Authors: Patrick French
When we reached Ajmeri Gate, crackers and fireworks were let off by a rowdy gang of BJP workers. The plan was to do a flag march through the almost exclusively Muslim section of the old city. Although it had been cleared with the authorities earlier, I did not realize it had been arranged, and felt anxious. We advanced in a convoy of vehicles through the tiny streets, travelling slower than a walking pace. Flag-waving, drumming and cold drinks had been arranged. People threw rose petals, waved advertising paddles and handed out sun visors in the BJP colours. The driver called out the Muslim greeting, “Salaam Aleikum,” from his window, as if he were being clever. Most of the people we passed kept their heads down, avoiding contact, but some returned the greeting. A woman BJP activist joined us in the vehicle, and as we passed a clothing store she said in a hysterical voice, “What do you think they sell—ladies ki panty [ladies’ panties] or burqa?” It was an unexpected remark. The other workers, all men, sniggered and looked embarrassed.
When we had been drive-marching in the descending evening light for about an hour through the busy, twisting maze of streets in the Muslim quarter, past a man hawking fish, past stalls which sold drill bits and stalls which sold metal cables, past food shops offering “broken chicken” and a bleating goat which was nearly the size of a cow, I realized the members of the convoy were more nervous than arrogant. It was not a triumphalist procession: rather, it was an obligatory pretence by the BJP that they were campaigning seriously in the Muslim area around Ajmeri Gate. They were in, for them, an alien world.
When we reached Asif Ali Road, I got down from Mr. Gupta’s vehicle and took an auto-rickshaw out of the old city. Along the way I passed a scene, one of the Delhi scenes that flash like false images as you glimpse them for one or two seconds: a tipped-up handcart of rice sacks, a stopped bicycle rickshaw, a man lying in the road either unconscious, dead or dead drunk.
An absorbing aspect of the race in Chandni Chowk was the running battle between Vijender Gupta and Kapil Sibal, a high-profile cabinet minister who was frequently seen on national television as Congress spokesperson. Gupta, as the underdog, was seeking to gain parity by attacking him; that way, he could be assured of daily headlines in the thirty or so newspapers in the constituency. When Sibal was accused of being “a two-faced
character” who exploited the parents of schoolchildren, he slapped Gupta with a defamation notice; Gupta responded that Sibal had “violated election norms” by using more than one loudspeaker on a car. As the legal writs flew, independent candidates jumped in to say these leaders should not be fighting. “Why are they tearing each other’s clothes?” asked one. Gupta took the high moral ground, telling a newspaper: “I am not a TV boy. I am a street boy. Sibal is a high-profile lawyer. I am only pointing out the wrong things.”
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Having mainly observed rural elections in the past, spread out over huge distances, I was surprised by how intensely the campaign was covered in the media. Each morning, Sibal would sit in his politician’s white kurta pyjama beneath a canopy in the garden of his ministerial bungalow with two or three dozen journalists—section correspondents of national papers, reporters from Urdu or Hindi news sheets, film crews from city TV channels—who would ask him provocative questions while he tried to keep his cool in the blazing early-summer heat. Like many things in India, the press conference was a negotiation, a give and take: politicians, loiterers, helpers, minders, drivers, workers and reporters were all there, all wanting to be part of it. The media needed stories, ideally involving an endorsement—a Congress representative defecting to the BJP, an independent leader coming out for Congress.
With the press growing increasingly fond of stings and hidden cameras, every move had to be thought out. When a man with a foreshortened leg hobbled up to the gate of Sibal’s bungalow with a Congress manifesto, seeking alms, no one dared to give him anything because it was presumed to be a set-up with a photographer in waiting. Each party campaign was required to file details of its expenditure every few days, which involved a member of the team filling in dozens of sheets of paper. If you showed you had hired 200 chairs for a meeting and there was evidence 500 chairs had been used, you might be investigated.
Mohan Kumar was an example of a small neta who was switching allegiance. He was a solid man with gold rings and a cotton trouser suit and stood nervously and a little pugnaciously in the garden of Sibal’s ministerial bungalow. Kumar represented—or said he did—a few thousand voters in a poor area of the city. “We need the family of tigers,” he said into a microphone, which was taken to be a reference to Sonia Gandhi. He was migrating, with his voters, from the Bahujan Samaj to Congress (at the previous assembly election he had gone the other way). When he spoke, his supporters raised slogans, “Bhai Mohan Kumar Zindabad!”—“Long live
brother Mohan Kumar.” As Kapil Sibal arrived, they cheered him with a similar slogan, but it was apparent their main aim was to build up their man while the television cameras were present. Sibal thanked Kumar—whom he described as a “coordinator”—for his support. Again, it was a negotiation: Sibal gained some more votes, Kumar was inflated within his own community by his fleeting proximity to the leading candidate, and his supporters, who were now rushing around in Congress caps and toggled scarves, got to eat. I asked one of them afterwards why he regarded Mohan Kumar as his leader. “He is a social worker. He gives out clothes every 1st Jan.” It was apparent, watching the visitors, that one of the reasons they had come was for the food. They consumed the unremarkable snacks—samosas with tomato sauce, tiny cups of tea—with the attention of people who were not used to eating full meals.
Voting was held across India in five phases over successive weeks, to allow the election commission to shift 2.1 million police around the country to monitor 714 million potential voters. Once the national election started, more and more people sought involvement or just attention in the Chandni Chowk race. In the office of the Congress media campaign near Connaught Place, the staff had daily inquiries from random people: a non-existent Muslim magazine ringing up to sell advertising space, dubious public relations types wanting to become involved, a group of Christians wishing to meet and declare their support. Compared to the BJP and Bahujan Samaj campaigns, leave alone Dr. Sita Ram Sharma’s attempt to convey his dislike of wine and romance, this was an efficient operation: text messages were relayed to organizers or precinct captains across the wards, and each day a press release in Hindi, Urdu and English was sent out, tailored for the appropriate audience, with fresh photographs of the candidate. A scholarly man with thin hair, glasses and a beard did the Urdu translation (although Hindi and Urdu are closely related languages, they use different scripts). His fingers skimmed over a Roman keyboard, stretching as if he were playing Rachmaninov, pressing three or four keys at a time to create the beautiful, flowing script on the screen. I heard one young office volunteer come out with a line which sounded as if it came from
The West Wing
: “I have a very meticulous system for ordering our coffee from Barista.”
They were nearly tripped up when the leader of an international Sikh organization said he would publicly back the Congress. Chandni Chowk did not have many Sikh constituents, but this man had been recommended, and an endorsement was an endorsement. A photo opportunity was fixed. Then the office ran a quick background check, and things did not quite fit
together. With just hours to go before the media snapped Mr. Sibal and Mr. Singh shaking hands in a common purpose, another story came tumbling out. Only weeks before, this eccentric, self-declared Sikh leader had done one of the most insulting things you can do in Indian public life: he had sent a garland of shoes to Sonia Gandhi in protest over the 1984 riots. He also turned out to be an admirer of the late Saddam Hussein, and even claimed he had visited him in his palace in Baghdad and given the Iraqi leader a wooden lion. “A great friend and a wonderful person. Five Mercedes cars came to receive me at the airport. I was treated like a king. I was given a special room and coffee in a golden cup.”
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When the votes were counted nationwide in May—a remarkably quick process since it was electronic; no hanging chads here—Congress and its allies won a strong victory, gaining more seats in the Lok Sabha than in the previous election, enabling them to govern without support from left-wing parties. Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul were in the ascendant. Manmohan Singh became the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after serving a full term in office. The BJP had run an ill-judged campaign, with Varun Gandhi talking of chopping off hands and not being repudiated, and L. K. Advani attacking Manmohan Singh as India’s weakest prime minister when he was admired for encouraging stability and growth. The 81-year-old Advani even had himself photographed lifting weights at a gym in Ahmedabad in a feeble effort to capture the “youth vote.” Mayawati made gains in Uttarakhand and Haryana but not the advances she had hoped for: although her total vote share went up by 1 percent, the success of Congress left her with no balance of power to hold. The communists and other leftist parties dropped back, still fighting over the grievances of the last century. Regional parties remained highly influential in some parts of India: the ruling BJD in Orissa, after dissolving an earlier strategic alliance with the BJP, boosted its vote by 7 percent.
In the Chandni Chowk constituency, the minor candidates evaporated (Dr. Sita Ram Sharma gained 609 votes) and Haji Mustaqeem scraped less than 4 percent. Three days before polling, a crowd had gathered outside his residence and shouted slogans in favour of Congress; rumours were spread at the tea stalls near the Jama Masjid that he in fact wanted people to vote for Kapil Sibal; Bahujan Samaj workers climbed on motorbikes and drove around the area, expressly denying this was true. The impetus had been running away from Haji Mustaqeem for weeks—his relations with his BSP minders had never looked good, and by the end he had lost interest in campaigning. For Vijender Gupta of the BJP, the election race had been in many
ways a success: he took more than a quarter of a million votes, and was now a prominent figure in his party in Delhi. The victor by a large margin was Sibal for Congress, who secured a second term in Parliament by winning nearly half a million votes, and became education minister in the new government. A candidate in South Delhi suffered the indignity of arriving at a polling station and finding his name had been omitted from the voting list; he was so angry that he smashed up an electronic voting machine, and was promptly arrested by the police.
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Although Congress was back in power for a second five-year term, the complexities of national elections meant the underlying results were more nebulous and intriguing. Had Congress once again become India’s natural party of government, and was the BJP in lasting eclipse? Straight after the election, my feeling after visiting about half a dozen very different constituencies was that the BJP’s methods and message were seriously dated. The aggressive Hindutva rallying cry that had brought down the Babri Masjid in the early 1990s appealed only to their hardcore voters, and sounded old fashioned. India was more self-confident now, and a demand for better governance usually took priority over religious grievances. One man put it to me this way (he was a garment exporter who headed a small traders’ association in Delhi): “Traders need communal harmony more than anybody else, because trade depends on cross-community work.” What did he mean? “Look at my business. Who is doing the transporting? Sikhs. Our shopkeepers are all Hindu. Who does the weaving and embroidery for us? All Muslims.” It was a very practical point of view. The BJP would need a fresh approach and new faces in order to return to power at the centre.
Against this, I had found it hard to detect a real wave of enthusiasm for Congress at ground level. Their victory was partly technical, in that their vote share (28.6 percent) was nearly the same as it had been a decade earlier when the BJP took office. The assumption made immediately after the 2009 election that the Congress party had been brought to power by the rural poor, grateful for the ministrations of the Gandhi family, turned out not to be accurate. Congress made its most significant electoral gains in urban areas: it won 34 out of 57 major urban seats. In addition, many of its voters were older people. So, statistically, there was no reason why the BJP or a mixture of other parties could not displace the current rulers.
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Everything—all of this—depended on the fluctuation of future events and personalities. The practice of democracy in India was deeply embedded, in a way that was rare in Asia. More than anything else, the campaigns
had demonstrated in their complexity and illusion, in their duplicity and seeming chaos, that Indian elections were a self-balancing ecosystem.
The poll had run smoothly, yet there was something that niggled. It had first become apparent to me during the 2004 election campaign, and it niggled again now. The problem was the first-time MPs. With their spanking faces and sense of bland entitlement, these young men and women were treated with reverence by the Indian media, although their achievement was usually to have shared genes with an earlier leader (not far from the achievement of the pistol-toting Maharaja of Jodhpur, Hanwant Singh). I watched one of these new MPs on television as he drove through the dust of his inherited family constituency in an enormous Pajero, turning now and then to a waiting camera with a purposeful frown and saying things like, “I want to help these people, like my father did,” or “We are going to make India number one.” He looked like a giant baby who had been dressed up and put in a big buggy and sent off on an adventure.
The disjuncture between these fresh fruits and the hopes of the many millions of individuals they were supposedly representing was massive. In person they were perfectly affable and often idealistic, but as a phenomenon they were damaging. Was Indian national politics becoming hereditary, with power passing to a few hundred families, even as the elections themselves became more vibrant and open?