constituency, where booth workers were told to
identify floating voters and work on them. ‘We also had slightly senior district
leaders who were given charge of managing opponents, wooing them, giving
them some recognition if necessary and bringing them on our side. In both the
SP and BSP, leaders fight elections, candidates contest on their own. The seat is
contracted out to the individual. In the BJP, the sangathan fights elections. And
that is the difference we found in the district. The candidate has to work hard, of
course. But there is the whole machinery backing him,’ pointed out
Chandramohan.

Indeed, in the BJP, the sangathan fought – and won – the election.

***

All of this – expanding membership; renewing contact with the members;

organizing trainings; holding organizational elections; commissioning
independent agencies to identify issues; having multiple meetings with booth-
level personnel; running a call centre and compiling micro constituency-level
data; convening statewide yatras and holding mass rallies; supporting candidates
and constituency-level election committees; managing and co-opting rivals
including through inducements; holding sabhas of all kinds, from the large ones
of the prime minister to smaller ones of local influential leaders; arranging
transport, from choppers for star campaigners to the fuel for the cars and bikes of
ground-level workers to buses and cars to get voters to public meetings;
publishing and pushing the propaganda material from billboards to posters
across each village, kasba and town; advertising in newspapers and television
channels – requires money.

And finances is the one element most difficult to investigate in politics. Parties
and leaders reveal their innermost political strategies, but they clam up when it
comes to discussing the question of resource mobilization, for there are
relationships to keep and improper and illegal practices to hide.

This is not unique to India. As political scientists Devesh Kapur and Milan
Vaishnav write in their introduction to a forthcoming volume on political
financing, ‘In less developed countries, poor accountability, weak or partial
transparency, and a lack of well-enforced disclosure norms and laws offer a
conducive context in which undocumented money can flow . . . Yet because
these flows of “black money” are opaque by definition, we know very little
about their relative size or mechanics.’ In India itself, they point out that since
1991 the size of the economy and that of the electorate has grown; elections have
become more competitive with shrinking margins of victory; and the number of
elections has increased with 30 lakh elected positions at the level of local
government – all of this has driven the spurt in spending.
I asked dozens of BJP leaders – from national office-bearers to key state-level
functionaries, from MLA candidates to ground-level cadres – about spending.
Most were reluctant to offer specifics, many of them had only nuggets of
information, and conversations revolved around the abstract and were often
speculative. So all I could piece together was an incomplete picture, only a slice
of what is political India’s darkest and most closely guarded secret.

I was given a wide range of figures for how much the BJP spent in UP – from as
low as Rs 16 crores to as high as between Rs 1200–1500 crores. There is no way
of independently confirming these figures.

How did the party muster up the funds?

For one, there was bottom-up resource collection. This meant that at the
constituency level itself, the candidate was expected to be ‘economically strong’
to invest resources of his own. This could be in the form of personal wealth; or
networks with local businessmen willing to fund him; or strong interpersonal
relations with local entrepreneurs who could offer transport or fuel costs, arrange
logistics, provide last-minute cash infusion necessary for elections.

A district-level BJP leader said, ‘If a candidate does not have the resourcefulness
to collect money for his own election, he is not good enough to be elected. But
remember, unlike the SP and BSP, where the candidate is completely on his own,
in our case, the expenses of the candidate are somewhat limited because the
organization takes care of a lot of expenses. He does not have to pay our cadres;
he does not have to pay Sangh Parivar pracharaks and sympathizers; the party
does not expect him to pay for star campaigners who fly in; a lot of propaganda
and publicity material also comes from the top. But yes, he has to put in his own
money too.’

Major state-level businessmen are the second source of funding. And they
contribute in various forms. They give cash – this is particularly true for
contractors, builders, those dependent on government largesse and licences in
the future. They also offer services in lieu of returns in the future. A BJP leader
in the Lucknow party office said, ‘Often, people just want to be involved and do
not even demand cash. They know we are in power in Delhi, they know we have
MPs, and once there is a buzz that we may win the state election, they are eager
to somehow get associated with the party even if we tell them we won’t give
them any cash. So there may be petrol pump owners who will take care of the
fuel; there are transporters who will give cars; there are businessmen who say we
will hire choppers for you.’ A Lucknow businessman who comes from a
traditional BJP family confirmed the existence of such transactions: ‘They don’t
need to ask me. As elections approach, I just send them five cars and give some
cash to a top-level state functionary. There must be hundreds like me at this
level.’

But while constituency- and state-level mobilization of resources adds to the

kitty, the bulk of the BJP’s resource mobilization for the UP election happened at
the central level. Given the enormous importance placed by both Modi and Shah
on the battle, the party’s vast networks were mobilized to get funds. The BJP has
ministries at the centre; it is in power in key states; it has MPs and MLAs.
Anyone remotely familiar with Indian political economy can assume that the
party would have leveraged power at all these levels to amass resources. But in
this, it was careful and somewhat distinct from how the Congress functioned.

A strategist familiar with the BJP’s working told me, ‘In the Congress, if the
party leadership wants, say, 50 crore, it would convey the message to a key aide;
that aide would then ask ministers or three or four chief ministers in states for
100 crore each; the CMs would then ask local businessmen, contractors,
bureaucrats, ministers and offer quid pro quo deals and immediately mobilize the
funds. So to get 50 crore, the party would end up raising about 300 crore; in the
process, lots of people down the chain would make money; the corruption would
be explicit and deals would often become pretty well known.’ In the BJP, he
implied, the task was managed by those at the top. ‘They know that at the end of
the day, the lender is the same. Why go through this elaborate chain? So the
party leadership would know which state, which ministry offers opportunities
and would directly deal with the concerned businessman or individual. They
raise funds which are necessary; they cut out the intermediaries; the deals are not
as obvious; they retain control over money; and then they disburse it carefully.’
This was broadly the pattern in UP.

There was one additional complication during the UP elections, which was
expected to affect the very nature of political spending, but it did not –
demonetization. In the concluding chapter of their volume on political financing,
Kapur, Vaishnav and Sridharan note that the move ‘did not lead to a marked
decline in the reliance on cash or other material inducements during elections’.
In UP alone, more than Rs 115 crore in cash was seized from the day the model
code of conduct came into force, three times the cash recovered in the previous
state assembly elections of 2012 – which shows that there wasn’t the kind of
liquidity crunch that many had expected post-demonetization. For the BJP or
even the SP, the impact was even lesser, for as ruling parties, businesses – as we
have seen above – did not demand cash upfront from them.

Cash is central to elections in India. And no party can win without a degree of
financial strength. Yet, it is important to remember that this is not the only, or
even the key, determining factor. If it were merely a battle of resources, the BJP
would not have lost Delhi or Bihar, or even the 2004 elections to the Congress.
But resources help, and every party needs a minimum quantum of resources to
become a serious contender during an election. Like the organization, it is a
necessary, yet not a sufficient, element. For now, as UP proved, the BJP has
shown the ability to mobilize and deploy resources at all levels.

***

The sangathan is what it is because of Amit Shah.

He conceptualized the membership campaign and, amid much mocking, took it

to its logical conclusion. He followed it up with a contact drive to deploy
workers to establish relationships with those who had become members. He
pushed for training of workers, organizational elections and the need to ensure
social diversity in the organization (more on this in the next chapter).

Shah activated the booth-level committee, made it functional, ensured careful

monitoring of its membership and made it an integral part of the party’s
machine. He drew independent feedback on issues that mattered to the
electorate, and carved out campaigns and mass contact around it. He devised a
careful process of selection of candidates, and armed them with solid
organizational backing and data to fight their elections. And he mobilized the
money needed for all of this.

And none of this happened from the distant, air-conditioned party office on
Ashoka Road in Delhi.

Between August 2014 and March 2017, Shah travelled to almost every Indian
state twice, covering over 5 lakh kilometres, to understand, supervise and direct
party units – with an eye on assembly elections as well as the 2019 battle. He has
been outside Delhi for 286 days in this period, 64 of which were in UP,
personally putting in extraordinary work and energy into the state. After the UP
win, Shah embarked on a 95-day trip across the country.

Narendra Modi’s mass charisma and Amit Shah’s tremendous organizational

skills together laid the foundations for the new BJP, in the middle of its most
ambitious experiment of social engineering.
 Social Engineering
Three days before Uttar Pradesh went to polls on 11 February, the president of
BJP’s UP unit landed on a small field in Saharanpur’s Gangoh constituency.

Keshav Prasad Maurya belonged to a backward community. He was a product of

the Sangh, a functionary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), before he
contested elections for the UP assembly in 2012. In 2014, he rode on the Modi
hawa, and became an MP from Phulpur – which was once Jawaharlal Nehru’s
constituency. In early 2016, the BJP had made him state chief, in an obvious bid
to woo the backward communities.

As he stepped out of the helicopter, a crowd rushed on to the field to greet him.
Maurya got into an SUV, the trademark of all North Indian politicians, to get to
the venue of the public meeting.

The next car was packed with a dozen people.

Om Pal Singh Saini introduced himself as the president of the All India Saini
Seva Sangh. This was a Saini-dominated area, he said, with a tinge of pride.
Sainis are categorized as OBCs in UP, and see themselves as a part of a larger
community of Saini–Kashyap–Kuswaha–Mauryas, to which the BJP leader
belonged.

‘This time, the BJP has shown us respect. The entire samaj is with the party,
because Mauryaji will become chief minister.’ The community, he said, had
swung between various parties in the past. But in the 2014 elections, it
overwhelmingly went with Narendra Modi. Ever since Maurya was made the
state president of the party in 2016, it had made up its mind to stick to the lotus.

‘Bhajapa hamari party hai ab. BJP is our party now. The PM is ours. The state
president is ours. The district president is ours. We finally have a political voice,’
said Saini. It was left unsaid, but ‘ours’ meant that the prime minister belonged
to the ‘pichda’, backward, community; Maurya was from his own wider caste
group; the district president was a Kashyap.

Three small farmers had come to the rally to listen to the state party president.
One of them was a Gujjar, Ram Singh. He traced back his family’s political
affiliations to Charan Singh, former prime minister, and one of North India’s
most respected kisan netas, who had carved out a coalition of backward castes
and Muslims, based on their peasant identity. ‘My father was with Charan Singh.
I got attracted to the Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan and came to the BJP. After
Kalyan Singh left the BJP, I voted for others. But in 2014, I returned to the
party.’ Kalyan Singh was the BJP chief minister in the 1990s. A Lodh, he had
been able to rally OBCs behind the party. But he steadily got marginalized in the
party and left in 2009. He subsequently returned to the party and campaigned for
Modi in 2014.

‘Both the Congress and Samajwadi Party only do the politics of one community.
They are communal. Congress can see only one community, BSP can also see
only one community – see Mayawati keeps saying I have given ninety-seven
tickets, and we all know about SP. It gave the family of Akhlaq [the man who
was killed in Dadri over allegations of consuming beef] one crore,’ said Ram
Singh.

Without uttering the word Muslim, he had made it clear what he meant.

The BJP, Singh added, was a nationalist, rashtravaadi, party. But wasn’t the
Congress a nationalist party as well? After all, it is the party that brought India
freedom. ‘Congress is a national, rashtriya, party, but it does not have a
nationalist, rashtravaadi, mindset.’

Om Prakash Saini was thrilled with the representation and respect offered by the
BJP to his community. Ram Singh was attracted by what he saw as the
‘nationalist’ rather than ‘communal’ outlook. Together, these sentiments would
be the game changer in the UP elections.

The voices from the ground fit in exactly with the scheme laid at the top by party
strategists, which had three broad components – changes in the party’s
organizational structure to make it more inclusive; reformulation of its
messaging, so that backward communities felt both a sense of victimhood and a
sense of emancipation; and alliances with parties with a base among these
communities, despite the BJP’s overwhelming dominance.

Narendra Modi has turned himself into a leader of the poor while retaining the
support of the better-off. In the background, Amit Shah is slowly transforming
the BJP into a party of the less privileged castes, while retaining the support of
the privileged. In the process, the BJP is moving from being a relatively
exclusivist Hindu party to becoming an inclusive Hindu party. By identifying the
most dominant political caste (which is not necessarily synonymous with the
most dominant social caste) in a particular setting, and mobilizing the less
dominant against them, Shah is weaving together unprecedented social
coalitions. This remarkable experiment in social engineering lies at the heart of
the BJP’s political success. And when it fails to carve out broad-based social
coalitions, when it is seen as a party of merely the privileged, it collapses.

***

After taking over as party chief, Amit Shah had to face assembly elections in
Maharashtra and Haryana. In the absence of a strong organization, he had to get
the arithmetic right.

He decided to focus on a strategy of political mobilization against ‘privileged

castes’. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, for the party is associated with
those castes which have benefited from the social structure and remain at the top
of the hierarchy. But here, the party has cleverly made a distinction between the
traditionally dominant castes in the social hierarchy and the politically privileged
castes.

The calculation is simple. All Indian states are plural in their composition. With
the rise of Mandal politics, assertion of OBCs and their mobilization, the more
numerically and socially dominant of these groups – from peasant backgrounds
– have also become politically dominant. But precisely because of that, a range
of other castes – both the traditionally powerful and the more marginalized – feel
alienated. And thus, the trick is to mobilize these castes and construct a coalition
against the dominant caste – which is, in the post-Mandal era, usually the
numerically largest middle caste of the particular setting.

In Maharashtra, where the politically dominant caste is the Marathas, the BJP
had, since the 1990s, adopted a pro-OBC strategy. It had promoted leaders from
the backward communities. Along with this, following the alliance with Shiv
Sena and the sharpened communal polarization, it had come to power in 1995.
But for fifteen years, it had been out in the opposition. In the 2014 Lok Sabha
polls, the Modi appeal helped the party mount a strong comeback and it won 42
of the 48 seats.

But the assembly election required more careful social engineering. The BJP
stitched together an alliance of upper castes, OBCs and, to a lesser extent, Dalits.
The BJP did get a fraction of Maratha votes, and given they are over 30 per cent
of the state population, it is not entirely easy to displace them. But its core
strength came from non-Maratha castes. Since there are over 200 OBC groups,
and the largest of them is less than 5 per cent, this required ground-level
management. The nature of the mandate was manifested in the chief ministerial
pick of the party. It appointed a Brahman, Devendra Fadnavis.

Suhas Palshikar, a Pune-based political scientist, notes that the BJP won 53 of
the 100 urban seats, with a 35 per cent vote share; it also, according to a post-
poll survey, got 52 per cent of the upper-caste and 38 per cent of the OBC vote.
‘The results of the 2014 election have firmly removed the Maratha elite from
state power.’

In Haryana too, in the assembly elections, the BJP did the unthinkable. The state,
associated with Jat political dominance, saw the party construct a coalition of
non-Jat communities. This meant bringing together upper castes, OBCs like
Yadavs, Gujjars and Sainis, and Dalits. It did not entirely give up on Jats, and
appointed a senior community leader of the state, Chaudhary Birendra Singh, in
the Union cabinet. But its focus was on the less dominant.

In north, east and south Haryana, the BJP did well, slipping behind others only in
the Jat-dominated western part of the state. The post-poll survey by the Centre
for the Study of Developing Societies suggested that the BJP got 47 per cent of
the Brahman votes, 55 per cent among other upper castes and 40 per cent of the
OBC votes. The party, from a measly 4 seats in 2009, shot up to 47 seats in an
assembly of 90, forming the government for the first time on its own. And here
too, it appointed a non-Jat, Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief minister.

Amit Shah was getting his social arithmetic right. But he would confront his
biggest challenge, and failure, in the complex social landscape of Bihar the next
year.

***
The strategy of constructing political alliances against the politically privileged
rested on bringing together the socially dominant who may be politically weak
because of lack of demographic strength (upper castes) and those who were both
socially weak and politically alienated but were substantial in numbers
(backwards and Dalits). In Bihar, the party could not get this mix right.

Lalu Prasad is a leader with remarkable political clarity. He had since 1990
played the caste card with ruthless efficiency, created a political climate against
upper castes for long monopolizing the advantages of state power, empowered
the backwards and given them a voice in politics. His game had ended when the
backward coalition he had cultivated fractured. Nitish Kumar led the extremely
backward communities resentful of Yadav dominance, and allied with the BJP’s
upper-caste base.

In 2015, Nitish and Lalu were back together. Lalu realized that the route to
power was backward consolidation, the original recipe that had first brought him
to power in 1990. If it became a ‘forward–backward’ election, there was no way
the BJP could win – for it would get confined to its core base of the upper castes.
Unhesitatingly using the caste card, Lalu almost single-handedly converted the
Bihar polls into an upper-caste versus OBC election.

In this, his biggest ally was the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. In an interview to
the Organizer editor, Prafulla Ketkar (described in detail in the next chapter),
Bhagwat critiqued the politicization of reservations, asked for a committee to be
set up to review it and suggested an autonomous commission could implement
it.

Lalu smelled blood, and immediately declared that if the BJP was elected to
power, it would end reservations. Despite indifferent health, he did seven to nine
rallies every single day, strutting out from his Patna residence at 9 a.m. and
returning late in the evening, with a copy of the second RSS sarsanghchalak
M.S. Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts . He quoted from the book to suggest the
RSS had always been anti-reservations.

In Dhabauli village of Raghopur, Tejaswi Yadav – Lalu’s second son and heir-
apparent – was campaigning in his first election. He walked briskly, asked for
blessings from women and shook hands with the men. He confidently said that
the elections had turned in their favour. What had changed?
‘The RSS chief’s remarks really changed the game. OBCs have come together.
The BJP is making one last attempt in the urban centres, but I think we will win
even there. The BJP thinks that like 2014, people will vote for Modi from
different castes. But that will not happen now.’ As a young leader, in his
twenties, and exposed to modern education, what did he think of this use of caste
in politics on all sides? ‘It is everywhere. In the US, isn’t it about blacks and
whites? Caste has been the way our society has been organized for centuries and
it will be key for a very long time. It matters.’

The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had already been building up a campaign around
caste, by demanding the caste-related data of the Socio-Economic Caste Census
(SECC) be made public. The SECC had been commissioned during the Congress
regime; it had been released under the BJP government, but the caste-wise
break-up had been held back. This would, Lalu had argued, show precisely the
state of backwards and Dalits, their assets, their income and education levels,
and their employment status. ‘The RSS is talking of ending reservations and we
are talking of increasing it on the basis of population,’ he thundered.

The message hit home.

The BJP had known that while upper castes would broadly be with the party, it
had to make a dent among the backward communities. But the fear of losing
reservations percolated down. The BJP was in a fix. It could not condemn
Bhagwat but distanced itself from the RSS chief’s comments; it got the Sangh to
issue clarifications; the prime minister himself reiterated his commitment to
reservations. But nothing worked.

A year and a half later, a top BJP leader who was closely involved with the Bihar
campaign, admitted, ‘Bhagwatji’s statement caused us far more damage than we
had thought. Besides Lalu, Prashant Kishor’s team also took the message down.
They printed pamphlets, and we were pushed on the defensive. All the work we
had done in deepening our penetration among the backwards went waste.’
Kishor was the key election strategist for the Nitish–Lalu alliance; he had
worked on Modi’s Gujarat 2012 campaign and the Lok Sabha elections of 2014.
There is, however, another school of thought within the BJP which believes that
vote share indicates that the party did get a portion of backward votes, and it was
sheer arithmetic generated by the mahagathbandhan that did them in. But it was
not just the Sangh. The same leader admitted that the BJP itself had managed
caste dynamics poorly, particularly in the area of ticket distribution.

‘We gave too many tickets to upper castes in the first list. This made it even
easier for Lalu to portray us as a party of forwards. Then we gave almost thirty
tickets to Yadavs thinking that his Yadav vote would split – this was foolish. It
did not split and we ended up wasting those tickets and antagonizing other
communities there. There were BJP rebels in over seventy seats.’

The BJP had aimed to make up for its lack of support among the backwards and
Dalits with careful alliances. It tied up with its NDA partners, Ram Vilas Paswan
(banking on him to get Paswan votes) and Upendra Kushwaha (hoping he would
get the substantial Koeri vote and break the Kurmi–Koeri alliance that had
propelled Nitish to power). They also tied up with Jitan Ram Manjhi, angry at
being removed from chief ministership, and hoped to make a dent in the
Mahadalit vote of Nitish Kumar. So the calculations, on paper, made sense. But
these alliances extracted a heavy cost. Another BJP leader, who did not want to
be named because Paswan, Kushwaha and Manjhi remain allies, said, ‘Our
alliances were a complete failure. We gave away eighty seats to these parties.
They have such a limited base. This was a waste. Many of them auctioned
tickets, and did not pay attention to caste at all.’

All this was in stark contrast to what the Nitish–Lalu–Congress combine, the
mahagathbandhan, had done. Contrary to expectations, ticket distribution was
remarkably smooth. Once again, Prashant Kishor had played an important role
with ground-level research to assess which party and candidate would be best
positioned in which constituency, and informally acting as the mediator and
conduit between Nitish and Lalu to facilitate smooth partnership.

‘Lalu took the Yadav-dominated seats, Congress was given the upper-caste seats,
and Nitish took the EBC [extremely backward caste] seats. And their votes got
transferred to each other,’ recalled the BJP leader. The mahagathbandhan gave
almost 55 per cent tickets to OBCs, and 15 per cent to Dalits.

Narendra Modi’s OBC background had played a key role in galvanizing the
backward communities towards the BJP in 2014. Within a year though, neither
Modi’s backward image nor Shah’s management or alliances worked. The BJP
was back to being seen as the party of the socially privileged, of the upper
castes, a party that was not reconciled to subaltern assertion and their aspiration
for upward mobility through reservations. The BJP’s quest to rule Bihar on its
own would remain unfulfilled because it was unable to reflect this diversity of
Bihar. Its social engineering collapsed.

***

With the Bihar lesson fresh, the BJP got down to work in UP. It already had a
template for the social alliances.

In 2014, Amit Shah had devised the ‘60 per cent’ formula.

What was this formula?

Bhupender Yadav is a general secretary of the party, an MP in the Rajya Sabha

and a close confidant of Amit Shah. Originally from Rajasthan, he was familiar
with the North Indian caste matrix and was the party in-charge of Bihar.

An established lawyer in his own right, Yadav was deputed to UP to help with
organizational tasks during the parivartan yatra and public outreach during the
campaign. After the polls, he would go on to head the parliamentary committee
on the creation of a new commission on backward classes. He would also be
given charge of Gujarat as the state headed for elections at the end of 2017, in a
sign of the implicit trust Modi and Shah had in him.

One evening in mid March, Yadav was on his way from the Lucknow party
office to the airport to receive Shah, who was returning from the campaign trail.
Over the 45-minute drive, he reiterated the contours of the 60 per cent formula,
which was trademark Amit Shah school of election management.

‘See, Muslims – who are 20 per cent – will not vote for us. Yadavs – who are
about 10 per cent – will remain loyal, largely to the SP, in this election. And
Jatavs – again a little more than 10 per cent – will be loyal to BSP. That leaves
us with 55 to 60 per cent of the electoral playing field. We are targeting them.’

This meant the traditional base of upper castes. It meant the backward
communities – hundreds of large and small castes – who were within the OBC
framework, but did not get access to power the way Yadavs did. It meant over 50
of the 60 Dalit sub-castes in UP, who were not necessarily as empowered as the
Jatavs.
But identifying constituencies was the easy part. Bringing them into the fold was
the real challenge.

2014 had provided an opening. OBCs in large numbers returned to the BJP. But
to sustain this success, the leadership knew it had to effect deeper structural
changes.

It was here that the organizational work put in by Amit Shah and his team came
into play. When Sunil Bansal was deployed to UP as organization general
secretary, he got a quick survey done of the composition and structure of the
party in UP. And to his shock, in 2014, he discovered that among party office-
bearers across the state – from Lucknow down to the district level – only 7 per
cent were OBCs and 3 per cent were Dalits.

This meant that groups which together constituted almost 70 per cent of the
population in the state had 10 per cent space in the BJP’s organization. The
structure was dominated by Brahmans, Thakurs and Banias. This was but a
reflection of who had dominated the BJP in Lucknow. It was the Kalraj Mishras
and Rajnath Singhs; it was the Laxmi Kant Bajpais and Surya Pratap Shahis who
had led the party in the preceding decade. These leaders had turned to their caste
networks and promoted their own at different levels of the organization.

The BJP’s new leadership was stuck with this team, a team that had repeatedly
failed to deliver, a team that did not reflect the social diversity of the state. It
knew this was a recipe for failure. Yet it needed to change things without totally
cutting off those who had remained loyal to the party.

The ripe time to engineer a course correction was during the membership drive
at the end of 2014 and early 2015. Seven hundred and eighty activists from OBC
and Dalit communities were sent to villages and towns where their own caste
was dominant to woo members. This had resulted in 15 lakh new members from
these communities enrolling in the party.

But the real change happened with an organizational reshuffle in the party in
2015. Bansal asked Shah if he could increase representation of backwards and
Dalits in the party. Shah responded, ‘Baat to theek hai, par log naraaz honge.
You are right, but people will get angry.’
They both then figured a way out. The party could increase the number of
positions instead of eating into the existing pie. Shah gave his go-ahead. This
became the licence for the party to increase positions at all levels in the party,
especially for OBCs and Dalits. Twelve new office-bearers were added in each
district. A hundred new members were added to the state executive committee.
Those who remained office-bearers were not removed, which helped in
mitigating resentment.

By the end of 2015, the party had a pool of a thousand new OBC and Dalit
leaders, who felt a sense of ownership of the party structure, who had space and
recognition in the hierarchy. But now, this needed to get formally reflected in the
structure.

During the organizational elections, the BJP slowly gave them positions of
leadership – and satisfied their craving for inclusion and representation. Of the
75 district presidents, 34 were now OBCs, and 3 were Scheduled Caste.

If these groups had 10 per cent representation in the organization in 2014, within
two years their share had spiked to 30 per cent. The BJP had engineered a silent,
almost invisible disruption. And the genius of it lay in the fact that it happened
without an outright rebellion of the existing leadership.

Did the upper castes get upset?

Bansal replied, ‘See if these OBC and SC leaders had been airdropped from
somewhere, and the district leaders were told to accept them, there would have
been resistance. But remember we had already added them in the organizational
structure in 2015 itself. So they had a year or so to work together with existing
district leaders. And the process of choosing district chiefs was consultative and
consensual. There wasn’t much trouble.’

It was at the end of this exercise that Keshav Prasad Maurya was appointed state
president. Maurya combined an OBC background with strong Hindutva
credentials.

Maurya was of course a symbolic choice. In UP, every decision is interpreted

through the caste lens. But this time around, the BJP had gone beyond the
merely symbolic, for his appointment also represented the more substantive
changes happening within the organization.

***

As Keshav Prasad Maurya wrapped up his public address in Saharanpur, we

stepped back into the chopper to head to his next public meeting in Amroha.

I asked Keshav Maurya, a bit mischievously, ‘All these people have come
because they want to see you as chief minister. Shouldn’t the party have declared
you as the face?’ Too clever to fall into the trap, Maurya smiled and shrugged,
and then said, ‘Every karyakarta, worker, in the BJP is a potential chief minister.’

The BJP had decided in 2016 itself that it would not project a chief minister for
three broad reasons. They knew they did not have a state-level face who could
take on established regional leaders like Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati. They
were also worried that in UP’s landscape, picking a chief ministerial face from
one caste would end up alienating other castes – and thus jeopardize the task of
building a multi-caste coalition. And finally, they had faith that Modi’s name,
and appeal, would be enough to offset the disadvantage of not having a name.
There was, party leaders argued, no set formula in this regard. In Bihar, the BJP
did not have a chief ministerial face – it fared badly, but in Maharashtra, it did
well. In Assam, it had a chief ministerial face – it won, but in Delhi it projected a
face and it lost miserably.

But there was little doubt Maurya had chief ministerial ambitions, and the subtle
message to the backwards, without making a commitment, was that their own
could make it to the top. This ambiguity helped.

Maurya’s aide, Vivek Singh, took out from a lunch box home-made sabzi
wrapped in a roti, and handed it to the leader. We looked down on the fields of
western UP, and over the noise made by the chopper I asked him why he thought
OBCs would vote for the party.

‘We have done justice in ticket distribution this time. The BJP has given the
highest number of tickets to OBCs in its electoral history in UP. This will draw
the community towards us,’ Maurya replied. He didn’t worry about upsetting
upper castes. ‘No, they have been given over 150 tickets as well. We believe in
taking everyone along.’ And then with a smile, without sensing the irony, he
added, ‘The other parties have given so many tickets to Muslims. They have
done injustice to others.’

It was not just representation, but messaging that helped the BJP appeal to these
communities. And that messaging centred on how they had been wronged by the
SP and BSP. ‘All these people have voted for the Samajwadi Party at some point,
but who has benefited – only one community. They have even voted for BSP, but
who has benefited – one caste. They are looking for alternatives. The BJP, they
know, does not discriminate. Yeh sabki party hai. This is a party of everyone.’
He might well have added – everyone who is Hindu.

Maurya was tapping into the contradictions that had existed, and had got
sharpened, within the heterogeneous OBC parivar. And there was a long history
to it.

***

In UP, the Congress had traditionally won elections on the basis of a coalition of
the upper castes, Dalits and Muslims. But the middle peasantry and the
backwards felt excluded from this power matrix, and veered towards socialist
outfits from the 1960s. As the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has
documented, this happened both within the framework of Ram Manohar Lohia’s
politics, which demanded representation and affirmative action primarily on the
basis of caste, and Charan Singh’s politics, which spoke of a larger peasant
identity and articulated demands around the ‘kisan’ identity.

But eventually, Lohia’s political school became dominant. The Janata Dal
government of V.P. Singh implemented the Mandal Commission report,
providing 27 per cent reservation to OBCs in central services. This was a turning
point. There was a deepening of the political consciousness of the OBCs, who, in
alliance with Muslims, elected Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar and Mulayam Singh
Yadav in UP.

But these state governments, instead of delivering benefits to the wider OBC
parivar, ended up become caste fiefdoms. From government jobs to political
positions, both Lalu and Mulayam raj came to be associated with Yadav Raj.
This, as Jaffrelot writes, made it ‘obvious that the notion of the OBCs had been
used by this caste to its own advantage right from the beginning’.
This led to contradictions within the backward classes.

In Bihar, for instance, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar had been comrades in the
larger Janata parivar and were committed to the empowerment of backwards.
But Nitish was a Kurmi. And Kurmis – an important OBC caste, though less
powerful and much smaller in numbers compared to Yadavs – felt resentful at
being left out of the party. Nitish broke away from Lalu and nurtured this
constituency. He eventually cultivated an entire constituency of extremely
backward castes, decisively fracturing the OBCs. The backwards, as we saw
above, would vote together only in 2015, when Nitish and Lalu came together
after two decades.

In UP too, these contradictions sharpened. OBCs may have been together in their
quest for reservations, and in their ambition of breaking Congress hegemony.
But the Yadav–non-Yadav divide had emerged. Many backward groups –
Kurmis, Kuswahas, Lodhs and others – had moved away from the SP
framework. Some had invested hopes in the BSP, but here too they were left
disappointed.

Keshav Maurya’s barb about the parties giving excessive space to Muslims, and
thus not doing justice to others, reflected the ideological prejudice of the BJP.
But what was true was that the SP and BSP spent little time on wooing the non-
Yadav OBCs, and this left the entire space open for the BJP. In Bihar, Nitish
Kumar had given expression to the anger of these communities and catered to
their aspirations. In UP, there was no such leader. Leaving out 30 per cent from
the electoral calculus would turn out to be suicidal for UP’s regional parties.

Akhilesh Yadav had banked on his rhetoric of vikas, development, across castes
breaking the image of the SP as a Yadav party. But the BJP believed this would
not work. It projected itself as the force which stood against the dominant caste,
the caste that had it good, and had neglected everyone else.

And that is why Maurya said, as we landed in Amroha, ‘Some castes have
become privileged castes. This election is a vote against that.’

***

The BJP succeeded. There was a consolidation of backward classes in every

corner of the state.

Take Bundelkhand.

Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi and Ashish Ranjan are political scientists with the
Centre for Policy Research (CPR). They wrote from UP for The Hindu .

In Jhansi’s Babina constituency, they met a family from the Rajbhar community,
all of whom had voted for the SP in the 2012 election. This time, they would
vote BJP. The family felt that they did not get the quantum of relief money the
government had committed to providing those affected by the drought – but the
Yadavs had got more than their share. A middle-aged man told them, ‘It isn’t just
about doing work, we want someone who treats us all equally.’

Sircar, Joshi and Ranjan concluded, ‘Whether fair or not, throughout UP, his
[Akhilesh Yadav’s] party’s organization is still largely associated with Yadav
domination of the local bureaucracy, police, and social structure – and ruling
through fear and violence while diverting resources towards their own caste.’

Or travel to centre-west UP.

The journalist Shivam Vij spent a week in Kasganj, a bellwether seat which has
since 1974 voted for the party that has won UP.

This was former BJP chief minister Kalyan Singh’s territory. After flirting with
the SP in 2012, the party’s towering Lodh leader had returned home. Even
though he was now governor of Rajasthan, the signal to the community was
unmistakable – the BJP was giving him space and respect, his grandson was in
the fray as a candidate from another seat and in every speech top leaders
mentioned Kalyan Singh’s rule as a golden period for law and order in UP.
(Don’t miss the irony, for it was under Singh’s watch that the Babri Masjid was
demolished.)

Out of 3 lakh or so voters in the constituency, Vij wrote, over 60,000 were Lodhs
– and the only party to put up a Lodh candidate was the BJP. Add to the Lodhs
the traditional upper-caste vote of the party and other OBC groups, and the BJP
looked almost invincible here.

Vij was to later recall that besides the loyalty to Kalyan Singh, and the caste of
the candidate, the anti-Yadav sentiment was palpable. ‘In one village, I
remember speaking to a group of non-Yadav OBCs, which included Lodhs,
Kashyaps and others. A Yadav came and quite aggressively said “Akhilesh,
Akhilesh”, almost disrupted the conversation and left. One Lodh turned around
and immediately said – this is the sort of behaviour which will make them lose.’

Or head to Purvanchal, as Sankarshan Thakur, the veteran journalist and roving

editor of the Telegraph , did in early March.

In Varanasi’s Jayapur, the village the prime minister had adopted, he met
Narayan Patel, the pradhan, a Kurmi. Patel was a supporter of the Apna Dal, a
minor ally of the BJP, led by Anupriya Patel, MP from Mirzapur and now
minister in the Union government.

The alliance was a part of Amit Shah’s strategy in 2014 to garner Kurmi votes.
Shah had continued with it in 2017. The idea fit in with his general outlook
towards elections – maximize votes, fill in the 5–10 per cent that had kept the
BJP short of winning by poaching leaders from other parties and picking allies
who may be small but have influence over a community. In UP, the alliance fit in
with the strategy of projecting the BJP as sensitive to independent OBC
groupings. A similar alliance was stitched together with a small party of
Rajbhars, the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party.

Relentlessly campaigning through the day on his motorcycle, Narayan Patel told
Thakur, ‘I am concerned with Modi and him alone. The country hasn’t ever had
such a leader, and UP too needs Modi.’

Or take the heart of Jat territory, at the other end of the state in west UP, almost
bordering Delhi. The message was similar, but adapted to specifics of the region.

The BJP had swept west UP, primarily riding on Jat vote, in the 2014 election.
This time around, the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) – former union minister Ajit
Singh’s party – expected its core constituency of Jats to return to the party. The
community seemed unhappy with the BJP for appointing a non-Jat as chief
minister in Haryana, not doing enough to push for their inclusion in the central
OBC list, and being disrespectful of Chaudhary Charan Singh, their iconic
leader.
Instead, the BJP swept the belt. An RLD insider later explained, ‘You know, Jats
did return to us. In 2014, we got only 7 lakh votes or so, which was 0.8 per cent.
This time, we got over 15 lakh votes, which is 1.8 per cent. The problem was
that in each constituency all other backwards came together for the BJP. The
extent of pichda consolidation behind them is staggering.’

This happened because the BJP was seen as capable of taking on the dominant.
‘In our areas, Sainis, Pals, Gujjars felt the BJP would keep Jats in check. The
more Jats said they would vote for RLD this time, the more others got
determined they would vote for the BJP. And eventually, the BJP ended up
getting both a section of Jats and all backwards.’

In all the big regions of UP, the BJP had thus ended up projecting itself as the
champion of the underdog, as the party standing up to the dominant, as the party
which was inclusive, and it won over the admittedly heterogeneous, but single
largest demographic block of the state – the non-Yadav OBCs.

***

Satish Prakash is a Dalit professor in Meerut. Prakash is a BSP sympathizer, but

remains independent and critical of the politics of the party. Well integrated into
Dalit networks, he is emerging as an important intellectual of the community in
western UP.

During the election campaign, we travelled together to Hastinapur – a reserved

constituency of the district – and followed the campaign of the BSP candidate,
Yogesh Verma. Prakash was confident of his victory, as he was of Mayawati
returning to Lucknow as chief minister.

After the elections, we spoke about what went wrong for BSP.

‘A section of Dalits, Jatavs, especially, have consistently fought against

Brahmanism and asked for space. When they became economically and
educationally empowered, they wanted to monopolize the space. Did they not
have a responsibility towards the weaker sections within the community? BSP
did not see that. BJP saw it,’ said Prakash.

The weakest of all social groups in UP are the Dalits. And within Dalits, the
weakest are the castes which are small and scattered, which have not had the
numbers, the education, the middle class and the political leaders to even
articulate their grievances.

They are the Dalits who voted loyally for the Congress for four decades, without
even a slice of upward mobility. They are the Dalits who voted for Mayawati,
but were left behind by the Jatav monopoly of the party machinery. They are the
Dalits who saw the SP’s Yadavs as their exploiters. They are the Dalits Prakash
was referring to as the ones the more powerful Dalits had a responsibility
towards, the Dalits left out of the party.

They are the Dalits who shifted to the BJP this time around.

Badri Narayan is one of the most thoughtful scholars of Dalit politics of Uttar
Pradesh, and the author of Fractured Tales: Invisibles in Indian Democracy . In
early April, Narayan gave a lecture at a conference in Patna, organized by Saibal
Gupta, the leading public intellectual of Bihar. The city was reeling from the
aftermath of the UP victory. And all conversations revolved around what had
happened in the neighbouring state.

Narayan too was taken aback by the scale of victory, and built on what Prakash
had told me. He pointed out that there are over sixty Dalit sub-castes in UP. A
few had achieved a degree of empowerment, and even among them it was the
Jatavs who had acquired the lion’s share of political power and access to
government jobs and schemes.

‘They have moved ahead because of several reasons like education, creation of
organic intellectuals and community leaders, and by culturally asserting their
identities through their caste history, heroes and other caste symbols.’ The
weaker castes were still largely illiterate; they did not have corresponding
community leaders who could mobilize them and assert their identities.

‘You know, Kanshi Ram used to separately name all these communities to give
them a sense of independent identity – all sixty-five of them. Mayawati lumped
them all together and gave them little space. Kanshi Ram also said jinki jitni
sankhya bhaari, uski utni hissedaari – representation according to numbers. But
even among Dalits, was this rule applied? It was the Jatavs who cornered the
bulk of the Dalit seats.’
Back in Meerut, Prakash agreed.

‘Take Valmikis, the second largest Dalit caste. How many are party secretaries at
the district level? None.’

He narrated an incident that he claimed had become important in the Valmiki

narrative about BSP. ‘When Mayawati was CM, a Dalit woman, Rekha Valmiki,
was a cook of mid-day meals in a school somewhere in Purvanchal. Some
students objected. You know what Mayawati did – she removed Valmiki. This
had a domino effect in other schools too. Think of the message that must have
gone out to the entire community.’

In Bihar, Nitish Kumar had tapped into the contradiction within Dalits – the
Paswans were seen as dominant, they were also perceived as loyal to rival Ram
Vilas Paswan. Nitish Kumar created a new category of Mahadalits, the most
marginalized Dalits, who then rallied around him in large numbers in the 2010
and 2015 elections.

And it was this contradiction that the BJP understood existed in UP as well. Amit
Shah had yet again shown why he was a better sociologist of North India than
leaders more rooted in the state – he had identified a contradiction, sharpened it
and mobilized everyone against the most dominant group in the category.

‘What Kanshi Ram did for Jatavs, the RSS and BJP are doing for the rest of the
Dalits. They are helping create their community leaders. They are helping
document their caste histories. They are exploring heroes of their community.
They are inventing and celebrating their festivals. They are placing shakhas near
Dalit bastis,’ Narayan argued.

And as with the non-Yadav OBCs, the messaging has a slice of victimhood. ‘A
deep sense of comparative deprivation is promoted. Look at what the Jatav got,
look at what you got. Then why stick to the BSP?’ Narayan believes this is just
the beginning and the BJP has barely scratched the surface, and penetrated into
ten or so Dalit castes. ‘Imagine if they do it with the others, step by step; there is
a complete vacuum out there.’

In the absence of Form 20 data – the booth-level break-up provided by the

Election Commission – it is not possible to get a sense of the demographic
break-up of which caste and community voted for whom. And unlike the non-
Yadav OBCs, the non-Jatav Dalits are the most silent of all communities in UP –
so even anecdotal evidence is hard to come by. The BJP won the majority of the
seats reserved for Dalits, but this too is not a parameter, for in reserved seats,
since all candidates are Dalits, the non-Dalit vote becomes crucial.

But what we know is this.

The BJP is now increasingly focused on Dalits, at the policy level in Delhi and
on the ground in elections.

Prime Minister Modi’s emphasis on Babasaheb Ambedkar’s legacy; the central

government’s celebration of days associated with Ambedkar’s life; its focus on
promoting the five sites associated with his life; the prime minister’s attempt to
give Ambedkar a contemporary resonance by naming the government’s digital
payment app BHIM; and the encouragement to Dalit entrepreneurs are all part of
this political project.

The opposition had hoped that the Rohith Vemula suicide and the Una incident
would harm the BJP – it did rile many Ambedkarite activists, particularly
students, but these were constituents who would have voted for BSP in any case.
It did not deter Dalits ‘relatively deprived’ within UP from giving the BJP a shot.

This does not mean that they have shifted completely; neither does it mean that
the resistance to the BJP will disappear. Indeed, the Saharanpur violence, where
upper-caste Thakurs and Dalits clashed and tensions persisted for weeks soon
after the BJP took office, showed the capacity of Dalits – particularly Jatavs – to
mobilize against the party.

But the scale of the victory indicates that at least a section of India’s most
oppressed, most deprived communities in one of India’s poorest states voted for
the party that has been associated and stereotyped as a party of the dominant
castes. It is an acknowledgement of this support, and the hope that this
constituency would consolidate on an ever larger scale, that the BJP decided to
nominate a non-Jatav Dalit from UP, Ram Nath Kovind, as India’s next
rashtrapati.

***
To understand whether the new BJP will hold together and whether its
experiment with carving out a multi-caste contract will succeed, it is important
to look back at the past.

2017 or even 2014 was not the first time the BJP had wooed the invisible castes.

Tariq Thachil, a political scientist at the Vanderbilt University, has written a fine
book on the BJP’s effort at expanding its social base, Elite Parties, Poor Voters:
How Social Services Wins Votes in India . He outlines three criteria for judging
whether the elite constitute a party’s core base of support – its internal
composition, pattern of electoral support and policy profile.

On all three counts, Thachil argues, the BJP ‘consistently exhibited all three
major markers of elite politics’.

But the BJP was slowly, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, recognizing it needed
to do more to win over other communities. The man who led this effort was
Govindacharya, the party’s all-powerful general secretary at one point, who fell
out with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and retreated from active politics in September
2000. Over a conversation, Govindacharya looked back at the party’s shift: ‘We
felt there was an opening in the mid 1980s. Two things had happened. There was
the Meenakshipuram conversion [hundreds of Dalits had converted to Islam].
And then there was the Shah Bano judgement. The Hindu sense of hurt grew.’
He argued ‘minorityism’ had become central in the politics of the times. ‘The
Babri Masjid Action Committee became active. They began asking for
permission to use archaeological sites for namaz. All this added to the sense of
Hindu hurt.’ It is important to note that the Hindu sense of hurt did not emerge
automatically, but due to sustained propaganda and organizational work by the
BJP, and the VHP, hammering home the ‘injustice’ done over centuries, the need
for historic justice, symbolized in the demand for the construction of the Ram
Mandir.

And then, in a few years, the Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan intensified. ‘There
was now a broader Hindutva umbrella. And then the backward communities
began to see a platform they were attracted to. They began coming back.’ Groups
such as Kurmis and Koeris had veered towards the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, BJP’s
older avatar, in the 1960s, but the party could not sustain their support. It was
Hindutva, Govindacharya argued, that provided the framework for Hindu unity,
across castes. Note the similarities with what Modi–Shah were to attempt almost
three decades later.

The BJP alliance with the socialists and Marxists in 1989, in the V.P. Singh
government, helped. ‘This increased our legitimacy in the eyes of the backward
communities,’ Govindacharya acknowledged.

This had been an important tactic of the party. Alliances with the socialists in
1967 had given the party access to power for the first time; participating in the
Jayaprakash Narayan movement in the mid 1970s and merging into the Janata
Party had given the party the first flush of wider legitimacy; and becoming a part
of the National Front of the late 1980s with groups which had a traditional base
among the middle-caste peasantry and backward castes opened up doors among
these communities for the BJP.

But there was a problem. When V.P. Singh decided to implement the report of
the Mandal Commission, providing reservations to OBCs, the BJP was in a fix.
It could not be seen as opposing it; nor did it wish to embrace it, for that would
have alienated its upper caste supporters. It once again went back to the Hindu
card – the Mandir – to neutralize the Mandal, and to do so, used backward faces.

L.K. Advani’s rath yatra was now in full swing, but the key faces on the ground,
at the regional level, were Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharti and Vinay Katiyar. It was
not a coincidence that all three belonged to backward communities – Singh and
Bharti were Lodhs, Katiyar a Kurmi. This was the golden period for BJP’s
expansion. Speaking about this period, a senior BJP leader from Bihar and now
an influential cabinet minister had told me in the run-up to the 2014 elections,
‘Hindutva is most successful when it has an OBC face. Look back at the
nineties.’

Govindacharya played an important role in encouraging this shift, which came to

be known as ‘social engineering’. But he insists this is not an apt term, for it
presumes that societies could be artificially engineered. But irrespective of the
nomenclature, the attempt was precisely to expand the base. And in the process,
Govindacharya offered his famous prescription for the BJP – the need to change
its ‘chaal, charitra, chehra’, style, character, face.

What did this mean? ‘When I spoke about chaal, I meant we needed to change
our style. Earlier, we held all our public meetings in the evening. Members of the
Bania community, by then, finished their work in the local bazaar and were free
to come. I argued that if we want people from the countryside to come to our
meetings, we needed to have these mass meetings during the day.’

And when people from rural areas, from different castes, came to these meetings,
it was important they saw a ‘chehra’ they could relate to, faces which came from
their own community. ‘It was important that people from different castes saw
their faces on the stage, they saw them speaking, they saw them being given a
place of respect. That was how they would feel a sense of belonging.’

The importance of faces could be seen in the case of Yadavs. They could identify
with elements of the Hindutva project. Indeed, Yadavs had often been at the
forefront of confrontation with Muslims, including in the Bhagalpur riots in
Bihar. Govindacharya remembered people from the community coming up to
him. ‘They said they are committed to cow protection; they felt Lord Krishna, to
whom they trace their lineage, was now being given space in our agenda when
we added Mathura to temple agitation; they were teetotallers. But they had
leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav in UP and Lalu Prasad in Bihar, and so their
emotional attachment to the cause did not translate into political support for the
party.’ The BJP was unable to make inroads into the community because it could
not offer faces of that stature.

But what was it that attracted backward communities to the Hindu political fold,
despite being victims of the Hindu caste structure?

Govindacharya pointed to two things. ‘Minorityism’, which led to Hindu

consolidation; and representation, going back to the need for faces. ‘They are
always cautious, and their association is based primarily on representation.’

Changing the party’s character, charitra, was not easy, and carving out a multi-
caste alliance was not easy.

Mandal had sharply polarized society and organizations on caste lines.

Upper castes were resentful at their relative loss of opportunities. Backwards

were empowered and saw in upper-caste resistance a ploy to deprive them of
their rightful space. Within both the Sangh and the BJP, this contradiction played
out. The BJP very reluctantly accepted the extension of reservations to OBCs for
purely electoral reasons after a period of much ambiguity. ‘The party’s waffling
on the question of caste-based quotas also distinguished it from most other
parties and was easily portrayed by its rivals as another instance of Hindu
nationalists prioritizing the preferences of their elite core. Consequently, when
the BJP finally decided to voice qualified support for reservations for OBCs, it
was simply too little, and too late, to help it shed its Brahman–Bania reputation,’
writes Thachil.

Even the Hindu card was not enough. In the 1993 elections, soon after the
demolition of the Babri Masjid, the BJP was unable to win a majority on its own
in UP. Instead, the SP and BSP – representing the backwards and Dalits – joined
hands to cobble together a coalition. It had indeed won the BJP support of upper
castes, but it was not enough to woo the lower castes who felt a sense of
empowerment with their own leaders and parties.

Govindacharya himself was shunted out to Tamil Nadu in 1993 due to a set of
controversies. As he was leaving Delhi, many OBC and SC members of the
party came up to him and said, ‘You are going, what will happen to us?’
Reflecting on it after almost twenty-five years, Govindacharya, who is dark-
complexioned, says, ‘They felt that I was from their own community, perhaps
because of how I looked.’

But the BJP also knew it would not grow if it did not expand socially.

Christophe Jaffrelot calls this a period of both reluctant and indirect

Mandalization of the BJP. It opted for alliances, for instance, with the Samata
Party in Bihar. Between 1989 and 1998, the share of the party’s OBC MPs from
the Hindi heartland increased from 16 to 20 per cent, while the proportion of
upper-caste MPs dipped from 52.3 per cent to 43.4 per cent. In UP itself, the
share of its OBC MLAs increased from 18 to 22 per cent from 1991 to 1996.

Thachil points to another tool which helped the BJP expand its social base,
necessary for electoral success, without hurting the interests of its core
supporters. ‘My main argument is that the politically motivated, private
provision of local public goods by the BJP’s movement affiliates proved central
to the party’s unexpected success among the poor.’ In other words, the work
done by Sangh organizations to provide welfare, such as education and health,
had helped the BJP reap electoral dividends. Thachil’s research primarily
revolved around Dalits and Adivasis, but it is an important insight into strategies
used by the party to deal with social expansion.

The political contradiction, however, remained.

The cracks in the wider upper-caste, non-Yadav backward coalition in UP

deepened through the 1990s. In a rather direct barb at Govindacharya, Murli
Manohar Joshi, one of BJP’s most senior leaders, said, ‘If a party has to change
its character, thinking, etc., it means the party is not worth it.’ He also asked,
‘What social justice has been brought in the name of social engineering?’ It was
perhaps not a coincidence that he was a Brahman.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee too was not comfortable with Kalyan Singh. There was no
doubt that Vajpayee was a pan-India leader, who transcended communities and
regions. But it is also worth remembering that he was a Brahman, and invested
in local politics in UP. His supporters in the UP BJP – Rajnath Singh, Kalraj
Mishra and Lalji Tandon – played an important role in building a political
climate against Kalyan Singh, who did not help his cause with controversies.

But this was not just about personalities.

The simple fact was the upper-caste base of the BJP was not entirely reconciled
to the shift in leadership to a backward leader. They had begun regrouping. ‘At
the first convenient moment, no one hesitated to remove Kalyan Singh,’ said
Govindacharya. Singh was offered the courtesy of choosing his successor; he
picked a political non-entity like Ram Prakash Gupta. But it was just a matter of
time before Gupta was dumped, and Rajnath Singh took over as chief minister.

So the BJP was back to having a Brahman, Kalraj Mishra, as the party president,
and a Thakur, Rajnath Singh, as the chief minister. The OBCs felt let down, and
drifted away from the party. They swung between the SP and BSP, depending on
the representation the party was willing to offer them.

The BJP lost the state in 2002 and did poorly in the Lok Sabha polls in 2004.
And once upper castes saw that it was not necessarily a winning horse, even they
began looking for options. The spate of defeats continued, in 2007, 2009 and
2012. BJP’s social coalition had crumbled.
 ***

And then Narendra Modi and Amit Shah took over Uttar Pradesh.

They made a strong push for social expansion; they uprooted the upper-caste
leaders, yet managed them in a way they would not rebel; they began changing
the organizational structure; they gave representation and respect to less
dominant communities; they leveraged the resentment that existed against the
dominant OBC or Dalit group among those who felt left out; they gave a high
number of tickets to OBCs; and they helped the BJP achieve to a larger degree
than ever before, ‘Hindu unity’ across castes.

Would they be able to take along both their older and newer supporters?

This will indeed be a tough balancing act. For now, in terms of real power and
positions too, the BJP has been careful not to antagonize its older supporters.
The selection of the UP cabinet, with a high representation of upper castes,
shows that the core base has not been forgotten. Yogi Adityanath himself is a
Thakur; Dinesh Sharma, the deputy chief minister, is a Brahman. Maurya – the
man who had hoped to become chief minister himself – has been accommodated
as a deputy chief minister, in a signal to backwards and recognition of their role.
Within a few months of Yogi taking over, Lucknow was already abuzz with how
the BJP win had been accompanied with ‘Thakur Raj’. These contradictions will
play out in the realm of governance and administration. How the BJP handles it
will determine its future.

But for now, UP has shown Amit Shah’s remarkable ability to understand
society, identify contradictions and exploit these. It also marks the BJP’s real
attempt to transform itself in its heartland from a party of only the dominant
social groups to a party of the less powerful, fighting the more dominant political
castes. The BJP wins elections today because it is a new BJP, because it is an
inclusive Hindu party. But how far the new BJP will be able to go will hinge
critically on its relationship with its parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
 Sangh: Source, Supplement, Shadow
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh remains the source, the supplement and the
shadow – contributing to the BJP’s phenomenal electoral success, shaping it, but
also getting shaped in the process.

The Sangh is the BJP’s ideological parent. It remains the ‘alma mater’ of almost
its entire leadership and cadre base, the home they can always turn to.

Yet it is not a one-way street. Narendra Modi’s personal popularity, the BJP’s
transition to becoming an inclusive Hindu party and its national success altered
equations between the parent and its offshoot.

The Sangh, with its strong emphasis on organization, has a natural aversion for
any ‘personality cult’ and thus to a single strong leader such as Modi. Its attitude
towards caste is more cautious than that of the party. Not long ago the RSS was
the organization with a wider national footprint, and the BJP was an offshoot
confined to specific regions. Today, the BJP is on its way to becoming a pan-
Indian outfit, outstripping the Sangh’s reach and spread. This has meant that the
Sangh plays the role of a supplement in electoral battles.

These contradictions on leadership, issues and election management have

persisted between the RSS and the BJP. They have not got out of hand for three
broad reasons – Narendra Modi’s personal dynamic with Mohan Bhagwat,
ideological convergence and regular coordination.

***

Narendra Modi is the Sangh. He is, as the commentator Ashok Malik once put it,
its most distinguished alumnus. It was the Sangh that deployed him to the BJP,
as the organization secretary of Gujarat in the late 1980s. Modi owes his
worldview, his networks, his political life and his ethos to the Sangh. Anyone
who treats Modi as completely distinct from the Sangh does justice neither to
Modi nor to the Sangh.

Yet Modi is not just the Sangh. He has gone much beyond the Sangh and, at key
moments, he has confronted, challenged and pushed the parent organization.
This was visible when Modi was the chief minister in Gujarat. After the 2002
riots – where Modi, either due to reluctance or incompetence, did precious little
to rein in the Sangh affiliates attacking minorities – there was also a phase when
the Modi–Sangh relationship dipped. A section of the Sangh leadership even
encouraged splinter groups and leaders against Modi in elections; the VHP
leader Praveen Togadia, the most hardline of the Hindutva leaders, was in open
war with Modi. The conflict was about personalities and egos, about control and
about the say the Sangh would have in direct governance.

As Modi grew in popularity and stature, media speculation hovered around

whether the Sangh would accept him as the face of the BJP for the 2014
elections. There were voices of dissent, but his enormous appeal among the
cadre – the pracharaks as well as swayamsevaks, the full-time cadre and the
sympathizers, and the wider Sangh ecosystem – meant that Nagpur had to take
into account voices from below. Mohan Bhagwat, and his number 2, Bhaiyaji
Joshi, supported Modi, and even persuaded the reluctant L.K. Advani to fall in
line.

But speculation persisted on how the Sangh–Modi relationship would work out
once Modi won with a resounding majority.

The RSS is uncomfortable with what it refers to as ‘vyakti-puja’. And while it

allows its mass organizations operational autonomy, it is uncomfortable with
loosening its control entirely. This is what had led to a tense dynamic between
the Sangh leadership and the Vajpayee government on a range of issues.

But Modi, as prime minister, has developed a remarkably smooth working

relationship with the Sangh. And this owes, first, to his personal equation with
Mohan Bhagwat.

An RSS functionary explained, ‘Atalji’s contemporary was Rajju Bhaiya

[Rajendra Singh, a former sarsanghchalak]. But when he became prime minister,
the sarsanghchalak was Sudarshanji, who was junior to him. This created
problems, because the PM was uncomfortable taking directions from him. The
sarsanghchalak was also a little too aggressive on issues where he should have
given the PM space.’

It is different now. Modi and Mohan Bhagwat are contemporaries, and their lives
have progressed almost in parallel, witnessing similar highs at similar stages.
Both were born in 1950; they became purnakaliks, or full-time pracharaks, in the
1970s; Bhagwat became the general secretary of the Sangh in 1999, and Modi
became Gujarat chief minister at the end of 2001; Bhagwat took over as the
sarsanghchalak in 2009, and Modi’s rise at the national level too happened soon
after that, leading to the 2014 win. To top it all, Modi’s mentor in the Sangh
happened to be Bhagwat’s father. All this had helped in winning the Sangh’s
support for his candidature back in 2013.

‘They are friends. The sarsanghchalak is also very pragmatic and open-minded.
You see his focus on social reform and one temple, one crematorium, one
waterbody campaign.’ This is an RSS campaign to end caste-based
discrimination and create commons which everyone, including Dalits, can
access. ‘And see Modi’s focus on expanding the base of the party. There is
coordination. It does not mean the government listens to everything the Sangh
says, and it does not mean the Sangh intervenes in every sphere. But the
relationship is very different from Atalji’s times,’ said the functionary.

There is another layer here, of deeper ideological convergence.

Ashok Singhal, the VHP supremo and Sangh veteran, was a fierce critic of the
NDA regime during Vajpayee’s time. In June 2013, some time before Modi was
to formally become the BJP face, Singhal was ecstatic about the Gujarat chief
minister as a future national leader.

In the clearest indication of the Sangh’s expectations and agenda, Singhal said
that they wanted Modi to stop the ‘process of de-Hinduization’ taking place. He
wanted Parliament to pass a resolution on the Ayodhya issue, paving the way for
a temple. The Sangh Parivar wanted the government to focus on ‘cleaning up the
Ganga’. ‘Like Ram, Ganga unites us. And there is a systematic conspiracy to
destroy the river.’ Banning cow slaughter was next on his agenda. ‘This is not
just for religious but also developmental and nutritional purposes.’

Take stock in 2017, and compare it to the expectations.

Except Ayodhya, where the scope for unilateral executive action is limited, the
government has pushed hard on the other two issues. The Ganga may not have
got cleaned, but no government has accorded it the priority and resources as
Modi sarkar. Nor has national discourse ever revolved so much around cow
protection. The political signalling is clear. A new notification on cattle slaughter
has been brought in; there has been a crackdown on ‘illegal slaughterhouses’ in
UP; and even the suspicion of anyone possessing – let along consuming – beef
can invite life-threatening attacks by self-appointed gau rakshaks. It began with
the killing of Mohammad Akhlaq in UP’s Dadri in 2015, but in the summer of
2017, beef-related lynching became the new normal in certain BJP-ruled states.
There may not be explicit political sanction from the top, but the absence of
strong political messaging to crack down on this form of mob violence and the
impunity enjoyed by perpetrators have undoubtedly encouraged this vigilantism.
There is a common thread behind these incidents – Muslims have been the
primary victims, and it has generated a sense of insecurity in the community. The
violence has become so rampant that Modi, at the end of June 2017, had to step
in and condemn killings in the name of ‘gau-bhakti’, a response many felt came
too late and needed to be accompanied with stronger action. A few weeks later,
in mid July, he once again asked state governments to firmly tackle any such
incidents.

The ideological convergence is also reflected in Modi’s open assertion of his

religious identity. A top BJP leader, who comes from the Sangh, pointed to the
pride the Sangh feels at key moments. ‘When Modi goes and prays at the
Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu, or Kedarnath, or Banaras, and comes out
with tika, he is saying he is a Hindu and he is proud of being one. The last PM to
visit temples so publicly was Indira Gandhi in her final term. Modi wears his
religion on his sleeve; he is unapologetic about display of culture. The Sangh is
very happy with this. Their agenda is precisely this. What else is the slogan we
used in so many campaigns – Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain, say with pride we
are Hindus.’

All this appeals to the Sangh worker on the ground, and keeps his faith in Modi
intact. ‘Atalji’s government was the first non-Congress government which lasted
its full term, but many in the Sangh always doubted whether it was really a BJP
sarkar. It was run by Brajesh Mishra, who had Congress blood. It was also in a
coalition. This is a full BJP sarkar. There is no doubt about its ideological
commitment, about Modiji’s intent, even when there may be small differences,’
says a young RSS worker from Delhi.

And finally, there is regular, mostly private but sometimes public, exchange of
views between the Sangh and BJP leadership. A BJP leader with roots in the
Sangh says, ‘PM is always very keen to know details of what the Sangh feels.
He takes reports from us about meetings we may have had with Sangh
functionaries. He encourages the Sangh to support his campaigns; he takes into
account their concerns.’ There is institutionalized coordination at the party level
with RSS joint general secretary Krishna Gopal working closely with both Amit
Shah and organization pointsperson Ram Lal. The doors of each minister are
open to Sangh affiliates working in that domain, and their views are heard – even
if they are not always acted on. And in 2015, Modi – as well as key cabinet
ministers – went to a meeting of the RSS in Delhi, where they discussed
governance priorities and took feedback. This was the most explicit and public
recognition of the party’s debt to the Sangh as well as a nod to the Sangh’s role
in statecraft.

Good personal relations at the top, broad convergence on the ideological agenda,
smoother coordination mechanisms and a degree of mutual accommodation –
with the BJP giving space to people with a Sangh background in key institutions
and pushing pet issues and the Sangh giving the BJP leeway on other issues of
governance – have helped them work well together.

This has created the room for the Sangh to reconcile itself, and even embrace,
the subalternization of the BJP.

***

In September 2015, Prafulla Ketkar was in Chennai when he got a call. ‘The BJP
is doing a press conference on your interview. Have a look,’ he was told.

Ketkar, the editor of Organizer , the English-language magazine of the RSS, had
interviewed Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat. In the interview, Bhagwat had
suggested reviewing the system of reservations. The Bihar elections were due.
And Lalu Prasad, the astute politician, smelled an opportunity to convert the
election into a forward–backward contest, the battle which had propelled him to
power in 1990.

The BJP, which needed votes of backward communities to win, was on the
defensive. At first it distanced itself from the sarsanghchalak’s statement – a
futile enterprise since no one would believe that the RSS supremo spoke only for
himself and not the broader parivar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself
categorically committed to continuing reservations, but the doubts refused to die
down.

The statement was used to establish that the Sangh remained a Brahmanical
outfit – uncomfortable with the rise of backward castes, unwilling to give them
space.

Almost a year and a half later, in the middle of 2017, Ketkar, sitting in the
Organizer office in Delhi’s Paharganj, was still struck by what he sees as a
misinterpretation of the interview.

‘Go back to the interview. We were discussing Deen Dayal Upadhyayji, and we
had asked what policy today is in tune with integral humanism. And in that
context, he mentioned reservations. It was not an anti-reservation, but a pro-
reservation statement,’ he told me.

Bhagwat’s exact answer to Ketkar called reservations for socially backward

classes as the ‘right example’ of such a policy initiative. But he had then gone on
to suggest, ‘If we would have implemented this policy as envisaged by the
constitution makers instead of doing politics over it, then present situation would
not have arrived. Since inception it has been politicized. We believe, form a
committee of people genuinely concerned for the interest of the whole nation
and committed for social equality, including some representatives from the
society, they should decide which categories require reservation and for how
long. The non-political committee like autonomous commissions should be the
implementation authority; political authorities should supervise them for honesty
and integrity.’

The reactions came fast and furious. Indeed, Bhagwat had left room open for
interpretation here. When he said the policy as envisaged by the Constitution
should have been implemented, people recalled that the original provisions were
only for Dalits and tribals – was he then suggesting that extending reservations
to OBCs was wrong? Would his call for a committee to review the system lead
to the dilution of the entire affirmative action architecture, and end up targeting
certain castes?

The doubts were rooted in the suspicion that the RSS spoke for Hindu upper
castes, and its quest for Hindu unity was a code for upper-caste domination. If
this perception is true, then the BJP’s efforts at social expansion will hit a wall,
for the marginalized will not accept second-class status. If it is not, is there a
fundamental departure in the Sangh’s orientation?

RSS texts offer a clue.

In 1974, the then chief, Balasaheb Deoras, gave a lecture in Pune. This has
become the organization’s definitive position on caste. He spoke of the need for
‘Hindu consolidation’, and admitted that ‘social inequality’ had been an
obstruction to this unity. He declared, ‘If untouchability is not wrong, then
nothing in the world is wrong.’ He acknowledged that ‘backward and
untouchable brethren’ have ‘borne quite an amount of misery, insults and
injustices all these centuries’. But then he warned them too, not to bring in
quarrels of the past to the present, and stop bitter language and tirades.

On reservations, Deoras said the desire of backwards for opportunities is

legitimate, but in the long run they will have to ‘compete with others and earn an
equal status on the basis of merit’.

This speech reveals the Sangh’s attitude to caste. It is conscious of inequality. It

acknowledges discrimination. But it is cautious about what to do. It wants
gradual social change, it places emphasis on personal conduct and it is not
comfortable with radical politics of backwards and Dalits. The manner in which
the ABVP, the Sangh’s student outfit, responded to Rohith Vemula’s assertion at
the University of Hyderabad is thus not a surprise.

Mohan Bhagwat, in March 2017, gave another interview to Ketkar. Bhagwat

acknowledged the 1974 speech as the ideological edifice for swayamsevaks, and
argued that the Sangh had made an effort to reach out to groups which had been
subjects of discrimination. He focused on improving personal, family,
professional and social conduct and supported intercaste marriages. He called for
an understanding of the anger. But like Deoras, he appealed to the victims to
tone down their language.

India’s marginalized, however, do not seek symbolism, they want real power.
They want representation and dignity. As an old RSS pracharak told me, ‘You
will see tension in the Sangh because it wants social unity and social justice. It
wants dignity, but also harmony in an unequal society. It is not as conservative as
people think, but it is not disruptive.’

Ketkar claims that the current Sangh approach combines the Gandhian approach
– changing the mindset of upper castes – and Ambedkarite approach – of
focusing on representation. ‘This is sustainable because it is backed by
organizational strength.’ But this claim is questionable; that the Sangh has never
had a non-upper-caste chief is probably the most obvious example of its
character. Indeed, except Rajju Bhaiya, all others have been Brahmans. Ketkar,
however, sees a churning: ‘You see the organization from below. There is a
change. Among pracharaks, state office-bearers, and even in the 250-member
executive committee, there are others. You will see a change.’

This detour into the Sangh is important to understand its evolving approach to
BJP’s subalternization. When it articulates a position incompatible with the
BJP’s efforts to woo backwards, elections are lost, as in Bihar. When it is
supportive, elections are won, as in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

***

There were two campaigns which catapulted Narendra Modi to victory in 2014.

The first was a modern, high-tech campaign run by Modi’s team from
Gandhinagar. Citizens encountered a Modi blitzkrieg over six months as the BJP
leader used every conceivable technology to project his message across the
country. The BJP infrastructure was deployed for this.

This is what we all saw – the rallies, the advertisements, the holograms, the chai-
pe-charcha and the message that only Modi could bring in ‘achhe din’.

The second was a much quieter, parallel campaign. Rarely has the RSS been as
intimately involved in an election as it was in 2014. It did, of course, create and
support the Jan Sangh; it went all out to work for the Janata Party in 1977; and it
has helped enable the success of the BJP over the past three decades. But it
always maintained a degree of ambiguity, and kept up the claim that it was a
solely cultural organization. In 2014, that changed – and a conscious decision
was taken to deploy the entire parivar in the quest to make Narendra Modi prime
minister. The Sangh’s public appeal was confined to encouraging citizens to
vote, and ensuring high voter turnout – a mission statement outlined by Mohan
Bhagwat during his annual Vijaya Dashami address in Nagpur in 2013. But its
mandate and role went much beyond it.

This was the invisible campaign we did not see.

These two campaigns intersected at times.

At the highest level, Modi himself was in touch with both the sarsanghchalak
and his deputy, Bhaiyaji Joshi. There was coordination at the party level with the
Sangh joint general secretary in charge of the BJP. BJP leaders in each state were
in touch with what they called the ‘vaicharik parivar’, or the ideological family,
particularly mass organizations such as the ABVP, VHP, Bharatiya Mazdoor
Sangh, Bajrang Dal and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram. At the local level, there was a
degree of coordination between the district unit of the Sangh’s affiliates and the
district unit of the party.

But in Delhi, the two campaigns needed a bridge.

It had to be someone who understood the language of modern campaigning, yet

was rooted in the Sangh. It had to be someone who was comfortable with
technology, yet knew how to help a ninety-year-old organization to adapt to it.

There were few people who fit the requirements more than Ram Madhav.

Originally from Andhra Pradesh, Madhav had been a long-time pracharak. Over
the preceding decade, however, he emerged as the Sangh’s public face in New
Delhi. He was their link to the Delhi-based national media; he was the
interlocutor with diplomatic missions; and because of his location in Delhi, he
also became an important, informal, link with the BJP. And he had an equation
with the prime ministerial candidate.

Sitting in the office of India Foundation, a think tank he has carefully nurtured
and which has emerged as one of Delhi’s most influential institutions, Madhav
recalled the 2014 experience and acknowledged, ‘I handled the Sangh part of the
electioneering. It was an exceptional election and we were involved in a full-
fledged manner.’

He knew that the critical cogs in the Sangh machinery were the prant (regional)
pracharaks. As the functionaries responsible for all Sangh activities in their
respective states, they serve as the link between the leadership in Nagpur and the
swayamsevaks, pracharaks and shakhas on the ground. And when the BJP needs
the Sangh to pitch in during elections, it is the prant pracharak who plays a major
role.

But they needed to be provided with knowledge resources to go beyond the

traditional mode of campaigning. So Madhav ordered Lenovo tablets for all the
prant pracharaks and held training for all of them on how to use it. ‘It was not
something they were used to,’ he said with a smile.

And in this training, he introduced them to that other key tool of elections: data.
Madhav tapped into data from two sources – election strategist Prashant Kishor’s
team in Gandhinagar, which had prepared detailed constituency-wise booklets
for each candidate, and Rajesh Jain’s data on constituencies. Jain was a
committed Sangh supporter and entrepreneur who had set up Niti Central, to
offer what they called an alternative perspective to the Delhi media.

‘I helped the prant pracharaks understand the importance of data down to the
polling booth.’ This data was then used by the Sangh to do the quiet door-to-door
campaigning, and work on voter mobilization which was critical to bringing
them out on polling day at the booth level.

Madhav also became an important link with party president Rajnath Singh, and
would pass on to him feedback that came in from the Sangh network about
candidates and ticket distribution. Already involved in political activities, he
would make a natural jump to the BJP after the 2014 victory and emerge as one
of the party’s most powerful general secretaries.

The Lok Sabha experience gave a glimpse of what was possible when the Sangh
fully committed its organizational apparatus in an election.

Its work is deceptively simple – get voters out to the booth. But that simple act,
which can shape political outcomes, requires identifying potential voters,
reaching out to them personally, persuading them, creating a favourable political
climate, providing organizational backup, especially in areas where the party
itself is weak, and using mass organizations working with students, labour,
women and tribals to activate their networks.
There is another indirect role – of the Sangh ecosystem. This consists of those
who are not full-time pracharaks but independent professionals with sympathies
for the Sangh. They are influential in their areas, and can swing opinion. They
can also invest resources.

The Sangh machinery and the Sangh ecosystem alone cannot win the party an
election. But without it, the BJP is often crippled. It lends the party a distinctive
edge, it boosts the party’s morale and as a supplement it is invaluable. This is the
role it performed in UP.

***

To understand how the wider Sangh Parivar works on the ground, I travelled to
Varanasi for the final phase of the UP elections.

Banaras Hindu University is one of the Sangh’s oldest recruiting grounds. The
Modi government made it a point to award the university founder, Madan
Mohan Malaviya, the Bharat Ratna in its first year in office. With a vice
chancellor who prides himself on being a Sangh product, the university – like
most Indian higher educational institutions after 2014 – has witnessed many
academics now publicly articulating their loyalties to the organization’s
worldview.

One such associate professor, also a swayamsevak, said the Sangh was ‘101 per
cent’ involved in the election campaign. He was not entirely comfortable with
the BJP’s ticket distribution, and felt it was wrong of the party to deliberately
keep many aspirants hanging for a long time. He also felt that the BJP had
sacrificed all other elements at the altar of winnability. ‘Earlier, they took inputs
from the Sangh. They have done so this time too, but less than in the past. They
have picked defectors from all parties, at the cost of ideological commitment.’

But this, he emphasized, did not take away from the larger goal of supporting the
party. ‘At the end of the day, the BJP has to fight elections and not us.’ The
academic outlined the exact role the Sangh was playing. It was helping manage
the dissatisfaction of those who were resentful at not getting the ticket. ‘We are
telling them they will be accommodated next time, that they must think of the
need to remove the Samajwadi Party government.’ Volunteers like him were
speaking to their friends and family, colleagues and students, and university staff
and telling them how bringing a BJP sarkar in UP would help. ‘And our
pracharaks are doing what they did in 2014 – working at the booth level to get
voters out.’

Take another constituency of supporters. The Sangh’s financial strength comes

from the old entrepreneurs and businessmen.

Varun Mehra owns Hotel Swastik Inn in Godhulia Chowk, near the
Dasaswamedh Ghat. The hotel is on the second floor of a building inside a
narrow by-lane, one of the hundreds which have made Varanasi an urban maze.
Mehra was sitting along with a police official, who introduced himself as
responsible for security at the Vishwanath temple and its vicinity. He was an
RSS sympathizer as well.

This was a crucial election, Mehra argued, because it offered them an

opportunity to have the same government in Delhi and Lucknow. ‘The general
sentiment among the educated, among the business community, is that the BJP
must win UP for development. This is the message we are sending out to our
friends, in our circles. Everyone has got a chance, why not the BJP this time?
This argument is appealing to many people.’

Mehra comes from a family of Sangh supporters, closely integrated in the local
Sangh ecosystem.

‘I was born into it. We are the Sangh, hum hi Sangh hain,’ he said with a laugh.
He explained how the organization, and its supporters, worked. ‘The Sangh
works quietly. None of us want any publicity. I will give you an example. A
pracharak of the Kashi region yesterday got a BJP MP to meet businessmen. We
had an interaction with him. And then there was a photo session. As soon as
people started taking selfies, the pracharak slipped aside. You will not see them,
and that is why this perception that they are not present.’

The importance of individuals like Mehra for the Sangh came from their old
loyalty, for their importance in the local marketplace and wider community, and
their financial strength. For Mehra and his wider family, the expectation from the
Sangh and its political affiliates is that they will create a more business-friendly
climate. Even though a move as disruptive as demonetization had just taken
place, and had adversely affected his business, Mehra’s loyalties were not
shaken.

‘Only the dishonest businessmen would have been angry. It may have affected
our business temporarily, but the crisis is now over. See the Bombay municipal
elections. This is the business hub of India. And the BJP has done so well in the
elections there even after notebandi.’

Mehra was planning to go to a large meeting of businessmen, to be addressed by

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, the same evening, and could not conceal his
excitement. He said, ‘Aap bhi aaiye, you come too. You will see how the
business community is with Modiji.’

The Banaras Hindu University academic and Mehra represented the Sangh
volunteers who would not be counted if you take a narrow view of how the RSS
supports the BJP. They are the invisible supporters, embedded in communities,
with influence, who can shape opinion in an election.

The more direct work of mobilization is done by the Sangh machinery.

Right opposite Mehra’s hotel is the old office of the RSS in Varanasi.

Pracharaks give their lives to sustaining and expanding the organization, and its
objective of ‘uniting Hindu society’. They are the ones who help provide the
personnel to the party at key moments, such as elections.

Three old men were reading newspapers, around a large desk in a quiet room. A
pracharak introduced himself as someone associated with the Sangh since 1955.
He echoed Mehra: ‘There is a feeling that the same party should be in power at
both the central and the state level. Both the rich and the poor want Modiji. The
army morale is up. Vikas ka kaam aage badh raha hai, development work is
moving forward.’

He highlighted an important distinction in the way the Sangh and the BJP
thought about elections. ‘The Sangh is a school where we award people marks
on the basis of merit, hard work and outcome. But politics is different. A party
has to see caste, economic strength, winnability. Ultimately, they have to fight
elections. And we are there to support them.’

It was six days before Varanasi would vote. RSS joint general secretary Krishna
Gopal – the key man who coordinates with the BJP – had arrived in Varanasi and
was convening meetings of activists from different districts. Having directly held
charge of eastern UP, Gopal was familiar with the entire political landscape. The
elderly pracharak explained what happened in these meetings. ‘He seeks inputs
from all workers on the political situation, on booth-level dynamics, on voter
mood. He also issues clear instructions about what they are meant to do on
polling day, and reiterates that having a higher voter turnout is essential. That
will ensure success.’

But this work was done quietly – which is why the Sangh’s role is so often
shrouded in mystery.

The pracharak continued, ‘Let me explain it to you in another way. A parent

takes care of the child, educates him, helps him settle down, provides him a
home, but doesn’t go around announcing it. The Sangh does not need to
announce it.’ The Sangh workers do not distribute posters, do not arrange chairs
at rallies or bring crowds themselves. ‘That is not our work. That is why media
always gets confused. They look in the wrong places. Our work revolves around
quiet sampark, contact, on a door-to-door basis – encouraging people to vote for
a leader and a party which thinks of the nation, increases India’s prestige
worldwide, improves the army’s morale and believes in vikas for all.’

Only one leader, and one party, fit this bill in the imagination and messaging of
the Sangh. That leader remained Narendra Modi. That party remained the BJP.

The new Sangh office is located in Sigra, only a few kilometres away from
Godhulia Chowk, but the legendary traffic of the town means we crawled our
way to it. It was from here that the functioning of the Sangh in eighteen districts
of Kashi prant was managed.

Inside, in a small room, a man was assiduously doing accounts. He told me, ‘You
should also go out, and persuade your friends and people you know to vote for
Modiji. We are a cultural organization, but this state needs a BJP government for
vikas, development.’

He then outlined how the Sangh was helping achieve this goal.

‘We work through a platform called the Matdata Jagrukta Manch, the voter
awareness front. We are focusing on voter turnout. The RSS believes that it is
the duty of Indian citizens to participate in democracy and vote.’ The subtext
was that this encouragement was reserved for voters who were most likely to
vote for the Sangh’s political affiliate.

But the most authentic explanation for how the Sangh helped the party came
from key political interlocutors themselves. A key BJP leader, interacting with
the Sangh on a daily basis, reconstructed the sequence of events. ‘We had our
first meeting with the Sangh in November 2016 about the elections. And it was
decided right then they would focus on sampark, contact, on the ground. Before
elections, senior Sangh leaders arrive in the region going to polls and
independently hold meetings, and help.’

He said that there were, however, two big differences between the Sangh role in
2014 and in 2017 in the state election.

The first was that the BJP itself was weaker in UP in 2014, and needed that
assistance. By 2017, given the work put in by Amit Shah, Sunil Bansal and his
team, the BJP organization had become a lot stronger, and the need for outside
assistance had diminished. This is an obvious, but important, point that applies
nationally. Where the BJP itself is strong and deeply embedded, the need for the
Sangh during the election process is lesser; where the BJP is weak, but the Sangh
has deeper roots, the latter becomes more important.

This also resulted in a second difference. In 2014, many RSS workers from
outside UP had been brought to the state to assist in all activities – IT, feedback
and monitoring, door-to-door mobilization, campaign management. This
approach can sometimes boomerang. In the Bihar elections, a top state leader
hinted to me that it generated resentment among the locals. In UP 2017, the BJP
did not need workers from outside in any large number. In fact, local leaders
from areas which had already voted were shifted to the areas going to vote next.

‘RSS workers from outside are not as involved, but that is because there is no
need for it. They are doing what is required,’ added the leader, who traced his
roots to the RSS. ‘Ultimately, please understand that the Sangh is where we
come from. It is my mai-baap too. This distinction is artificial.’

Indeed, in the search for an RSS role, it was easy to miss the fact that the entire
leadership had come from the Sangh itself.

Narendra Modi was a pracharak in the Sangh. Amit Shah was from the Sangh.
Sunil Bansal had come from the Sangh just three years earlier. Keshav Prasad
Maurya was a VHP activist and office-bearer till not so long ago. Lower down
the hierarchy, Chandramohan had been in the ABVP, in the Swadeshi Jagran
Manch, before moving on to the BJP. Many state-level office-bearers traced their
roots to one or the other organization of the Sangh Parivar. The support staff of
every major BJP leader, Amit Shah downwards, consisted of individuals who
had come from a Sangh background.

Indeed, the BJP was the Sangh. In some elections, the rest of the RSS machinery
may be more active, and in some, they may retreat.

This search was also a bit confounding for outsiders because we were
desperately looking for some mysterious, secret army which would appear from
nowhere, campaign during the elections and then disappear. Obviously, it did not
work like that.

The BHU academic was the Sangh. Varun Mehra was the Sangh. We only
focused on the pracharaks and their role in mobilization, and this was
inadequate. As Bhaiyaji Joshi, the second most powerful person in the Sangh,
told Organizer in an interview, ‘Our entire effort is to make Grihastha (family)
karyakartas the main pillars of our work. Today, thousands of families are taking
forward this work. The number of pracharaks is very less in comparison to the
Grihastha karyakartas.’

This was the wider ecosystem, and each person – in his own way, often quietly –
did what he had to during the election.

Over ninety years after it was formed, the Sangh – through its disciple Narendra
Modi; by opening itself to more inclusion, albeit partly and slowly; and by quiet
organizational work – is helping install friendly governments across India
through electoral success. In the process, its political offshoot is becoming more
powerful than ever. The two remain integrated in their quest for Hindu unity, and
Hindu rule.
 The ‘H–M’ Chunav
On 23 February 2017, at 9 a.m., a hotel manager in Allahabad proudly showed
the ink on his finger. ‘I have voted and cycle will win.’ Cycle is the symbol of
the Samajwadi Party.

He then narrated a story from the polling booth. A man in the queue could not
see properly, and asked for help. ‘He wanted to press kamal [the BJP symbol]. I
said I can’t help you but then the police told me show it to him.’ He paused, and
said with a mischievous smile, ‘Instead of kamal, I showed him cycle and he
pressed it. One more vote for us.’

The others around him, at the hotel reception, smiled politely.

When he moved away, his colleague said, ‘You saw what he did. Isn’t it wrong?
He is a Muslim. Yeh sab log aise hi hain, this entire community is the same.
Pradesh ko barbaad kar diya hai, they have ruined the state.’ This second hotel
employee was a Brahman, and said he would vote later in the day for the BJP.
‘The BJP will win. But these people are also in large numbers, they vote in bulk,
they turn up even without brushing their teeth, and so it will be a challenge. Par
inko harana hai, but we have to defeat them.’

The SP–Congress alliance would have been pleased to see the energy and
enthusiasm of the Muslim voter. But the reaction would also have been music to
the ears of the BJP, for it revealed the election was increasingly being seen
through the lens of religious identity.

The BJP cannot, with its current ideological framework, win elections in north
and east India, from the borders of Delhi, past UP and Bihar, through West
Bengal, all the way to Assam, without a strong element of communal
polarization. The reason is simple. In all these states, Muslims constitute 20 per
cent or more of the population. And the party starts with a minus 20
disadvantage – Muslims neither vote for the party, nor is the party interested in
their votes.

To consolidate the rest of the electoral playing field, it needs to be internally

inclusive of Hindu castes, which it is trying to be, but, crucially, it needs to
construct the Muslim as the ‘other’, as the community which would exercise
disproportionate power if the others won, as the community which needed to be
‘taught a lesson’. It needs to tap into existing prejudices, it needs to stoke
resentment, it needs to manufacture fear and anger among Hindus and it needs to
play up the perception – often rooted in reality – that others are focused on
winning the ‘Muslim vote’.

To achieve this, the BJP and its ideological affiliates have relied on the most
sophisticated, yet most crude, propaganda – sophisticated because of the
innovation and use of technology, crude because of the nature of the messaging
and the recourse to straight falsehood. They have been actively complicit in anti-
Muslim riots and violence – and benefited from the anger and anxieties such
moments produce. They have triggered low-intensity, but persistent, tensions and
sharpened existing ones to enhance the trust deficit between friends, neighbours,
villages and workers on religious lines.

This serves both the instrumental goal of getting different castes to vote together
and the larger ideological goal of ‘uniting Hindu society’. And when the party
succeeds in converting an election into an ‘H–M’ (Hindu–Muslim) chunav, in a
Hindu-majority landscape, its victory becomes certain.

***

‘Ekta ki shaan, Sangeet Som; Hindu ki pehchan, Sangeet Som.’

The slogan on the campaign van announced Sangeet Som as the BJP candidate
from Meerut’s Sardhana constituency in UP 2017. A legislator in the just
dissolved assembly, he was implicated in the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013. The
riots had led to close to fifty deaths, and displaced over 40,000 people. In the
run-up to the violence, mahapanchayats had been held by members of the Jat
community. Som was alleged to have made provocative speeches at these events,
and uploaded fake videos.

One such video ostensibly showed how Muslims had ‘brutally’ killed two Jat
boys, Sachin and Gaurav, in Muzaffarnagar’s Kawal village. These two boys, the
narrative went, were protecting the honour of their family, their sister, from a
Muslim man and had to pay with their lives. There remain different versions of
what triggered off the riots and led to the killings, including of the Muslim who
was involved in the scuffle with Sachin and Gaurav. But the video itself turned
out to be a 2012 clip from a province in Pakistan, meant to inflame passions and
cause anger.

The Justice Vishnu Sahai Commission set up to investigate the riots concluded:
‘By the time it was deleted, a lot of tension had already been created between
Hindus and Muslims in Muzaffarnagar and adjoining districts on account of it.’
Som was among those held responsible for it. He was booked under the National
Security Act. The fake video was not an aberration. Sangh affiliates had
circulated on WhatsApp text, audio and videos – many of them fake – to build a
narrative of how Muslims were trapping Hindu girls and killing Hindu boys
during the riots.

While associated with militant Hindutva causes, including gau raksha, Som’s
personal record was less than clean. Hindustan Times reported from Meerut that
Som was a director of a meat processing and export company. When asked about
it, Som had replied, ‘I am a Hindu hardliner and hence there is no chance of
getting involved in activities which are against my religion.’

The hypocrisy did little to take away from his ‘hardliner’ credentials though.
And Som continued to play the ‘Hindu card’. In the 2017 elections, local
observers pointed out that he faced a tough contest. And Som went back to
capitalizing on the riots that had devastated Muzaffarnagar and helped the party
in the Lok Sabha elections in the region. During the campaign, he distributed
inflammatory CDs of the riots, once again trying to stoke communal
polarization. He was booked for violating the poll code.

The riot was helping the BJP, even four years later.

It was early morning, the best time to meet candidates on the campaign trail,
before they set out for the rural pockets of their area. Outside Sangeet Som’s
house in Sardhana, I met Raj Kumar Saini, a party supporter.

‘In this state, there is atyachar, exploitation, of Hindus. For the Muzaffarnagar
riots, Hindu boys are still in prison but all the Muslims are having a good time.
Hindu girls have been raped in UP but Muslim girls are pampered. What we
need is Hindus to vote together.’
The perception of what happened during the riots, as well as the propaganda,
was far removed from the reality. More Muslims had died. Muslims had to live
in camps, in difficult circumstances. There were credible reports of rapes of
Muslim women. Yet the Hindu sense of victimhood was sharp. And Saini
reflected that.

‘Yeh sarkar unka hai, this government is theirs. They started the riots. Yet Azam
Khan got their boys released. And then, they got compensation, they got a lot of
money. What did Hindus get?’ Azam Khan, the supreme leader of Muslims in
the Samajwadi Party, was widely perceived to have played a role in protecting
the Muslims involved in the killing of Sachin and Gaurav. His communally
provocative remarks helped the BJP consolidate its supporters. But to believe
that the Muslims were more privileged in Muzaffarnagar because of Khan was
simply untrue.

But facts were not relevant. In a bid to consolidate Hindus, Som was relentlessly
pushing the narrative of how Hindus had been victimized under SP rule.

After talking to Saini, I walked past the security personnel outside the gate, up
the stairs, across a terrace, and entered a large room with three long tables.
People sat on either side, waiting for their turn with the strongman of the area.

Som was injured, his left arm wrapped in a plaster. But the Thakur leader had
not let it slow him down, as he juggled phones, and instructed his assistant to
add a few more villages to his programme. His answers to my questions about
communalism were unapologetic and confident.

‘Why did SP construct boundaries for graveyards, but not for crematoriums and
Ramlila grounds? Why did they spend thousands of crores to make a Haj house
in Ghaziabad, but not a single penny to create a resting house for the Kanwarias
who travel through the same route? Why has the government given scholarships
only to Muslim girls, but not to our girls? Why does Mulayam Yadav say that
only SP can take care of Muslims; hasn’t Akhilesh Yadav allied with the
Congress just for Muslim votes? Don’t Hindus live in this state? They can give
what they want to Muslims, I am not opposed to that, but they must give the
same to Hindus,’ he told me.

Som was returning to a familiar theme that had been central to the BJP’s political
narrative – the theme of ‘appeasement’, or tushtikaran. It was based on the claim
that secular politics in India had meant pro-Muslim politics; secular parties were
pro-Muslim; and in the process, Hindus had lost out. And it was a theme we
would hear repeatedly through the UP campaign.

And so, in this pocket of western UP, less than a hundred kilometres from the
national capital, the BJP campaign was based on glorification of violence, a
narrative of victimhood and prejudice. That the SP government was seen as
discriminating in favour of minorities, instead of applying law universally, aided
the BJP.

It worked.

On 11 March, Sangeet Singh Som was elected as the MLA from Sardhana. He
had bagged 97,921 votes, with his closest rival lagging behind by over 20,000
votes.

***

Sangeet Som represented the norm, not the exception.

In Amroha, the former test cricketer Chetan Chauhan was contesting the
assembly elections. Over tea in his constituency, Chauhan was clear that the
‘majority community’ in his area felt let down. ‘Work has only happened for
Muslims.’ He alleged that SP MLAs had protected those who ‘robbed and looted
land’; that these crimes had been committed mostly by the ‘minority
community’; that there was a reaction against their ‘goondagardi’; and candidly
admitted that the BJP would tap into this anger. ‘Hindus have got battered for
five years . . . They will consolidate.’

This was a remarkable campaign platform. For a candidate to so openly point to

one community as being responsible for crime, generate resentment in another
(more dominant) community and hope to gain from it revealed the BJP’s clearly
cynical use of the politics of religion. Like the narrative around Muzaffarnagar,
none of this was backed by facts and evidence. It was enough to construct a
perception, through images and texts, using WhatsApp and the wide
organizational network, of the Muslim as the criminal and the Hindu as the
victim, of all other parties as only working for the Muslim and the BJP as the
sole defender of Hindu interests.

It worked.

Chetan Chauhan was comfortably elected as the new MLA representing the
people of Nauganwa. He got 97,030 votes. His victory margin, like that of Som,
was over 20,000 votes.

He is today the minister of sports, with cabinet rank, of India’s largest state.

***

Many tend to compartmentalize the BJP’s use of the development card, the law
and order card, and the Hindu card and treat them as distinct platforms. This
ignores how cleverly the BJP often juxtaposes all three into a common narrative.
And in this process, it is happy to use what it knows to be lies. Take the other
issues it raised in western UP.

The party claimed Hindus were insecure in Kairana in western UP because of

Muslim gangsters, that they had to flee because of this fear and that Kairana had
become the ‘new Kashmir’. All independent fact-finding teams found the claims
untrue; migration that had taken place was in the search of better opportunities.
Once again, like the narrative of Muslims as the lucky ones in Muzaffarnagar or
Muslims as the criminals in Amroha, the narrative of the Muslim as the gangster
and the Hindu as the forced migrant in Kairana was spread, even though it was
just as untrue. Through the WhatsApp groups – and the BJP Lucknow office
itself ran over 800 such groups – and social media, particularly Facebook, a
narrative of ‘Hindu insecurity’ was constructed. A party leader, when confronted
with the fact that this was just not true, admitted to me, ‘Bhai saheb, that does
not matter. The point is to show we are the victims. This will get Hindus angry.
They will then realize they have to unite against the Muslims.’

A similar narrative was built up about illegal slaughterhouses, and how it had
been promoted by the pro-Muslim SP government. The official spin was that this
was linked to law and order, to environment and hygiene, to abiding by laws and
municipal norms. But the same leader candidly admitted the underlying
calculation: ‘When you think of these slaughterhouses, what images come to
your mind? I think of Muslim butchers, cow slaughter and blood on the streets. I
think of how the Muslims have taken over our public life, how they are
destroying our culture and lifestyle, of how there are chicken and meat shops
everywhere, and how they have become rich doing this. By raising it, we want to
wake up the Hindu, get him angry.’

But the most dubious narrative that the BJP and its ideological affiliates spread
across UP – and even in other parts of the country – was that of ‘love jihad’. The
term had gained currency during the Muzaffarnagar riots, when Sangh activists
pushed the theory that Muslim boys used tricks and lies to woo Hindu girls,
entrapped them into relationships and converted them. This was, they argued,
‘demographic aggression’ – it was an organized conspiracy to increase Muslim
population and reduce Hindus to a minority. Over the past three years, the theory
of ‘love jihad’ had become a part of everyday conversations across west UP.

Truth was again irrelevant to the claim. There was, first, no proof that inter-
religious relationships and marriages had indeed increased. Two, even if they
had increased, there was no evidence that this was part of any ‘organized’
Muslim conspiracy. It may have been a function of growing interaction between
young adults of different religions in secular spaces like universities and markets
in a region which had a mixed population. And three, the entire construct – as
multiple false cases and allegations showed – was a patriarchal attempt to
control women from having agency.

But the BJP had successfully used the idea to generate resentment and suspicion
of Muslims. It had successfully instilled fear among Hindu parents, as well as
Hindu girls. And the party had connected it to its election campaign. ‘One of our
big platforms in this election, in west UP, is the anti-Romeo squad. This is a law
and order issue. Women security is a real issue. But it is also about love jihad,’
said the BJP state spokesperson Chandramohan candidly. But instead of
explicitly using the term in the 2017 election, the BJP promised anti-Romeo
squads. He added with a smile, ‘The anti-Romeo squad is actually the anti-
Salman squad. It is the anti-Naushad squad.’

In one of its first policy actions after taking charge, the new BJP government
deployed anti-Romeo squads and cracked down on illegal slaughterhouses.

The pattern was obvious. The BJP had picked campaign themes which would
instil anxieties and anger among Hindus, and generate suspicion and hatred for
Muslims. It had been less than truthful in its messaging, and indeed used brazen
lies – by pointing to Muslims as the advantaged community in Muzaffarnagar,
by explicitly attributing all crime to Muslims in Amroha, by alleging Muslim
gangs had pushed out Hindus in Kairana, by creating the image of the Muslim
butcher destroying cultural values and by arguing that Muslim men across the
state were entrapping Hindu women. In all this, the narrative went, the
opposition parties were backing the Muslims. The BJP would defend Hindu
interests, rights, values and culture. And for that, it needed their votes. The
conscious attempt to stoke divisions – called ‘polarization’ in the political
lexicon – was deeply cynical and potentially dangerous.

***

The issue of Muslim appeasement was picked up by the highest leadership.

At the Drummond College in Pilibhit, as Amit Shah’s chopper landed, he was

honoured by the city’s Sikh community, who tied him a turban – a concession
not given by either the prime minister or Shah to the Muslim skullcap.

During his speech, after a defence of the central government’s record and a
critique of the SP’s record, Shah changed his line of attack.

‘Did you get the laptop Akhilesh promised?’ Shah roared. Without waiting for a
response, he replied, ‘You didn’t because your caste is not right; you didn’t
because your religion is not right.

‘Did your girls get the scholarship Akhilesh promised?’ Shah asked. ‘No, you
didn’t because your religion is not right.’

The loudest cheer came from a tiny section of saffron-clad young men, who
responded with the chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’.

Shah was tapping into the underlying sentiment that Som and Chauhan
articulated and nurtured – the SP’s governance regime was discriminatory. But
like Som and Chauhan’s claims, it was not completely rooted in facts. The
distribution of laptops, by all accounts, had been fair and non-discriminatory.
Towards the end of the campaign, Akhilesh Yadav began reciting the names of
students who had received laptops – and it included children and young adults
from all castes and communities.

But Shah’s attack struck a chord, for enough people believed that the SP was
prejudiced in favour of Muslims. For this, the SP had no one to blame but itself,
for it was an image the party had proudly cultivated since the days of Mulayam
Singh to woo the minority vote, an image which came back to haunt it now when
a political force was systematically tapping into the majority vote.

Shah drilled this message into his audience elsewhere too.

In west UP, the BJP had swept the elections in 2014. The aftermath of the riots
had polarized society, the Hindu–Muslim fault line had deepened and Jats in
particular had overwhelmingly voted for the BJP.

But this time around, there was a sense that Jats were unhappy with the party for
a range of reasons – the BJP’s perceived unwillingness or inability to get the
community included in the central OBC list; its treatment of Jats in Haryana and
the appointment of a non-Jat as chief minister; its inability to get out of prison
young Jat men implicated in the riots; its disrespect towards Chaudhary Charan
Singh, on whose birth anniversary Prime Minister Modi had not tweeted and
whose family had been displaced from their bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi.

At the same time, their gulf with Muslims persisted. The two communities
blamed each other for what had happened. Muslims saw Jats as aggressors,
responsible for the violence and displacement of thousands in camps. Jats saw
the Muslims as having started the battle, getting away because they had their
government in Lucknow which pampered them with relief and held them
responsible for the arrest of the young men of their community.

On the day before the first phase of polling, an audio-tape of Amit Shah got
leaked. He was heard speaking to Jat community leaders at the Delhi residence
of Jat leader and central minister Chaudhary Birendra Singh. Making a fervent
plea to the community to stick to the BJP and offering promises, he asked them a
simple question.

‘If we lose, who will win?’ Murmurs were heard, with people suggesting
gathbandhan. ‘The SP alliance,’ Shah replied. ‘Who will become the CM? And
what will you get?’ This time, someone was heard replying loudly,
‘Muzaffarnagar ke dange, riots.’

In the recording, Shah repeated the question some time later. ‘What will happen
if you do not vote for us? The BJP will lose. In this belt, we are dependent on
you. We cannot think of winning without you. But the biradari, community, will
lose too. Think about those who will sit in power, think of all they have done to
the biradari, think of what they will do to the biradari.’

It was left unsaid, but Shah’s hint about who would come to power was obvious.
And it was unlikely he was just referring to a party or a leader. It was for the Jats
to decide whom they disliked more: Muslims and parties which favoured them
or the BJP.

In another public speech, he was even more explicit, warning UP against

KASAB, an acronym devised for the Congress (KA), Samajwadi Party (SA) and
Bahujan Samaj Party (B). This associated the rival parties not just with Muslims,
but with the Pakistani who had come to define modern-day terrorism in India for
his role in the Mumbai attacks. Shah was doing exactly what the party
machinery on the ground was doing – making the Hindu anxious, making the
Muslim the object of suspicion and making all other parties seem as champions
only of Muslims, those potential terrorists.

The message was obvious – to save UP from Muslims, and thus to save UP from
terrorists, the Hindus had to wake up and vote for the BJP.

***

If the rivals had to be projected as pandering to Muslims, it was important for the
BJP to maintain ‘purity’. Under Shah’s leadership, the BJP did not give a single
ticket to a Muslim. For liberal critics, this was a weakness – it reflected all that
was wrong with the party, and was thus a reason to put the BJP in the dock.

For the party faithful and its ideological affiliates though, this was a sign of
strength.

The party’s official explanation was simple. They judged candidates on

winnability; there was no winnable Muslim candidate; Muslims did not vote for
the party; and so it was naive and wrong to expect the party to give them tickets.
But there was a deeper ideological subtext.

Soon after the 2014 elections, I had gone to visit Ashok Singhal. The eighty-
eight-year-old Singhal was speaking to a media entrepreneur, with BJP links, and
in my presence, told him, ‘You have ties with Muslims also. Tell them that 2014
has shown that elections can be won without Muslim support. It is time for them
to understand that and respect Hindu sentiments.’

Singhal elaborated: ‘For too long, Muslims have thought they have a veto on the
nation. But this has also consolidated the Hindus. Today, the Hindus have come
together. After 700 years, a proud Hindu is ruling Delhi. And Muslims have
become irrelevant. This is a setback to them. The tables have turned.’

Singhal died in 2016, but the worldview thrives. In the middle of the 2017
election, a BJP leader echoed Singhal in Lucknow: ‘We want anti-Muslim
polarization. Why pretend otherwise? We don’t believe in these games of giving
one ticket to Muslims to please Dilliwalas.’

For their part, the Muslims too knew who they were not voting for.

A young Muslim in Ambedkar Park in Lucknow said he could never forgive

Narendra Modi for 2002. A Muslim student at Deoband said he thought Modi
had ‘improved’, but Yogi Adityanath and Sakshi Maharaj’s statements made him
furious. The maulanas of Dargah-e-Ala-Hazrat in Bareilly, one of Islam’s most
influential seminaries, said it was the BJP’s stance on the uniform civil code and,
more recently, triple talaq that riled them the most.

A Muslim trader in Jhansi said that he was not worried if Modi came to power,
for there had been no riots under him as prime minister, despite fears that there
would be bloodshed – but the problem was that Muslims had no access to the
sarkar when the BJP was in power; they had no sunwai, no voice. A Muslim
mechanic in Kanpur Dehat’s Akbarpur Bazar elaborated on this theme, and said,
‘The BJP cannot kill all of us. They cannot send us to Pakistan either. All they
want is to keep us out of power. They want to exclude us, they want to subjugate
us.’

A Muslim cleric in Deoband, the other globally influential Islamic seminary in

west UP, had a variant of this explanation. He said the problem was that the BJP
itself did not seek Muslim votes. ‘Because they want to show us as the problem
and unite everyone else. How can there be any conversation then?’

But while Muslims knew they would not vote for the BJP, it did not necessarily
mean they all planned to vote together or only vote to defeat the BJP. There is
ample evidence now to suggest a fragmentation does take place among Muslims,
on the urban–rural, caste, class, party matrix. And with both the SP–Congress
alliance and the BSP desperately wooing the ‘Muslim vote’, there was a division
of votes. It also had, from the Muslim point of view, the damaging effect of
providing the BJP with ammunition to polarize even more deeply, and
consolidate the Hindus.

A BJP strategist admitted, ‘Yes, we of course used it. Everyone was wooing the
Muslims. We told the Hindus – they will unite, will we always remain divided?
Trump in the US showed that it is not blacks and Hispanics and Muslims who
will decide who becomes US president. It is whites. Here too, it is not Muslims
who will decide who rules UP. It is all other Hindus. They want to defeat us. We
want to defeat them and their parties. It is a battle.’

In the battle, his side won. In the new assembly, there are twenty-five Muslim
legislators, a drop from the sixty-eight elected in 2012. No Muslim sits on the
treasury benches of India’s largest state, which has over 40 million of them.

***

Before he sets out for his campaign run, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office
receives an email from the party. This provides him a brief history and the
political context of the region where his rally is scheduled, the key issues, the
key personalities of the area and the BJP’s political talking points.

The prime minister glances at the paper and absorbs the issues highlighted.

But there is no expectation that he will stick to any script. An official who has
worked with him closely speaks admiringly of his ability to package talking
points in the simplest manner possible, and tailor it for the audience depending
on its mood and responses. He may pick certain inputs, but he is often original.
He speaks extempore and does not even consult any notes except names and
places he has to refer to.
All this means that no one quite knows what Modi is going to say.

And that is why, except maybe Amit Shah, no one expected the prime minister
of India to say what he did in Fatehpur, on 19 February, as polling for the third
phase of voting was under way in the wider Awadh belt.

Modi started his speech, as he does, with a chant of Bharat Mata ki Jai. The
audience responded, as it does, with enthusiasm. He then took the names of each
party functionary on the stage – a standard ploy to make them feel important,
and give a sense to the crowd of the different communities represented on the
stage – and introduced the candidates contesting from the district. Each of them
came and stood next to him, brandishing a cut-out of the lotus.

The prime minister promised ‘vikas ki Ganga’. He mocked the SP–Congress

alliance, spoke about the inevitability of their defeat and accused the SP of
converting police thanas into party offices and patronizing criminals. He
committed to waiving loans of farmers and spoke about other development
initiatives of the central government.

But 35 minutes into his speech, Modi laid out the most detailed exposition yet, in
his own manner, of the politics of ‘appeasement’, without once mentioning the
term.

‘We believe in sabka saath, sabka vikas. There should be justice for everyone.
Under Ujjwala, we have distributed cylinders. We did not say, Modi is the MP
from Banaras, so only Banaras residents will get it. No, everyone in every corner
of UP would get it, on an equal basis. We did not say only Hindus will get it,
Muslims will not get it. Everyone will get it, everyone in queue will get it. We
did not say this caste will get it, this caste will not get it. Nahin, no. Everyone
would get it according to the village list as per their turn, and everyone’s rights
would be fulfilled in the coming days. Mera–paraya nahin chalta hai, us and
them does not work. A government has no right to do this.’

And that is why, Modi added, discrimination in UP is its biggest problem.

‘Discrimination is at the root of injustice. You tell me – is there discrimination or
not?’ The crowd roared, ‘Yes.’

Modi continued, ‘I am perplexed. In UP, you ask a Dalit and he says I don’t get
my share, OBCs take it. OBCs say we don’t get our share, Yadavs take it. Ask
Yadavs and they say only those attached to the family get it, and the rest goes to
Muslims – even we don’t get it. Everyone is complaining. This discrimination
cannot work. Everyone must get according to their right. This is sabka saath,
sabka vikas and the BJP is committed to it.’

And then, after laying the context and the philosophical basis of what he was
saying, Modi threw in a knock-out punch – which he must have known would
become the battle cry of the 2017 election.

‘That is why if a graveyard, kabristan, is made in a village, a shamshanghat,

crematorium, must also be built. If electricity is provided during Ramzan, it must
be provided during Diwali. If electricity is provided during Holi, it must be
given during Eid. There must be no discrimination. It is the government’s task to
provide a discrimination-free administration. There should be no injustice, never
on the basis of religion, never on the basis of caste, never on the basis of high
and low. This is sabka saath, sabka vikas.’

This was an extraordinarily significant speech.

Read in its entirety, devoid of context, not one word was out of place. Modi had
framed this not as a debate on religion, not as a debate on caste, not as a debate
on the BJP’s much-favoured term ‘appeasement’, but on the constitutional duty
of the state to treat all citizens equally. Many would argue that this is precisely
what Modi himself, as chief minister, had failed to do back in Gujarat in 2002.
But in Fatehpur, his appeal was couched in a language that was unobjectionable.

But when placed in the political context in which it was being said, Modi’s
signal was unmistakable. There was no substantive difference between what
Modi had said and what Sangeet Som had said in Sardhana, what Chetan
Chauhan had said in Amroha, and what his chief lieutenant, Amit Shah, would
say in Pilibhit.

It was meant to make the Hindu bitter at what he was not getting; it was meant to
make him feel resentful of the Muslim for being pampered; it was meant to
bracket all other parties as pandering to specific interests based on religion. In
the name of a common citizenry and an unbiased state, it was meant to divide
communities.
And as with the other claims, Modi’s argument too was not entirely rooted in
evidence – for there was little to suggest that the government deliberately
enabled the celebration of Eid and obstructed the celebration of Diwali by
ensuring continuous supply of electricity in one case and not the other.

As the message percolated down, the phrase that became most popular was his
juxtaposition of kabristan–shamshanghat, Ramzan–Diwali, and how the
government was favouring one over the other. This, in turn, was interpreted as
how the government was favouring Muslims over Hindus. And this, in turn,
generated anger not just against the government but the other community, the
Muslims in this case.

‘Modiji sahi keh rahein hain. Sab Musalmanon ke liye kaam ho raha hai. Modji
is right. Everything is only being done for Muslims,’ Ram Patel, a Kurmi trader
in a Mirzapur bazaar, told me. A mind as politically astute as Modi’s could not
but have known how the message would be heard. It worked.

***

Why did Modi’s message, and the larger BJP message, on this particular theme
resonate both in 2014 and in 2017?

I spent over seventy-five days in UP, including a month at a stretch during the
elections, in late 2016 and early 2017. I travelled to every corner of the state,
often multiple times. And I met hundreds and hundreds of people – from every
community. But through this journey, I did not hear a single Hindu utter the
word that has defined national politics for so long – secularism.

Muslims, yes, continue to use the word. They look longingly at ‘secular parties’,
and include the Congress, SP and to a lesser extent the BSP within that
framework. Politicians from these parties too, sporadically, use the term to
appeal for votes from minorities.

But even those Hindus who were not voting for the BJP, who belonged to SP
families, who were traditional BSP supporters, who were with the Congress, had
a set of reasons to support their respective parties. The reason they never offered
was secularism.
The end of ‘secularism’ in everyday political discourse requires much deeper
investigation. A good case can be made about how the Sangh’s sustained
‘communal propaganda’ over the decades is finally showing its results. The scale
of innuendo and sometimes outright deception, the use of technology and
organizational networks to spread messages that are at best partial and at worst
outright false, and the systematic manner in which the party – from the prime
minister to the booth worker – works in pushing it has altered the conversation
entirely.

There can be a view that it is the administrative and governance failure of parties
which publicly associated themselves with the idea of secularism that discredited
secularism itself. There can be a view that the end of the use of the term does not
necessarily mean that people do not hold dear the values of harmony, tolerance
and state neutrality in matters of religion or that they have turned ‘regressive’.

But one powerful explanation is that the secular parties in states like UP have
themselves reduced the idea of secularism to appeal to the minority vote. The
more they did this, the more it created the space for the BJP to consolidate
Hindus.

Indeed, the experience of Bihar in 2015 shows that there is nothing inevitable
about an electoral victory based on the Hindu card, if the opposition plays its
cards right.

Like Lalu Prasad hoped to convert the Bihar election into a ‘forward–backward’
contest, the BJP wanted to make it a ‘Hindu–Muslim’ election. If Hindus
consolidated, the game was over. To be fair, using the religion prism was not
unique to them. A key trigger for the Nitish–Lalu–Congress alliance was to
ensure that the Muslims consolidated, rather than fragment as they had in 2014.

To do this, the party resorted to the language of ‘polarization’.

Amit Shah declared that if the BJP lost the election, Diwali would be celebrated
in Pakistan.

To an observer, it may have seemed like regular poll-time rhetoric but the
statement had multiple layers. It first projected the BJP as the party defending
India; implicit in it was the fact that the other parties in the fray were ‘anti-
national’.

But the other hidden meaning, sent out to the base, was even clearer. It was no
secret that the state’s substantial minority population wanted the BJP to lose.
And so Bihar’s Muslims would celebrate BJP’s defeat; Indian Muslims and
Pakistanis were the same in the imagination of the hardline Hindu base; and
therefore BJP’s defeat would be celebrated in Pakistan. Shah had resorted to the
classic technique of the Sangh ecosystem – of fusing nationalism and religion,
and projecting itself as the sole defender of the principle. This was exactly what
he did with his reference to KASAB in UP.

The BJP also played the beef card. In UP’s Dadri, Mohammad Akhlaq had been
lynched in September 2015 for allegedly possessing and consuming beef. The
BJP had claimed this was a law and order issue, and since law and order was a
state subject, there was little it could do about it. But its affiliates had stood up to
defend the alleged murderers, and tried to keep the focus on the issue of beef
rather than on the killing.

Lalu Prasad had, in a speech soon after the killing, said even Hindus ate beef,
and warned the Sangh and BJP not to communalize the issue. The BJP smelled
an opportunity. By portraying the mahagathbandhan as defending cow slaughter
and beef consumption, it could turn Hindus – and even Yadavs – away from
Lalu, the party calculated. Modi himself said the remark had ‘insulted’
Yaduvanshis, as Lalu beat a hasty retreat.

Yet, despite these efforts and what many even in Lalu’s camp saw as a potential
blunder, the Hindu card did not work in Bihar. Why?

A top BJP leader offered an explanation. ‘For one, you have to understand Bihar
is not UP. There has been a history of polarization in UP. Ayodhya, Kashi,
Mathura are all there. After the Bhagalpur riots in 1989, there hasn’t been a
major riot in Bihar. The relations between communities here are not as
acrimonious. We should have factored that in.’

But it was not just intercommunity dynamics, it was the politics. Nitish Kumar
had been careful never to project himself as the leader of Muslims, who would
go out to defend their interests at all costs. He had, by breaking from Modi, won
their loyalty. But unlike Mulayam Singh in UP, he had never been identified too
closely with only that community. This made it more difficult for the BJP to use
the language of appeasement, and how the government favoured Muslims over
Hindus. Lalu Prasad was a different issue. His politics rested on a Muslim–
Yadav coalition, and he had been vocal on Muslim issues. But in 2015, even he
toned down his rhetoric and stayed away – for the most part – from entering a
debate on the secular–communal binary.

A key leader of the RJD offered an explanation: ‘Muslim leaders came to us and
told us clearly they will be with the mahagathbandhan. We don’t need to worry
about them at all. And then they said don’t talk about us. It will help them
consolidate the Hindus. Talk about other issues. We will keep quiet and come
and vote.’

The BJP too could see this at work. Even in constituencies in districts with a
substantial Muslim presence like Katihar and Araria, the mahagathbandhan put
up a Hindu candidate to prevent the BJP from converting it into a Hindu–Muslim
election. It succeeded, for Muslims voted for the Hindu candidate of the alliance.
‘They managed to avoid polarization through these clever tactics,’ admitted a
BJP leader, almost admiringly.

All this meant that the BJP’s Pakistan and beef strategy boomeranged. Not only
did it fail in uniting Hindus, it helped consolidate Muslims and led to more
aggressive voting on their part. ‘They would have been with the alliance anyway,
but our aggression made them insecure. Their turnout was high, even if they
cleverly remained quiet,’ said the same BJP leader.

There is no set formula. The BJP’s Hindu card has worked resoundingly well for
the party in certain contexts. In Bihar, this did not happen. Besides the
uniqueness of the Bihar political landscape, it indicates that by itself the Hindu
card is not enough, and it is just one ingredient in a more complex dish.

But even the Bihar experience offers an insight into how society and politics are
changing. The ‘secular parties’ in Bihar won not by highlighting their
secularism, but by downplaying it. They won not by openly articulating the
aspirations of the minorities, but by deciding to go quiet on it. That the
mahagathbandhan was assured of the Muslim vote and did not have to compete
for it allowed it to play it this way. In UP, the ‘secular’ parties played up their
secularism. That two secular blocs – BSP and SP–Congress – were competing
for the same Muslim vote meant they were aggressively articulating their
aspirations. This left space for the BJP to build a counter-narrative.

The end of secularism as a value in itself has profound electoral implications.

And if BJP’s extraordinarily cynical majoritarian political project is one possible
reason for it, the role of secular parties in reducing the idea to minority votes is
another.

***

Emboldened by UP, the RSS and BJP believe their ideological project is on
track. A key BJP insider said, ‘Nations are built on majoritarian identities. India
was an aberration because the liberal elite held disproportionate power. Hindus
were not organized. The fact is this is a Hindu nation. What we are seeing is this
assertion at the ballot box. Those who will not fit into this mould, who will not
accept the values of the majority, will get marginalized. This is the old Sangh
position. We are seeing it play out electorally.’

Through elections, a Hindu nation, he insisted, was coming into being.

Many on the ground saw the battle this way too.

After the 2017 assembly election, at a Khan Market coffee shop in New Delhi, a
young, newly elected BJP MLA from a west UP district, explained his victory.

‘It was an India–Pakistan election,’ he said blithely.

India had won. The Hindus had won – in 2014, in many state elections after that
and in 2017, to capture the biggest state prize, UP.
 Beyond the Heartland
The BJP today is India’s pre-eminent national party.

Just as it is no longer an upper-caste party, it is no longer a North Indian party. In

the core Hindi heartland, the BJP’s fundamental class and caste character is
changing, enabling its electoral success. But beyond the heartland, in the most
unlikely of places, its expansion rests on a mix of three strategies – co-option of
existing political elites; dilution of the ideological core; pragmatic adaption to
specific realities.

The expansion beyond its traditional areas of strength is a part of Narendra Modi
and Amit Shah’s carefully crafted plan. And in key areas, it is being executed by
the old RSS hand, and one of the most influential leaders in the BJP today, who
straddles the world of domestic politics, national security and foreign policy,
Ram Madhav.

***

When Ram Madhav transitioned into the party after the Lok Sabha elections, his
mandate was winning the North-East.

But before that, an unexpected brief came his way.

When Rajnath Singh took over as home minister, the party needed to pick a new
president in keeping with its broad principle of one person, one post. The choice
narrowed down to Amit Shah – who had made a name for himself with the
party’s success in UP in 2014 – and J.P. Nadda – a key organizational figure. A
substantial section of the Sangh pitched for Nadda, but Modi’s backing saw Shah
through. Nadda was then given a choice. Would he like to stay on in the party
organization or work in the government? Nadda opted for the latter, and went on
to become health minister in the Government of India.

This, however, created a vacancy. Nadda was the Jammu and Kashmir in-charge
for the party. The BJP needed a new person to take charge, and Shah told
Madhav, ‘Aap zara dekh lijiyega, please look after it.’ Again, the choice had a
context. Madhav had travelled to the state during his Sangh years, and he knew
the intelligence–security establishment – which plays a major role in the politics
of the state – quite well. The problem was he only had two months before the
elections.

Madhav embarked on a two-pronged strategy – consolidate and sweep Jammu,

and register a presence in the Kashmir Valley, which would be hugely symbolic.
The ambition of wanting to form the government in India’s only Muslim-
majority province, a province that had long seen a separatist movement, and
hoping to win seats in the valley itself which was the hub of this movement, was
staggering. But it reflected the energy and expansionist drive that had suffused
the BJP since 2014, under Modi and Shah.

In its pursuit of seats in the valley, Madhav recalled, a major turning point was
getting on board the former separatist leader Sajjad Lone. Madhav worked on
him for weeks, and eventually arranged a meeting for Lone with Prime Minister
Modi. The former separatist came on board.

‘We also relied on Modiji’s appeal in the valley. We wanted him to do a rally
there. Most people, including the security agencies, were uncomfortable. But I
sat there for a week, Sajjad’s role was very important too, and we succeeded in
holding a rally of the PM in Srinagar and people came defying the call of the
separatists,’ he recalled. Even Modi had not expected it. Soon after wrapping up
a rally in Jammu, before proceeding to Srinagar, the prime minister called up
Madhav: ‘Bheed hai? Aana hai kya? Is there a crowd? Should I come?’

The party also sought to convert to its strength what had been a failing of Indian
democracy.

As Sankarshan Thakur reported for the Telegraph , the prospect of voter absence
rather than voter turnout had stirred the BJP into pursuing Kashmir Valley seats.
‘The BJP back room has begun to focus on a few seats that it believes it can
swing with the help of absentee migrant voters. Among these constituencies are
Habbakadal and Amirakadal in Srinagar’s downtown, and the town of Sopore in
north Kashmir.’ These were pockets which once had a substantial number of
Kashmiri Pandits.

Yet, Madhav admits, they failed in their mission. ‘I tried hard to get at least one
seat in the valley; we were unable to do that,’ he admits. ‘The others used this
bogey that Modi is coming to consolidate opinion.’

But if Kashmir had been a setback, Jammu swept the BJP to its highest tally ever
in the assembly.

The Modi wave was still an overwhelming factor for the residents of Jammu. It
had long suffered from a sense of being dominated by the valley – the BJP
tapped into the resentment and promised the region its share in the power
structure. And while Madhav denies it outright, other independent commentators
believe there was a strong Hindu undercurrent, laced with nationalism.

The elections threw up a hung assembly, with the People’s Democratic Party
(PDP) only marginally ahead of the BJP. Madhav first tried to stitch a deal with
the National Conference. In an apartment on Delhi’s Hailey Road, in the same
complex that houses India Foundation, BJP sources told me, Amit Shah and
Madhav met Omar Abdullah and offered him the position of chief minister. The
BJP had also reached out to Farooq Abdullah to convince his son. But Omar,
who BJP leaders insist considered the arrangement in his meeting with them,
went back to the valley and rejected the offer. Omar Abdullah has consistently
denied that such a meeting took place at all.

Madhav then initiated talks with the PDP, whose key electoral plank was that it
would keep the BJP out. That a man steeped in the Sangh worldview was to
negotiate an agreement with the party which was often seen as engaging in ‘soft
separatism’ was ironical. But over months, Madhav was able to strike a deal with
the PDP negotiator, Haseeb Drabu.

The alliance was to come under increasing strain as the situation in the valley
deteriorated over the summer of 2016 and 2017. The contradictions between the
PDP and the BJP, and BJP’s own larger national project and Kashmiri
aspirations, would end up eroding the credibility of the government. Many
would question Madhav’s strategy, but the party argued the mandate did not
leave room for other options.

More importantly for our story, the elections were proof of the BJP’s ambition. It
reflected the party’s ability to ride on the Modi wave. The nationalist, and Hindu,
subtext of the BJP campaign worked well with the Hindu voters of Jammu. It
also showed the party’s pragmatism in wooing and working with a former
radical leader like Sajjad Lone. But the elections also revealed the limits of the
BJP’s expansion. The valley had decisively rejected the party. The belligerence
of Sangh affiliates in the rest of India had damaged the party’s prospects.

But the experience was baptism by fire for Ram Madhav. It was the first time he
was managing an entire election as a political leader.

‘The big lesson for me was that elections are as much about management as
politics. You have to understand each constituency well, you have to manage
your resources, you need to know what to use where, you need to strategize, plan
and execute it carefully.’

All this would hold Madhav in good stead as he heralded the BJP’s entry into the
North-East.

***

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections in Assam were just around the corner.

Narendra Modi was relentlessly campaigning across the country, including in the
North-East. The BJP felt Assam, in particular, was ripe for electoral dividends.

Ram Madhav was still with the Sangh, but travelled to the state frequently.

On one such visit, right before the election, at an official’s house, he met the
Congress leader, a serving cabinet minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma. It was an
open secret in Guwahati’s power corridors that Sarma was unhappy with his
boss, Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, and the Delhi leadership. Gogoi was already
in his third term, and Sarma saw himself as the next natural leader of the party in
the state – a commitment the Congress was not willing to make. Instead, Gogoi’s
son, Gaurav, was being promoted and was fighting the Lok Sabha elections.

Madhav had sensed an opportunity, and had been in touch with Sarma.

At the meeting, he got Sarma to talk to Modi on the phone. Sarma told the prime
ministerial candidate, ‘Modi saheb, don’t worry. You will get two or three seats
more than you expect from here.’

The BJP was to win seven Lok Sabha seats from the state, and a few were with
Sarma’s quiet assistance. In 2011, the party had won 12 per cent of the vote
share in the state. In the 2014 elections, it got 37 per cent of the vote share. The
BJP knew it could now aim for the assembly elections.

A year and a half later, in August 2015, after a grand 25-kilometre roadshow,
with thousands of people accompanying him, Sarma joined the BJP. He brought
along ten Congress MLAs. There was resistance from within the BJP and the
local Sangh unit. But Madhav pushed it through, with a green signal from Amit
Shah.

Sarma would turn out to be the party’s strongest asset in the state elections, held
in May the following year.

Few knew that he had already been an invisible asset to the BJP in the 2014
elections.

Madhav recognized it was a turning point in his plans for Assam. He was acting
on the principle his party chief Amit Shah had always believed in – when you
cannot win yourself, get the man who can win on your side; to get the extra vote
you need, disrupt the opposition and win over those who can get it for you. The
principle synced perfectly with what the pragmatist in Madhav believed.

Sarbananda Sonowal, a serving Union minister who had been selected as the
party’s chief ministerial face, would appeal to the party machinery and cadre.
Sarma would appeal to the masses. It was time to overcome the north-eastern
barrier.

Assam had presented a strange paradox for the BJP.

Here was a state where a key national security issue flagged by the Sangh and
the party had deep political resonance – the immigration of Bangladeshis from
across the border. Yet the party had never been able to capitalize on it. It was the
Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) which championed the issue through the 1980s,
catapulting a young Prafulla Kumar Mahanta as chief minister. And over the
previous fifteen years, the Congress had managed to establish dominance in the
state.

The structural disadvantage of being seen as a North Indian party in a state with
a long tradition of distinctive subnationalism had always haunted the party. The
BJP was also organizationally weak. Gogoi was facing anti-incumbency but was
a rooted leader who had delivered on key welfare schemes. The Congress also
had an excellent booth management system.

The timing of the election was also not particularly ripe.

The BJP had lost Delhi and, in November 2015, it had lost Bihar, despite a high-
profile prime ministerial campaign. There was an increasing sense that Modi had
lost his way. His foreign visits had become a subject of much mockery. Inflation
had spiked – dal prices had skyrocketed, and the Har Har Modi of 2014 had been
replaced by Arhar Modi. During the time, a government official – serving as the
district magistrate of an electorally sensitive district – said, ‘Congress roots are
deep. The 2014 hawa is not there. It will be difficult for the BJP.’

It was against this backdrop that Madhav and Sarma got together to strategize
the way forward.

Their first step was to ensure that the Congress would be totally isolated and
should fight the elections alone. After the success of the mahagathbandhan in
Bihar, there had been a push by many forces – including Bihar Chief Minister
Nitish Kumar – to encourage the Congress into a similar anti-BJP grand alliance
in Assam. This had to be stopped at any cost. And a key figure in this was
Badruddin Ajmal, the Lok Sabha MP from Dhubri and leader of the All India
United Democratic Front (AIUDF). Ajmal had a strong Muslim base, and an
alliance between the Congress and Ajmal would lead to clear consolidation of
Muslims.

The BJP got into action and deployed all means possible to ensure that such an
understanding between the Congress and Ajmal was not struck. The party
succeeded. Ajmal not only fought independently, but also relentlessly criticized
the Congress. To confuse the Muslim voter even further, the BJP projected him
as its key rival. Fragmenting the Muslims was essential to success.

But if one part of the strategy was isolating the Congress, the other element was
widening the BJP’s net of allies as much as possible. And in this quest, Madhav
initiated dialogue with the Bodoland People’s Front, which had 12 MLAs in the
outgoing house and was even a part of Gogoi’s cabinet. The alliance would have
been incomplete without the AGP. And despite tough seat-sharing negotiations,
the AGP joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

Three key elements of Madhav’s strategy were now in place – Sarma had been
brought in, the Congress was isolated and the BJP was leading an umbrella
alliance. It was not all smooth though, and Guwahati was abuzz with how there
were palpable tensions between the party and the Sangh’s local unit on issues of
alliances and election management. But the foundations had been laid for the
campaign.

In terms of agenda, the BJP decided to be on the offensive against the chief
minister. At a time when the Congress was baiting the BJP with deeply personal
attacks on Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah, Madhav’s clear instruction to
the party was not to respond to any attack, as provocative as it may be. ‘The idea
was to attack him [Gogoi], keep the focus on his record.’ The BJP fielded a
strong candidate against Gogoi in his own constituency – so that the chief
minister himself had to spend more time battling his local rival. To ensure that
the focus stayed local, Madhav also decided that the central leadership should
have a limited role. Modi, who had carpet-bombed Bihar with his rallies, did
only three large rallies; Amit Shah addressed two public meetings. The
leadership was given to local, state-level faces.

Independent observers believe that the promise of progress and change was the
key appeal of the BJP.

Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi and Ashish Ranjan of the CPR extensively
travelled in the state during the elections. In a working paper for CPR, they
wrote that while the mainstream narrative on Assam was ‘defined by an
excessive focus on linguistic, ethnic and religious strife’, many voters they met
spoke of development and economic growth, not social conflict, as the key
issues. ‘The Congress has brought peace and stability to the region, but Assam
seems to be falling behind the rest of the country with regard to economic
development. This is the real subtext for the “voters seeking change” in this
election.’

Building on this theme, Sircar and Ranjan wrote in The Hindu : ‘The BJP
returned to a mantra that had served it so well during the 2014 election,
development and change. Mr Sarma was broadly perceived as an effective
Cabinet Minister for Health and Education for the Congress. Coupled with Mr
Modi’s popular image, this strengthened the BJP’s case as a party for the
development of Assam.’

But along with development, identity was a key issue.

It helped that the party’s chief ministerial face, Sarbananda Sonowal, a former
AGP leader, was closely associated with the battle against immigration. Sarma
too vocally raised the issue of Assamese identity, and how it was under threat. In
rally after rally, his refrain was how this was the last chance to save ‘our
identity’. ‘We don’t want Bangladeshi people to encroach not just on our land,
but also our politics. In this election, Bangladeshi immigrants want their own
chief minister,’ he told the journalist Sheela Bhatt of the Indian Express .
Formally, the BJP made a distinction between Indian Muslims and Muslims of
Bangladeshi-origin. But the agenda did help send a message to the Hindus.

Shekhar Gupta has documented the politics of Assam since the early 1980s when
he was posted there as a reporter. In the run-up to the elections, in a column for
the Business Standard , he examined how the RSS had created the political
climate for the BJP to reap dividends. ‘The Assam movement was fuelled by
ethnic chauvinism. It started as an anti-outsider movement, mainly targeted at
both Muslim and Hindu Bengalis and Marwaris. The RSS saw promise in this,
but had to deal with the contradiction of ethnicity and religion.’ Gupta noted that
the RSS worked patiently ‘to shift the emphasis fundamentally from anti-
immigrant to anti-Muslim immigrant. Popular hatred and fear of the “Bongali”,
in this ideological transformation, became anti-Muslim immigrant, or “Mian
Manus”, pejoratively.’

This was also the election that gave birth to a new team of election strategists for
the BJP. Rajat Sethi and Shubhrastha came into their own with this election.

Shubhrastha, a graduate of Delhi’s Miranda House college, had been involved in

the Modi campaign and the Nitish Kumar–Lalu Prasad campaign as a part of
Prashant Kishor’s Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG) – it was here
that she understood the importance of research, media campaigns, data-driven
decision- making and the need to combine a centralized campaign with adapting
to local-level realities.
She had also begun feeling increasingly uncomfortable with campaigns where
outsiders sought to take the data accumulated by a party over years, replace and
almost supplant the party machinery during the election campaign, and then
move on. ‘I really felt you should not take away political capital from the
karyakarta. Instead of acknowledging the role of the party, there is a tendency to
take credit. You can work in a small team, trust party workers,’ she explained
later. And by now, she had become ideologically more aligned with the BJP.

The time to move was ripe.

Rajat Sethi, unlike his partner and future wife, was always on board with the
politics of the BJP. He had met Ram Madhav while studying at the Indian
Institute of Technology, and had invited him to speak at Harvard when he was a
student there. With degrees from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Sethi had returned home in 2015.

Madhav asked Sethi if he would be willing to shift to Guwahati and help with
the Assam campaign. Sethi agreed. As soon as the Bihar elections ended,
Shubhrastha joined him in Assam. The duo began with a constituency-wise
analysis of strengths and weaknesses. Their basic task was providing on-the-
ground inputs and steering the social media campaign – this included managing
the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the leaders; the WhatsApp groups; and the
messaging on hoardings, billboards and in newspapers. They worked with the
ABVP and party cadre.

Ram Madhav says, ‘They played a very important role and provided us real-time
feedback. We were getting to know details about each constituency, for instance,
at noon today, this is the mood in this area. The following day, there would be
feedback on the latest situation. We had people on the ground, feeding these
inputs and we had an app to process it. This was critical.’

All this came together for the BJP, as it swept to power in the state with its allies.

The election once again revealed the BJP’s ambition. It showed the various
strategies and tactics the party was willing to employ to win an election, and its
ruthless pragmatism.

It was willing to co-opt outsiders such as Sarma who had spent all their political
lives criticizing the BJP; it recognized its own vulnerabilities and negotiated
with allies in all humility despite being a national party with a Modi-like figure
ruling from the top; it knew that while in some elections the central leadership is
an asset, in others, the local leadership is more crucial and Assam 2016 fit into
the latter; it tactically fragmented the opposition through various means and
showed that it could succeed in a state with over 30 per cent Muslims; it struck a
balance in managing leaders, giving Sonowal leadership while providing
adequate space to Sarma – a quality that is often missing and leads to deep
internal factionalism in parties, ruining electoral prospects; and it fused the issue
of development and identity.

The implications of the Assam win went far beyond Assam.

The party that had faced two major setbacks in Bihar and Delhi in 2015 was
back with a bang. It gave confidence to the leadership and enthused the cadre. It
also marked the BJP’s arrival in the North-East, making it a truly national party.
And it consolidated the position of Ram Madhav, as his stock and reputation as
an electoral strategist and political mind grew exponentially.

But it was not time to rest, for Manipur was next.

***

In September 2015, N. Biren Singh was an angry man.

Singh – a Congress leader and former minister – was sitting in his lawn at his
residence in Imphal. The Modi government had just signed a framework
agreement with the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isaak-Muivah) –
NSCN (I-M).

Manipur’s primary fault line is between the valley and the hills. The valley is
dominated by Meiteis – who are predominantly Hindu – and the hills by tribals,
particularly Nagas and Kukis, who are Christians. A long-standing demand of
the Naga rebel groups is the creation of a Greater Nagaland which incorporates
the Naga-speaking areas of Manipur. This is unacceptable to the Meiteis of the
valley, who dominate the power structure.

And that is why when the framework deal was signed, without its details being
revealed, Imphal’s political establishment and civil society were suspicious of
the BJP’s intent. The centre had tried to reassure Manipur that it would not be
divided, but the apprehensions persisted.

Would a pan-Naga cultural council – which did not affect territorial boundaries
of the state – be acceptable?

Singh rejected it outright.

‘What is this cultural council? Punjabis are there in India and Pakistan – will
Delhi allow them to have a cultural council? Will Delhi allow the Pakistani flag
in Kashmir? Why should we tolerate Nagas having mixed loyalties, allow a
Naga flag in our territory?’ He went on to argue that Delhi – which meant the
BJP government at the centre – was backing ‘Christian tribals’, who are
conspiring to push the statehood agenda.

A year and a half later, in March 2017, N. Biren Singh had seamlessly
transitioned to the party he had criticized; he was sworn in as the first BJP chief
minister of Manipur. How did it happen?

***

Ram Madhav knew Manipur may be his toughest assignment yet.

In Jammu and Kashmir, the BJP had a base to start with, for Jammu was
hospitable territory politically. In Assam, the BJP had done reasonably well in
the Lok Sabha elections, and had some foundation to build on.

But in Manipur, the party had nothing.

It had no representative in the assembly. It had no MP from the state. It had won
2 per cent vote share in the previous election. It had no organization. It had no
leaders. It did not even have strong candidates. They were, literally, starting from
zero.

But what it did have was power at the centre, and this provided a psychological
and political boost.

Pradip Phanjoubam, editor of the Free Imphal Press and one of Manipur’s
leading public intellectuals, said, ‘There is a belief in all small and financially
weak north-eastern states that the states will have it much easier if it aligns with
the party in power in the centre. This is the outlook both of the politicians and
electorate. There have been severe financial crunches in the past when the
parties in power at the centre and the state were different, and these probably
were partly coincidental but I am sure by design as well.’

Indeed, during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s prime ministership, the BJP first opened
its account in Manipur – with four MLAs. When a ceasefire deal with the NSCN
(I-M) was extended in 2001, it generated the same apprehensions in Manipur
that we had earlier heard N. Biren Singh articulate. The BJP lost successive
elections, and the fact that the Congress was in power at the centre all these
years helped ‘ensure this fate’, argued Phanjoubam.

But while the BJP did have this advantage, the election still had to be fought on
the ground. There was no automatic, easy pathway, and while having power at
the centre was helpful, it was no guarantee of victory. And for this, Madhav
would have to deploy the same tools he had used elsewhere.

For one, the party knew it had to create a pool of leaders.

‘We knew that in the absence of a strong organization, we were dependent on

Modiji’s image and the strength of the local candidate, and so it was important to
get that,’ Madhav admitted. Like wooing Sajjad Lone in Kashmir and co-opting
Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, Madhav looked to outsiders. N. Biren Singh, a
footballer-turned- politician, was one such leader who was brought in, along
with others from the Congress.

The other big challenge was articulating a coherent party platform and agenda.
And in this, the BJP displayed a remarkable ability to adapt.

It first had to navigate the Meitei–Naga divide. The Meitei-dominated valley has
40 seats and the tribal-dominated hills have 20 seats in the assembly. The BJP
could not disown the framework agreement signed by its own government at the
centre that had so agitated Singh in 2015, yet it had to win over Meitei opinion
in the valley for it to succeed.

In the Naga-dominated areas, smaller Naga outfits who were allies of the NDA
at the centre were contesting elections but separately – for if the BJP was seen as
allied with them, they would lose the Meiteis. If necessary, Madhav calculated,
these groups would back the BJP in Imphal too post-polls. The focus had to be
on the Meiteis, and on getting a substantial share of the 40 seats in the valley.

A key pillar of the Congress campaign was to allege that the BJP would break up
the state. The BJP decided that for the most part it would avoid falling into the
trap except to say that it was committed to Manipur’s unity. And when Prime
Minister Modi addressed a rally in Imphal, the party prodded him to commit to
this position from the stage. With Modi himself committing to the territorial
integrity of Manipur, the party got a boost among the Meiteis. Phanjoubam
confirmed, ‘The fear was allayed to a great extent by assurances of BJP central
leaders, including the PM himself.’

The BJP had another tricky issue to confront, where its traditional stated position
went against what is widely considered the popular opinion in Manipur – the
Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

Irom Sharmila had just ended her fast and declared her intention of contesting
elections. The BJP was not worried about Sharmila, but knew that its position
against diluting or scrapping AFSPA could work against it. Madhav knew how
sensitive the issue was, for he had negotiated with the PDP on the same issue in
Kashmir. The BJP had stuck to its red lines, and not given into PDP’s demands
on AFSPA.

But fortunately for the party, when it commissioned a survey, it discovered that
AFSPA ranked low among the major issues that mattered to Manipur in terms of
the electoral calculus. This was eventually reflected in Sharmila’s own
performance. The remarkable champion of human rights won less than a
hundred votes in her own seat. The BJP stayed away from getting into a debate
on the issue.

What mattered to people, the survey told the BJP, was development and
corruption under Chief Minister Okram Ibobi Singh. And so, as in Assam, the
BJP focused on anti-incumbency and local issues. It ran a high-voltage
advertising campaign targeting the chief minister, calling him Mr Ten Percent,
prompting the rattled chief minister to call editors and warn them.
The BJP also discovered, through the survey, that the issue of ‘encounter
killings’ was high up on the list of popular concerns. Nationally, the BJP is seen
as a party that would prioritize ‘security’ over civil liberties, and is willing to cut
corners, even if it means violations. However, in Manipur, given its popular
resonance, the party took it up as a key platform and turned the tables on the
Congress. It relentlessly highlighted the fact that the state had witnessed 1528
encounters or extrajudicial killings in recent times; it refused a ticket to a former
police official who was identified closely with encounters and it promised a CBI
investigation into the cases. It collaborated with local human rights groups and
projected itself as a party of civil liberties.

The adaptability of the party is reflected in another example. Christian tribal

candidates went around the hills telling people that the BJP was actually the
Bharatiya Jesus Party, only half in jest, to assuage their concerns over the BJP’s
Hindu character.

Indeed, in the North-East, the BJP has made an exception and does not push its
gau raksha or anti-beef agenda. Madhav categorically said, ‘We respect the
cultural diversity of the region.’ There is a clear tension here between its
ideological beliefs and electoral necessities, and the party has opted for the latter.
Phanjoubam agreed, and said the BJP has not pushed North Indian cultural
hegemony in the region. ‘Beef is still sold openly, Bollywood movies remain
banned, there has been no shift in the ways of worship. But it is still too early to
give a clear verdict.’

Madhav was assisted, once again, by the Rajat Sethi and Shubhrastha team.
They had set up base in Imphal towards the end of 2016 and spent six months
there. They conducted extensive interviews, travelled, conducted surveys to
identify issues and help with the strategy. They also shaped the communication
strategy, which was eventually approved by Madhav.

But Manipur’s elections are not just about issues and communication.

Given the presence of dozens of underground outfits that hold sway over
important parts of the state and can determine who votes and how, the BJP
opened channels with some ‘U-Gs’, as they are known in the state. They were
‘managed’ through various means – and one can safely assume this took the
form of monetary inducement, promises of future rehabilitation and political
settlements, and more.

Elections are driven by money everywhere. But political sources in Imphal told
me that the kind of transactional politics that happens here is staggering. Votes
are directly purchased, for anything between Rs 1000 and Rs 5000. This meant
that the BJP too had to deploy considerable resources, which came partly from
Delhi and partly from states where it was ruling in the North-East.

Was it possible for people to take the money and vote as they wish? A Manipur
politician said, ‘It’s not easy. We have small constituencies and small booths. It
is easy to get a sense of which family has voted in what manner.’

Another challenge was internal.

There were multiple power centres in the BJP trying to have a say in the
Manipur election. This led to conflicts over ticket distribution and strategy, and
many in the BJP believe that if there had been a clear delegation of authority –
like in Assam – and Ram Madhav had been given complete charge, the party
may have won more seats.

When the results emerged, the BJP had won the highest vote share. But it had
got 21 seats, much less than the Congress’s 28.

Yet, on the grounds that the mandate was a rejection of the Congress, the BJP
cobbled together a quick alliance. With NDA allies, who had fought separately,
and a few defections from the Congress, the party got past the majority mark.

The BJP had succeeded in bringing together a unity government in the true sense
by having a Naga party, the Naga People’s Front, join the coalition. Madhav
argues, ‘Like bringing the PDP and BJP was a historic thing, I believe what we
have achieved in Manipur is equally historic. Two major forces – Meiteis and
Nagas represented by different political parties – came together.’ Politics in the
state had been a zero-sum game between the two communities, and the NDA
was able to break that.

At the swearing-in, Ram Madhav sat in the front row, another victory under his
belt. If after Assam, he and Himanta Sarma had personally gone to invite Tarun
Gogoi for the swearing-in, this time, in Imphal, he sat next to Ibobi Singh – the
ousted Congress chief minister.

Biren Singh – the angry man of 2015 – took over as the new chief minister. Rajat
Sethi was appointed his adviser.

The Manipur election had revealed the BJP’s continued pragmatism, and its
willingness to absorb leaders from other outfits who commanded influence.
Many worried that this may actually mark BJP’s Congressization – Singh is the
only BJP chief minister at the moment who is a former Congressman. But the
party remains confident that these will only add to its strength, without diluting
its ideological core.

The election, in fact, showed that in its quest for electoral success, the BJP is
flexible on the ideological framework – from managing two sides locked in
hostility, Meiteis and Nagas, and winning over a slice of support from both, to
projecting itself as a party championing civil rights and minority rights. And it
showed that Modi’s appeal transcended regions, with his massive Imphal rally
becoming an important turning point in the election.

But the win’s symbolism went deeper.

The state which had witnessed one of the strongest separatist strands in India,
through multiple movements, was voting for the most self-avowed ‘nationalist’
outfit. The mix of ideological dilution, adaption and co-option was helping the
BJP expand in the most unlikely of regions.
 The Future of the Hegemon
The BJP looks increasingly invincible in the contemporary Indian political
landscape. Most commentators, and even some opposition leaders, believe that it
is only inevitable that Narendra Modi will return to power in 2019. At the end of
July 2017, the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar – often projected as the
potential national challenger to Modi – shifted sides, allied with the BJP, and
publicly declared that defeating the prime minister was impossible in the next
election. Indeed, this is the most likely scenario at the moment.

But Indian politics is unpredictable, and democracy has its own ways of
introducing checks and balances within a polity. Without making any
predictions, based on its record, it may be useful to look at the different variables
that will determine the BJP’s future.

Four broad factors will decide whether India will see a greater expansion, and
the continued hegemony of the BJP, or whether the BJP’s march will get halted.

***

If the BJP’s success is primarily due to Narendra Modi’s wide appeal, the future
of the Modi brand will largely determine the BJP’s future. Modi’s big success
was his appeal across classes – even though the support dipped as income levels
dropped. The political scientist E. Sridharan suggests that in the 2014 elections
38 per cent of the upper-middle class, 32 per cent of the middle class, 31 per cent
of the lower-middle class and 24 per cent of the poor voted for the BJP.

Once in power, Modi came to be too closely associated with the rich and
corporate interests, but he was quick to reinvent himself. And today, he retains
the support of the middle class and has seen a spike in the support of the poor.

Indeed, Modi recognizes that this is a fine balancing act. In his victory speech at
the BJP headquarters in Delhi, after the UP assembly election results on 12
March, declaring his vision for a new India, the prime minister spoke of the
welfare of the garib, poor. ‘I can see the capacity of the poor. I can see their
power . . . If the poor gets educated, he will give results to society. If he gets to
work, he will do more for the country. The poor are the country’s biggest
strength.’

But then he immediately shifted track, seemingly aware that his original base
needed reassurance, and recognized that the middle class often has to shoulder
heavy responsibility. ‘They have to pay taxes. They have to obey rules. They
have to conform to norms of society. They have to bear the maximum economic
load in terms of quantum. This weight on the middle class has to be reduced.
The middle class has capacity, all it wants is there ought to be no obstacle and it
will flourish.’ In a sign of who constituted the BJP’s more vocal support base,
and its organizational structure, the statement was greeted with ‘Modi-Modi’
chants in the party office.

Modi then linked the two, and said, ‘Once the poor of this country have the
capacity to bear their own weight, the weight on the middle class will disappear
completely . . . If we can fuse the power of the poor and the dreams of the
middle class, no one can stop India from scaling new heights.’

The speech is clear in its messaging. Modi recognizes that he has not been able
to meet the expectations of the middle class, but he does not make any additional
promise; he also recognizes there is a lot more to be done for the poor, but holds
out the hope for them that progress is about to happen.

Will Modi be able to sustain a multi-class compact, with his sabka saath, sabka
vikas slogan, and be a leader of the rich, middle class and poor? Or will it
become a zero-sum game between these different constituencies? Will the
discontent first emerge from the constituencies that brought him to power in the
first place: the middle class, India’s business community and youth? Or will it
emerge from the relatively disadvantaged, say, the farmers? The farmers
agitations in mid 2017 are a possible pointer to this.

A top BJP leader, who deals with both the organization and the government,
admitted to potential fault lines.

‘What we are seeing is that the PM has moved on to a new base. And that is
bringing huge benefits to the party. But the party organization has still not
transformed itself. At the moment, everyone is together. But the party’s character
and the PM’s support base may slowly diverge. And that is why the party has to
transform its nature. You cannot have an SUV-driving rich contractor as your
district president if your target is the poor voter.’

He warned, ‘Otherwise, there is a real danger of falling between two stools and
being reduced to a temporary wonder – the poor may not come, and the rich and
middle classes, the business community will find an alternative. What is helping
us at the moment is that there is no challenger nationally.’

Will the BJP’s traditional base of the upper-middle class and middle class push
back against Modi if this trend of focusing on the poor and the lower-middle
class and the less dominant persists?

Shakti Sinha is a retired bureaucrat, with both political insights and academic
interests. Sinha worked closely with Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the Prime
Minister’s Office in the late 1990s, and had a ringside view of the working of the
institution and the leader. He now heads the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library.

He said, ‘What is happening is that even if the traditional supporters are not
prevailing to the extent they used to, their ideas are prevailing. The idea of
Indian nation, pan-Indian identity, a strong state, the willingness to stand up to
adversaries, the rise of India’s status internationally, economic development,
modernity and infrastructure are all ideas very integral to their consciousness
and how they have imagined India. And Modi’s larger messaging and agenda
revolve precisely around those themes.’ Modi’s appeal across sections made him,
Sinha suggested, ‘the strongest figure the Jan Sangh or the BJP has ever seen in
its history’.

Fundamentally, the question of whether Modi can sustain his appeal depends on
policy, delivery and governance.

In the middle of 2017, the economy poses a serious challenge. Growth figures
are down, the introduction of the goods and services tax has disrupted businesses
across the board, jobs are not being created, private investment is down, key
sectors like IT have seen downsizing, the economic after-effects of
demonetization are showing and, despite a good agriculture season, farmers are
up in arms in key states. Top policymakers candidly admit that jobless growth
represents both a political and an economic problem, as a million young people
get added to the workforce every month. Going back to the electorate in 2019
with the promise of ‘achhe din’ fulfilled is looking increasingly unlikely. The
government will have to douse the fires soon, restore the dream of the middle
class, have a single-minded focus on jobs and continue to focus on the poor for
the Modi appeal to last.

***

Politics is the art of managing contradictions. And if Modi’s ability to reconcile

the contradictions between the different segments of his support base is one
variable, the BJP’s ability to reconcile the contradictions across multiple castes –
often standing in direct confrontation with each other – will be the other variable
in determining its electoral success.

Take the case of UP.

As this book documents, the BJP’s real success was in being able to expand its
social base. This was not at the cost of its older base. There was consolidation of
the upper castes, both Brahmans and Thakurs, behind the party in both 2014 and
2017. But it was able to go beyond them to reach out to the backwards,
particularly those groups resentful of Yadav dominance, and Dalits, especially
the ‘invisible castes’ resentful of Jatav dominance.

Will this umbrella coalition last?

Caste groups end up competing with each other for state patronage, resources,
access to power. There are limited opportunities available and so certain caste
groups and, within the caste groups, certain individuals end up cornering more
than their share of positions. Developmental politics itself, the way it is
practised, often becomes a zero-sum game – a road is constructed or schemes are
more effectively implemented depending on whether the constituents of that
village are supporters of the regime in power. Given weak institutions, access to
political power often determines if a person of a specific caste has access to the
local police station and whether the thana is responsive to his complaint.

This flawed political governance model in fact made room for the BJP to win
power. Castes which had felt left out of the power structure during the rule of the
SP or the BSP ended up consolidating behind the Modi cry of ‘sabka saath,
sabka vikas’.
But to deliver on this promise, the BJP needs to reinvent the entire model of
governance. It has to create structures where local police officials respond to
each complaint irrespective of the caste of the complainant and where that caste
figures in the power matrix. It has to appoint individuals to key positions based
on competence and not because the individual happens to be from a caste group
which supported the BJP during elections. It has to steer development
institutions in such a way that delivery is for all, and not based on partisan
affiliations.

This is a tall order.

And that is why contradictions become inevitable. Many in UP believe that a key
feature of the first hundred days of the Yogi Adityanath government is
‘Thakurwaad’, a reference to the return of Thakurs – Yogi’s own caste group – to
positions of power in politics and administration. Data indicates this is not
entirely true. What is true, however, is that upper castes have cornered the
maximum share of power. In a quick survey of police appointments after a
hundred days of the Yogi government, at the end of June 2017, it was found that
out of seventy-five district superintendents of police, forty-two were upper
castes – including twenty Brahmans and thirteen Thakurs. Twenty-five of the
forty-six ministers in Yogi’s government are upper caste. In Saharanpur, clashes
took place between Thakurs and Dalits, and there is a strong narrative among
Dalits that the police backed the Thakurs, emboldened because their own man is
now the chief minister. Many among the backward communities have already
begun feeling that while their votes catapulted the BJP to power, they have not
got their share of benefits yet.

Winning elections on the basis of broad coalitions brings in its own set of
political challenges. In UP, the BJP’s first priority will be to keep the ‘60 per
cent’ – upper castes, non-Yadav backwards and non-Jatav Dalits – intact. It will
also have to manage the remaining 40 per cent – Muslims, Yadavs and Jatavs –
who were out of the BJP’s winning coalition but are powerful enough social
groups to cause disruption and pose governance challenges.

But this is not merely about keeping all social groups happy. The real test for the
BJP, and its ideological mentor, the RSS, is whether it is able to engineer a
change in beliefs and mindset, and reconcile its core upper-caste base with the
subaltern assertion.
The Sangh is changing. It knows that its quest for Hindu unity will remain
incomplete unless it recognizes that Hindu society has been discriminatory,
unequal and hierarchical. It is comfortable with accepting this principle, but is
cautious about the logical corollary – the need for reordering social relations.
The Sangh’s approach to the question of caste thus swings between accepting the
need for justice and the need to avoid disruption of any sort. Like the Congress
party, its own upper-caste character, particularly at leadership levels, lends itself
to a paternalistic, top-down notion of reform, which is now unpalatable to the
empowered backward communities.

It is this tension which was manifested in Mohan Bhagwat’s statement in the

run-up to the Bihar election. It is this attitude that extends to many in the BJP,
and this makes backward communities and Dalits, especially Ambedkarites,
deeply suspicious of the party’s intent – for they see in the rhetoric of inclusion
an upper-caste conspiracy to retain dominance. A top BJP leader from Bihar
admits, ‘We are still not the natural party of the backwards and Dalits. What has
changed is that we are no longer untouchable for them. But it is fragile. They are
watching. And unless sabka saath, sabka vikas translates on the ground, unless
they see their own leaders get prominent space in the party at all levels, unless
they see us take their side in battles against upper castes, they will not fully trust
us. This is a real test for us.’

This test will determine whether the BJP becomes an inclusive Hindu party or
shrinks yet again. It will determine whether the BJP continues to win elections or
reverts to opposition benches, where it has spent most of its political life.

***

Make no mistake. Emphasizing its Hindu credentials, and in the process stoking
resentment against Muslims and ‘secular’ political parties which also cater to
Muslims, has helped the BJP. In this quest, the party is willing to deliberately use
tools of deception. It is willing to disrupt social harmony. It is willing to stoke
low-intensity conflict and even riots.

Many tend to view the BJP in a compartmentalized manner – as a modernist

outfit which believes in vikas and prosperity, and as a Hindu revivalist party
which believes in the politics of hate. And they tend to praise the former, and
hope the latter will fade away or argue it is what keeps the BJP down.
This is an artificial, and false, division. The BJP is both. It is a Hindu party. Its
leaders and support base harbour deep resentment against Muslims. It does not
hesitate to sharpen the Hindu–Muslim divide in the pursuit of political power.
And it also believes that infrastructure, investment and the modern economy are
essential to catapult India to the global high table.

This formula has worked well for it. The 2014 elections had both strands. The
UP election too, as this book documents, had a strong element of Hindutva
rhetoric to accompany the BJP’s promise of development for all. In fact, the two
were often interlinked, for the party claimed that under the SP regime Muslims
had benefited disproportionately and that it would restore equality.

But anti-Muslim politics in itself is not enough to win the BJP elections.

And that is why the future of the party is also dependent on how it calibrates the
use of the Hindutva card. The appointment of Yogi Adityanath was an
acknowledgement, to some extent, of the ‘Hindu’ nature of the mandate and the
Hindu unity which underpinned it. The crackdown on ‘illegal’ slaughterhouses
may have been pushed under the framework of rule of law, and environmental
regulations, but it was a signal to the Muslims. And the cow vigilantism we have
witnessed – from Mohammad Akhlaq’s lynching in 2015 to Pehlu Khan’s
murder in 2017 – is the most violent expression of Hindutva. The BJP and the
Sangh ecosystem may distance themselves from it, and blame it on fringe
groups, but there is no denying the political leadership has not dealt with it
seriously, which in turn has been construed as tacit sanction.

The politics of gau raksha, in fact, offers interesting pointers on the trade-off
involved in Hindutva politics for the BJP.

Many in the party are concerned neither about the killings nor about the criticism
that inevitably follows such incidents. They believe that this helps the party
consolidate Hindus. A party leader says, ‘The violence is wrong. But the
fundamental question here is, should we respect the cow or not? Should we
respect the sentiments of the Hindus of this country, or are only minority
sentiments to be respected and privileged? Should beef consumption be allowed,
hurting Hindu sentiments?’

The incidents, this school of thought argues, polarizes opinion on the issue. And
when there is polarization, even though there may be critiques, there is also a
section of society that gets consolidated. ‘Gau raksha is our old agenda. But
today, the country is talking about it. You may not like it, but for the Hindu on
the street, it is not the violence but the issue of cow protection that is important.’

But this is not a straightforward script, and even within the Sangh–BJP
ecosystem, there is recognition that this kind of belligerent politics has costs.

For one, the BJP has national ambitions.

The 2019 strategy rests on expanding its presence in the North-East and the
South. In fact, the North-East is the one region where the BJP has not spoken of
cow protection and the issue of beef consumption at all. It knows that any such
move will be seen as an attempt to impose North Indian Hindu mores on a
region where subnational sentiments are strong, and would prove electorally
suicidal. But can the region be insulated from what is happening in the rest of the
country? How do BJP’s Kerala expansion plans, where beef festivals are
celebrated, square off with what the party’s affiliates may be doing in UP? There
are already instances of BJP leaders in states like Meghalaya quitting the party
on the issue.

Two, even within its core areas of strength, it is not apparent that this form of
cow politics is actually leading to Hindu consolidation. In fact, it may be
alienating a section of the urban middle-class Hindu vote that went to the BJP in
2014.

From Mumbai bankers to Gurgaon entrepreneurs, all avid Modi supporters, one
has heard disapproval of gau raksha, and disappointment that the BJP is not
doing enough to stop it. Commentators of the right, who supported the party
during 2014, have been relentlessly critical of the party’s turn. Whether they are
merely uncomfortable with this form of politics or repelled enough to go against
the BJP because of it is not clear. But the BJP will have to keep a close watch on
the consequences of extremist politics on the incremental vote that came to the
party in 2014.

And three, it is eroding the BJP’s claims of providing order and governance.
Mob violence hits at the very core of the state monopoly over force. It generates
insecurity. It can lead to widespread lawlessness and trigger major violence.
Indeed, Prime Minister Modi – who has ambitions of being recognized as a
global leader – appears to have recognized the perils of this form of cow
vigilantism and violence. At the end of June, in Sabarmati Ashram in
Ahmedabad, Modi unequivocally condemned killing in the name of ‘gau bhakti’,
said violence has no place in society, and evoked Mahatma Gandhi, who
believed in cow protection, to say he would not have approved.

Both because of ideological and electoral reasons, the BJP will continue to play
the Hindu card. Its leaders often claim that while Hindu consolidation may be its
electoral tactic, its governance strategy remains sabka saath, sabka vikas. This is
a matter of debate. But what is clear is that the BJP’s political future is closely
linked to how it navigates Hindutva politics, whether this politics overwhelms
the party itself or whether the party calibrates its use according to circumstances,
timing and context, and whether it aids or cripples its plans to become a truly
national party.

***

The final variable which will determine the BJP’s future has got nothing to do
with what it does or does not do. You do not win elections on your own always.
The other side loses elections too. And since 2014, there has been no doubt that
the rise of the BJP has been aided by the state of the opposition. Whether the
Congress gets its act together, whether regional ‘secular’ and ‘social justice’
parties reclaim their space, and whether non-BJP parties are able to unite will
play a big role in deciding how long Modi stays in the prime minister’s residence
on the recently renamed Lok Kalyan Marg in the heart of New Delhi.

In the Congress, the old contract between the family and party was simple – the
family would bring in votes, the party would remain loyal to it. The family is no
longer able to bring the votes, but the Congress is stuck. There can be no unified
party without a member of the family at the top, for no leader of the second rung
will accept another as the party boss. And so it waits for Rahul Gandhi to one
day be able to deliver. There are no signs of this happening.

Increasingly, regional parties which have fought on the plank of secularism and
social justice are coming under pressure from the BJP. And this is because the
party has been able to construct a narrative that secularism has meant pandering
to minorities, and social justice has meant giving power to one or two backward
castes at the cost of others. Whether this is fair or not is irrelevant, but it does
generate pressure on these formations to reinvent themselves. Unless they are
able to do that, they will face the BJP onslaught.

And finally, a key variable which will determine the BJP’s future is the index of
opposition unity.

In Bihar, the Grand Alliance of Nitish Kumar–Lalu Prasad–Congress worked.

And the BJP, despite retaining a respectable vote share, was not able to beat the
sheer arithmetic when the three other parties in a four-cornered contest
combined. In UP, there was an alliance – of Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi –
but not a grand alliance, for Mayawati, who commanded over 20 per cent of the
vote, stayed out. The anti-BJP vote fragmented and Modi laughed all the way to
victory.

There are efforts yet again to bring together all opposition parties under a single
umbrella. The defection of Nitish Kumar to the NDA ranks is a big setback to
these plans. But for the rest, the instinct for survival is acting as the glue, for
these parties recognize that separately they will not be able to stop the Modi
juggernaut; collective action is their only hope. Indeed, this will present a
formidable challenge to the BJP.

But even a united opposition will confront four challenges. For one, there is no
consensus on leadership. Will Rahul Gandhi accept a regional leader? Will a
powerful regional leader like Mamata Banerjee accept a Rahul Gandhi? Having
a common pre-election face is imperative in a presidential-like contest,
especially when up against Narendra Modi. But arriving at an agreement on this
face will be the biggest challenge for any such formation – and could well mark
its collapse even before it is formed.

Two, this opposition formation will need to have a credible narrative. If ‘remove
Modi’ is the only message, and the glue that binds them together, then they have
a problem. Modi will project it, much like Indira Gandhi did, as a battle between
him – a man committed to removing India’s poverty, a man committed to India’s
vikas – against a conglomeration of small, scattered, disparate units – united
only by their hatred for him.

Three, a grand alliance in itself is no longer a guarantee of success. All citizens

have agency. Individuals decide their vote independently. And even families, let
alone full communities, do not vote together. This means that vote transferability
is not easy any more. Any alliance succeeds if it is backed with credible
messaging, organizational coordination on the ground and natural convergence
of interests. A top-level diktat does not work.

And finally, it does not solve the problem that it is in bipolar states, where the
BJP is in direct competition with the Congress, that the party has done
remarkably well. The Congress collapsed in states like Rajasthan, Gujarat and
Madhya Pradesh in the previous Lok Sabha election. Opposition unity is not
going to help revive the Congress in these states. And thus, how the opposition
does will once again depend on how the Congress fares – and this in turn will
determine the future of the BJP.

***

The BJP’s rise is a transformational moment in Indian democracy. It may remain

powerful, it may become hegemonic or it may collapse as rapidly as it grew. But
through a mix of strategies, the party has changed the nature of political
contestation in India and is on its way to redefining what it means to be Indian.

How the BJP acquires power is now clear. But winning is easier than ruling.
How the BJP uses the political power it has acquired so successfully will
determine whether Narendra Modi’s dream of a ‘New India’ is fulfilled.
Chapter 9