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