No Mr Aiyar, The Gandhi Family Is Not The Glue That Congress Needs To Stay Together

In a column in The Times of India on 21 July 2019, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar makes a pitch for Sonia Gandhi and her family, and posits that the family is the glue without which the Congress party will disintegrate. He then proceeds to compare former prime minister Indira Gandhi with Sonia Gandhi—apple and orange—and deviously employs election results post-Rajiv Gandhi to substantiate his argument. 

The highest tally of Lok Sabha seats that the Congress party achieved after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was 27 long years back, in 1991, when it won 244 seats. Since Sonia Gandhi was not even in the frame then, Aiyar dismisses that victory, saying “Congress failed to win outright”. In 1996, a Sonia Gandhi-less Congress won 140 seats, and Aiyar rightly says it lost.

Now compare this to the spin he gives to the performance of the party after Sonia Gandhi took charge of it, after allegedly locking the then Congress president Sitaram Kesri in a toilet. In the election that followed her throwing out of Kesri, Congress won 141 seats, just one more than it did under him, but Aiyar calls this score "respectable". Worse, he not only gives a complete miss to the much lower 1999 tally of 114 under Sonia Gandhi, but also goes on to assert that "she led the party to victory in 2004 and 2009".

In 2004, Sonia Gandhi won just five more seats than Kesri did in 1996. In 2009 she won only 206, and that too thanks to Dr Manmohan Singh and the rejection, by core voters, of a secularised Lal Krishna Advani, in an almost presidential-style election marked by a low turnout. However, as per Aiyar, while 1996 with 140 seats was a defeat, and in 1991 Congress "failed to win outright" with 244 seats, 2004 and 2009 were victories “which proved that Congress needed the family to win elections”.

The Congress suffered its most humiliating defeat ever in 2014, when it was reduced to an unbelievable 44 seats under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. The rout was so overwhelming and debilitating that one would have expected a seasoned columnist like Aiyar to have dwelled on it, and the causes for it, at length. But, no, just as he skipped the 1999 elections when Congress won only 114 seats, he gives this unprecedented rout also a complete miss, because it too does not fit with the case he is trying to manufacture for the Gandhi family.

If all this was not enough, Aiyar makes a further mess of his argument by pinning blame on the downward spiral of the Congress party, both before and under Sonia Gandhi, on its dumping of Nehruvian secularism and aping of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In fact, his only comment about the second consecutive rout of the party in 2019 is a disparaging one about the temple run of Rahul Gandhi in the run-up to the elections.

No wonder Aiyar is silent about why the ‘janeudhari’ Congress president lost in family bastion Amethi and, worse, why he chose to contest from a constituency where the communal and fundamentalist Indian Union Muslim League was needed to carry him to victory, and the majority was inconsequential. Why, even Sonia Gandhi would likely have lost from Rae Bareilly — despite non-BJP parties not putting up a candidate — had the BJP put up a strong candidate against her.

The rejection of the mother-son duo is that deep, across the country, but Aiyar cannot see it, or pretends not to.

Although she ruled India for 10 years and has been in the spotlight since the assassination of her husband Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, little is known about what and who Sonia Gandhi really is as a person, and what her beliefs and ideologies are, except that she is an Italian by birth and a Roman Catholic by baptism. The same mystery surrounds her son too.

But the one thing that they both openly share, and are most charged up about, is their intense dislike, bordering on hate, for the Hindu Right. Sonia Gandhi told journalist Vir Sanghvi as much just after the 2004 elections. A few days back, Rahul Gandhi too left no one in any doubt when, in his letter of resignation as Congress president, he stated that “every single living cell in my body resists BJP’s idea of India.”

Aiyar, once again, conveniently misses both these visceral disclosures, only because they bust his “aping BJP” fantasy.

It is true that Rajiv Gandhi and other Congress leaders made feeble attempts to assuage the feelings of the majority which felt short changed even in free India, and that too despite a bloody communal Partition. But after Sonia Gandhi seized control of the party, all that changed completely, as I suspect Aiyar knows but will not admit.

Over the years, an increasing number of Indians have come to believe that the ideological problem of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi is not just with the Hindu Right, but with the Hindu majority itself, and that they identify only with Christian and Muslim minorities, who they consider their core vote bank. The task of bringing in the Hindu vote needed to make up the numbers to grab power has been outsourced by them to regional and caste-based parties, most of which see power as a means to maximise the personal wealth of their leaders, all means fair.

It is only the fear of losing the complete majority vote — own and of allies — that compels them to publicly attack the majority indirectly via the Hindu Right.

Remember, the target of the draconian Communal Violence Bill that both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi pushed hard, despite strong opposition, is not the Hindu Right, but every single Hindu living in India. Similarly, every single Hindu is suffering the consequences of the 93rd Constitution Amendment, which Sonia Gandhi rammed through in 2004, even though she did not have the mandate to do so, as Congress won only 145 seats. Only Hindus have been disadvantaged by her sectarian Right to Education Act. And who can forget how Hindu terror was invented and the fact that Rahul Gandhi believes that radical Hindus are more dangerous for India than jihadi terrorists nurtured and unleashed by Pakistan?

In sum, it can be said that the Congress party did not flounder in 2019 because Rahul Gandhi tried to ape the BJP. On the contrary, it probably drove away a significant number of additional Hindu voters, who saw through the Hindu charade that Sonia Gandhi and her children were enacting to attract their votes. That is why they won a mere 23 seats in all of India outside Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

In the 21 years that Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have been at the helm of the Congress party, they have not been able to win a single election for the party. If one must compare Sonia Gandhi with Indira Gandhi, as Aiyar does, it has to be on the scale of seats won by them in various elections.

Despite the Gandhi brand name and the large legacy vote that Sonia Gandhi inherited, the figures of 141, 116, 145, 206, 44 and 52, in the six elections that Congress has fought under the Sonia Gandhi family, show that the family has not been able to establish a connect with the people, and now stands totally rejected. Only Swaminathan Aiyar can see in this Gandhi family the winner that Indira Gandhi was, when it is clear that only a non-Gandhi leader can pull the Congress out of the Gandhi swamp.

In a column in this magazine on 8 July 2019, this writer had argued that the grand old party is in the agonising throes of death and desperately needs fresh non-Gandhi air, if it wants to survive. The ecosystem, however, continues to peddle the lie that the family is the glue that is keeping the party together, and not the gas chamber that is killing it. What do you think?

This was first published in Swarajya on 23rd July 2019

Can Someone Pull Congress Out Of The Gandhi Gas Chamber?

More than 10 years too late, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have finally been forced to look at the writing on the proverbial wall. The Congress president has formally taken responsibility for his failure to lift the grand old party, even marginally, above the shocking and humiliating bottom it hit in 2014, and resigned.

Unfortunately, not even a whiff of contrition or respect for the will and wisdom of the people emanates from Rahul Gandhi's resignation letter. Instead, it reeks of an undiminished sense of entitlement, hatred for the majority, fake love for Muslims and Dalits, and an almost missionary assertion that he will keep pushing the Congress party to strangle itself with his ‘Idea of India’.

It matters not to him that this so-called idea, alien to even his own father, has been so vehemently rejected by the people of India, that they have not only reduced his party to a once unthinkable 23 seats in all of India outside Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but also handed him a humiliating personal defeat in the family bastion of Amethi.

Sonia Gandhi too continues, overtly unfazed, as the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and together the duo have evidently no intention of gracefully stepping aside and giving the Congress, gasping for fresh air, a chance to rise and reclaim its place as the premier national political party of India.

Although the duo ruled India for 10 long years, a closer examination of all the elections that they have been actively involved in, especially the two verdicts that gave and kept them in power, reveals that, despite their power surname, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have not won a single election for the Congress party, and should have quit in or before 2009.

In 2004, only eight seats separated the Congress (145) and Bharatiya Janata Party (137). That was a verdict against the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and not, by any stretch of imagination, a vote for Sonia Gandhi. Between 2004 and 2009, even though no scam had yet come to light, neither she nor Rahul Gandhi was able to enthuse Indians to come out and vote them in again. On the contrary, they lost a string of states during this period — Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir. Their victory in Delhi was due to Sheila Dikshit, and in Rajasthan, they won only 96 seats to BJP’s 78, despite the fact that the latter had 60 rebel candidates out of whom as many as 27 won.

Their 2009 ‘victory’, thus, not only came as a surprise to many, but it also led even BJP leaders to hastily conclude that their party was past its peak, and Sonia and Rahul Gandhi would rule India, unchallenged, for decades. In hindsight, it is evident that nothing could have been farther from the truth.

What should have been an easy victory for the BJP in 2009 turned into a big shock defeat for two main reasons.

One, Sonia Gandhi, sensing that there was no enthusiasm for her and Rahul Gandhi among the people, played a masterstroke by making Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — "Singh is King” — the face of the Congress party. Singh, who had a clean image, had caught the imagination of the people with the manner in which he pushed the nuclear deal; in that act of his, they saw in him a patriot who had stood up to Sonia Gandhi, to protect India’s national interest. That solitary display of spine and intent by the prime minister led the people to believe that India was safe in his trustworthy hands.

Two, just a year after the 2004 debacle, causes for which he evidently misread, Lal Krishna Advani went to Karachi and called Jinnah secular. With that one blunder, he lost forever the trust of many of BJP’s core voters and destroyed his political career. To make things worse, in 2008 he blundered by not only opposing Singh’s nuclear deal, but in also trying to bring down his government and installing Mulayam Singh Yadav as prime minister, in a clumsy and shady manner. That killed whatever little enthusiasm there still was among core and potential BJP voters, and they showed their anger by staying at home on voting day.

So when a crafty Sonia Gandhi surprised everyone by projecting Manmohan Singh, and not her own unpopular son, as the prime ministerial candidate, Advani, imagining that the mild Singh was no match to him, played right into her hands. He made the contest presidential, which effectively put Sonia and Rahul Gandhi out of the contest. The rest is history. In that direct battle of trust, people made Singh the king and knocked Advani out.

Unfortunately, everyone, docile Singh included, soon forgot that people had voted for the prime minister, and that the Gandhis were undeserving beneficiaries of the faith that people had reposed in Singh who, as it appeared then, had also got the economy roaring. Instead, even though the Congress won just 206 seats, the family ecosystem built an aura of invincibility around Sonia Gandhi and put her on a pedestal above all, and beyond any criticism by anyone, BJP leaders included.

It took five more years and Narendra Modi — not to forget social media that ‘routed’ embedded mainstream media in a parallel battle — to shatter that myth of invincibility. And it has taken another five years, and an even more humiliating defeat, to ram home the truth that Rahul Gandhi and his mother never could, and never will, win the trust of the people of India.

Perhaps, Rahul Gandhi too had sensed the mood of the people in the run up to 2019; that is why he allegedly struck a Faustian bargain with Indian Union Muslim League to enter India’s Parliament. Who would have imagined in 1947 that 72 years after a bloody, communal Partition, the president of the Congress party would be reduced to such communal beggary, in India?

Unfortunately, going by the cringe-worthy sycophancy displayed by senior Congress leaders, many much older, and all certainly wiser, than Rahul Gandhi, there is little hope that the Congress party will break free from the shackles of the Gandhis, despite the fact that they have not been able to win a single national election for the Congress since the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

After 18 years of failure and a disconnect with the people that is almost surreal, it is unbelievable that, in an arrogant display of sheer contempt for voters whose trust they never could win and have now irretrievably lost, they are still marketing themselves as the last and only hope for the Congress.

The grand old party is in the agonising throes of death. It is gasping for fresh air and not more of the family gas that is choking it.

The BJP faced a somewhat similar situation after its tally dropped to 116 in 2009. That party too had an entrenched cabal that did not want to give up its power and perch, party’s fate notwithstanding. Had its key leaders not made the inspired choice they did in 2013, it would probably have found itself staring at 44 seats in 2014 and irrelevance in 2019.

Captain Amarinder Singh, Jyotiradiya Scindia and Sachin Pilot, to name just three, are all capable of reviving the Congress. They can all do what Manmohan Singh did for the Congress in 2009, and more, sans the Gandhis. The family ecosystem never tires of praising them and the huge talent pool that they say the Congress has. But at this most critical moment in its history, it continues to peddle the lie that the Gandhis are the irreplaceable glue that is holding the 183-year-old party together.

Does the Congress have a Rajnath Singh who can pull the party out of the Gandhi gas chamber before it is too late, and oversee a smooth and complete transition of power?

First published in Swarajya https://swarajyamag.com/politics/will-the-congress-step-out-of-the-gandhi-gas-chamber

Don't Be Fooled, Rahul Gandhi Is No 'Pappu'

Not enough attention has been paid to the visuals of Congress President Rahul Gandhi playing with his mobile phone for 24 long minutes during the President’s address to Parliament. Was Gandhi being the kid that some Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders believe he still is, or was he deliberately doing so to insult the President of India with entitled disdain?

Having been a member of Parliament for over 15 years, Rahul Gandhi is fully aware that at least one camera is deployed to capture his every move and gesture inside the august House.  So it cannot be that he did not know that the visuals would be telecast by every channel into every Indian home. Fresh from another unprecedented rout which has reduced Congress to a shocking 23 seats outside Kerala and Tamil Nadu, a personal defeat in Amethi and a ‘victory’ gifted by Muslim League in Wayanad, why did Rahul Gandhi want to be seen exhibiting the kind of arrogance that he showed when he publicly humiliated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when the latter was on a foreign tour? 

When Congress won a second term in 2009, there was a lot of buzz about Gandhi becoming a minister for a couple of years, before occupying the PM’s chair. As the subsequent slap to his Prime Minister showed, Rahul Gandhi—like his mother—saw Dr Manmohan Singh as no more than one of his many employees, serving under whom was unthinkable. The same attitude informed his relationship with Presidents Pratibha Patil and Pranab Mukherjee. President Kovind had to be shown his place too, and through it a warning conveyed to Congress leaders that they should remain In their place, resignation after rout notwithstanding. 

Rahul Gandhi, many believe, is a messed-up—and therefore dangerous—by-product of the marriage of dynastic Indian entitlement and White fundamentalist contempt for everything Indian.

As the great-grandson of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and son of Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul has grown up believing that he has a divine right to rule India and Indians. As a result, he considers himself superior to and above every non-Family Indian political leader. In power or not, he expects Congress leaders, age and appointment irrespective, to pay obeisance to him, and non-Congress leaders to put him on a hallowed exclusive pedestal.

As the grandson of Mussolini’s Colonel Stefano Maino and son of Edvige Antonia Albina Maino, Rahul Gandhi manifestly sees India through the eyes of a White man who thinks nothing of India and Indians, and believes, with missionary zeal, that he is here to get Dalits out of the Hindu fold—escape velocity of Jupiter, missionary visas, foreign funds—and to so demonise and emaciate other Hindus—Hindu terror, CVB, intolerance, majoritarianism—that they meekly submit, once again, to be ruled by ‘minorities’, as they were till 1947.

His mother, it must be mentioned, remained an Italian citizen, even though she was living in the house of India’s Prime Minister, till 1983, and became an Indian passport holder only when her own husband came within a step of becoming PM. She learnt Hindi only after his death, and only because she couldn’t do without the poison of power that literally fell into her lap. And it is from her, as he admitted in an old interview to Sagarika Ghose, that Rahul Gandhi learnt about India during his formative years, when his father was busy and mostly away. 

So when he uses BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh as key targets of attack, it probably flows from an irreconcilable ideological hate, and not from the politics and values he inherited from his father and paternal grandmother. 

It is not entirely a coincidence that while some leaders of Congress speak about building shelters for cows if their party comes to power, Rahul Gandhi not only takes pictures with Congressmen who publicly slaughter cows to hurt Hindus, but also does not speak up for their religious sentiments, or for implementation of laws banning cow slaughter. Nor is he ever seen with Hindu victims of cow smugglers. 

On the contrary, he has repeatedly spoken about the right of people to slaughter cows for food, even if it means flouting the laws enacted, ironically, mostly by his own party before it passed into his Italian mother’s hands. It is also not a coincidence that ‘Beef Festivals’ were organised brazenly in various parts of India, Delhi included, when he and his mother were ruling India.

Rahul’s latest tweet on Yoga epitomises this visceral hatred.

On the day the whole world was celebrating Yoga, India’s timeless selfless gift to humanity, one would have expected Rahul Gandhi to at least remain silent, if he could not bring himself to say something positive about it as an Indian. But, no, he had to let his bile flow. This was not a tweet by a politician; it was frustrated loser tweeting, riled by visuals of millions of Indians renewing their connect with an ancient Hindu practice that enables individuals to achieve physical, mental and spiritual well-being—and more—souls intact and unsold. 

That he is not bright is clear as daylight, but what is evidently not so is that Rahul Gandhi is not a harmless simpleton brimming with love. It doesn’t really hurt him when people call him ‘dumb’, ‘pappu’, ‘budhu’ etc. A simple man with heart of gold can always move people to vote for him, particularly if the main opponent is not as brilliant and rooted and trustworthy as Modi is.

So while making fun of ‘pappu’ is a good pastime, it has the effect of concealing the oppressive dynastic entitlement and an alien ideological hatred that defines the man, and makes light of the havoc he will ruthlessly create—Tukde Gang in the vanguard — should he ever drink the intoxicating poison of power again.

Never forget the danger, and never dismiss Rahul Gandhi lightly.

A shorter version of this post was published in Swarajya  https://swarajyamag.com/politics/dont-fall-for-it-rahul-gandhi-is-no-simpleton

Alliance With Congress: The Fall of King Kejriwal

No one quite took Delhi by storm, not even Narendra Modi, like he did. For a people silently suffering what they perceived to be a humongously corrupt and terror-friendly government led by Sonia Gandhi, for a people who had become disillusioned with politicians as a class, he rode in on a pristine white horse, with a halo so luminous that it mesmerised even the most cynical on both sides of the ideological divide.

Such was the blind belief in him that even when he broke his own promise and became a politician, everyone trusted him when he said that he did so only because politics could only be cleansed, and the system changed, from within. The aura did not diminish one bit even when he took support of Congress to become Delhi’s Chief Minister, or when, in a tearing hurry to become PM, he not only put up over 400 candidates for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but himself rushed to Varanasi to contest against Narendra Modi, the BJP’s PM candidate.

Varanasi, fortunately for India, did not buy his lie that while Modi was roaming around in planes and helicopters, he, an aam admi, had come to that city in a train “with only Rs 500 in my pocket,” and would stay there permanently even if he lost. In the event, when campaigning ended, he took the first flight back to Delhi, and has since never set foot in Varanasi.

Defeated in Kashi, he begged forgiveness of Delhiites and swore that he would never betray them again. Not only did they pardon and embrace him, they even gave him a victory like no one had ever got, sending 67 AAP MLAs to an Assembly that has a strength of 70.

Since that dazzling 2015 victory, the story of his precipitous fall from the pedestal he had put himself on, and his un-peeling as an allegedly blindly ambitious con man who is totally devoid of any values and principles, is long and revolting, to say the least. And we haven’t yet seen the bottom.

Arvind Kejriwal has done everything that he had accused the politicians he had entered politics to fight against of doing, and some more. From moving into a 5-acre bungalow, to taking state security, to trying to become CM of Punjab by courting Khalistanis, to cheering the “Bharat Tere Tukde” gang, to accusing other politicians of being corrupt only to apologise later, to abusing and blaming Modi for the mess that he has made in Delhi, there is nothing that he has not done with a vengeance that defies sanity.

The net result is that four years after Delhi voters gave him a stunning, unprecedented victory, he has so totally lost their support that he has again done something that many thought was unthinkable: begging Congress to ally with him in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.

As always, even his beggary is devoid of humility, not a tinge.  War against corruption and Congress forgotten, he now claims that he has become a warrior against Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, and demands that the Congress party should play second fiddle to him in his latest “holy” fight with a common enemy. To pressurise the leadership of Congress into submitting to him, he has even gone to the extent of alleging that the party is not allying with him because it is secretly in bed with BJP.

At the same time, even though he knows he has almost completely lost public support, he is not willing to let the Congress ride on his back, on Delhi’s seven seats, in the 2019 edition of his holy war. Initially he tried to fool that party into agreeing to contest only one seat, but later improved the offer to two. The latest is that he is so desperate that he is willing to settle for a 4/3 formula in Delhi, no alliance in Punjab and one only seat in alliance in Haryana.

For Congress, the dilemma is almost like the one that confronted Mayawati and Akhilesh in UP, and Mamata in West Bengal. In order to defeat Modi in 2019, should it let a shrinking-dying AAP ride on its back into Parliament and beyond, at its expense? Should it listen to loyal ‘neutral’ journalists who want this alliance even more desperately than Kejriwal does?

The impact of what Congress does now will be felt in the Delhi Assembly elections which are due after less than a year. That is why Kejriwal is asking for more seats than Congress; he will demand an even bigger share of the pie from it at that time, on the strength of his 2015 score in Assembly elections and 2019 performance in Lok Sabha elections.

In short, Kejriwal, having completely lost the plot and the mandate in four short years, and desperate to cling on to power in Delhi, knows that he has no choice but to cannibalise Congress and reduce it to being a peripheral player in Delhi for years, if not decades. And he believes he can use Sonia and Rahul’s alleged hatred for Narendra Modi, and their burning desire to see him lose, to con them into falling into his trap.

Behind this devious plan lies Kejriwal’s fear that if he contests alone and gets fewer votes than Congress, he could well be forced into becoming a junior partner of that party in the Assembly elections next year. The predator will become prey.

Rahul knows that without an alliance with Kejriwal, he will not win any seat in Delhi. He also abhors the thought of Modi becoming PM again. In alliance, Rahul can win a maximum of three seats, though, given the soaring popularity of Modi and the trademark duplicity of Kejriwal, there is a real possibility that he might not win any, which will make his bargaining position with Kejriwal even worse during Assembly elections. Also, two-three seats of Delhi are not going to change the national picture for Congress. In addition, the possibility of two-odd AAP MPs moving to the BJP after elections, should the numbers so dictate, cannot be ruled out. No one is fighting a moral battle here.

Kejriwal has driven himself into a corner and is left with no choice but to beg Congress for an alliance, but Rahul has one to make. Does he want the immediate fruit of a couple of seats, or is he looking beyond 2019? Is he ready to risk becoming a fringe player in Delhi like he is in neighbouring UP,  or is he eager to reclaim the space Kejriwal snatched brutally from him in 2014.

This article was first published in Swarjya https://swarajyamag.com/politics/the-fall-of-king-kejriwal-what-a-congress-alliance-can-do-to-a-common-man-with-uncommon-aspirations

Is There Really No Wave In This Election?

BJP rally (Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Political pundits have given their judgment: This is not a wave election. 2014 was a one-off, and not only will the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) struggle to cross the 200 mark this time, but even Sonia Gandhi might pull it off on the back of regional leaders who, they believe, will dutifully line up, like Rajas of yore, to offer their loyalty and support to her.

They have a point. No wave is visible. The BJP has just lost three Hindi-heartland states to the Congress, and Mayawati and Akhilesh have stitched up a formidable alliance which, more than anything else, will ensure that votes of 80-seater UP’s 17 per cent Muslims are not split and wasted.

It is also no secret that the BJP’s performance in the by-elections to Lok Sabha since 2014 has been dismal, to say the least, with the party failing to win any new seat and losing as many as nine out of 15 seats it held, including the one won five times in a row by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

The pundits are, therefore, justified in dismissing the results of various opinion polls which show, in sum, NDA almost touching the half-way mark, BJP comfortably crossing the 200 hurdle, and Congress failing to wrest 100 by some margin.

Nothing in 2014 pointed to an absolute majority for the BJP. Nothing is pointing to an encore this year. In 2014, the impact of the chemistry of Modi, the ‘challenger’, was unknown; in 2019, analysts and psephologists agree that the chemistry of Modi, the prime minister, will not be enough to beat the arithmetic of the caste-religion combinations that have been formed to defeat him and the BJP.

Before the BJP lost three states towards the end of 2018, the Opposition, Congress and its thinkers, Arun Shourie among them, were convinced that 2019 would be lost if BJP was allowed to make it a battle between Modi and the rest. Thus was born the hare-brained strategy of turning the election into 543 independent elections — one per constituency — that would wish Modi away, though no one quite knew how that could be achieved on terra firma.

Victories of the Congress in Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Rajasthan led to the hasty abandonment of that strategy, as Rahul Gandhi’s advisers were convinced that the only way to beat Modi was by turning the election into a Presidential contest between a triumphant Prince and an under-pressure Prime Minister.

That is how, some argued, LK Advani was trounced in 2009 by Dr Manmohan Singh. With the Congress being weaker than it ever was, they reckoned that all that the party needed was to touch its modest tally of 2004, and the rest would fall into place just as it did then. Hence the cacophony of its ecosystem urging all political parties to come together, effectively under Rahul’s leadership, to take on and defeat Modi, head-on.

Regional leaders, however, had different ideas this time. They saw no logic —where they were strong — in letting Congress increase its overall tally at their expense, with the votes of their vote banks, and then lord over them after the elections. On the contrary, in the death throes of the Congress, they spotted a heaven-sent opportunity to bolster their own chances to head/dictate terms to a rag-tag non-BJP government they believed would run the country if BJP lost.

Not crunching numbers here, but suffice it to say that with the Congress left out in the cold in UP and West Bengal — 122 seats — and facing almost unbeatable alliances stitched up by BJP in Bihar and Maharashtra — 88 seats —it will be a miracle if the party gets into three figures. In 2004, when Congress won 145, it had 31 seats in these four states and a whopping 29 in Andhra. This time it is staring at a loss of 50 seats in these five states alone. Add the Modi factor in other states, and it would appear that the party’s overall tally will be between 30 to 60 seats only.

Thus, having made the election Presidential solely on the basis of recent Assembly election results, has the Congress party made its biggest blunder by playing straight into Modi’s hands, or have Rahul and his election strategists spotted something not readily visible, and played a masterstroke?

Coming to the BJP, conventional wisdom also suggests that in the absence of a wave, the combination of anti-incumbency and anti-BJP alliances should be enough to pull the party below the 200 mark, and if that happens, and if Congress can’t cobble up the numbers, a face acceptable to Rahul and his ecosystem will become the PM of a chastened and weakened NDA.

But is there, really, no wave?

The two main parts of a wave are the trough and the crest. Before 2014, both Congress and BJP were in a trough, and both had given up on winning. LK Advani, in fact, admitted as much in his blog in 2013, that the best case scenario would be a coalition which could not be formed without BJP’s support. No one foresaw the crest that Modi created, or its amplitude. After 30 long years, a party won an absolute majority, and it was the BJP’s first such win.

In a wave, a trough follows a crest. So, before we say there is no wave this time, we must first find the trough. Did it follow the wave of 2014? If yes, when did it occur? Did Modi’s popularity ever so plummet in the five years that he has been PM?

After five years in power, Modi’s popularity graph shows, in sum, an upward trend. As per Lokniti CSDS, Modi was preferred as PM by 34% of the respondents in May 2014, while in 2019 the figure has gone up by 9% to 43%. Other pre-poll surveys also show a similar trend. Does this not imply that the crest of the 2014 wave is the trough of 2019, and BJP can only go up from here?

A large number of young Indians are still in awe of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Some, in fact, liken him to Superman—he can do anything. Modi’s rallies continue to attract huge, rapturous crowds across the country. The enthusiasm has not dimmed at all. If anything, Rahul Gandhi has inadvertently added to Modi’s mystique with the low-level personal attack that the latter has brilliantly turned on its head, to convince all except inveterate Modi-haters that India needs this ‘Chowkidar’ even more than it did in 2014.

Pakistan’s generals, influenced perhaps by the belief of some of their Indian counterparts that the surgical strikes of 2016 would make it difficult for Modi to go for another cross-LOC strike, have also done their bit. People are convinced that only Modi could have ordered air strikes on Pakistan proper, a first after 1971. Balakot has reinforced his image as a fearless, disruptive doer who places India’s interest above everything else.

Congress’ tame surrender to Pakistan after 26/11 has come back to haunt it; at the same time, in the battle of perceptions, it has made Modi look much bigger than he was before he ordered the audacious attack. Superman, may we say?

There is no peer — no one even near — nor  any trough, and Modi’s popularity, peaking at the perfect time, is at an all-time high. Therefore, a Mahagathbandhan notwithstanding, it is appears to this writer that the crest of 2014 is moving directly to an even higher crest in 2019.

Pundits will see its amplitude on 23 May 2019.

A slightly different version of the article was published in Swarajya  https://swarajyamag.com/blogs/is-this-really-a-waveless-election

ADVANI: NOT DONE YET

No general tells his troops—that too in the hearing of the enemy—before going into battle that they are fighting to lose. That is exactly what Lal Krishna Advani, widely credited with having taken BJP from 2 seats in 1984 to 182 in 1999, did in 2012, 20 long months before the general elections, further demoralising despondent supporters of the party. It gave them—and the country—no comfort that even after another defeat against an exhausted and ill-equipped adversary, their timorous, twice-defeated, unwilling-to-retire general was finding joy in getting a side-seat at the high table of power.

In his blog post of 05 August 2012, this is what Advani thought would happen after the Lok Sabha elections of 2014: “a Third Front government can be ruled out...a non-Congress, non-BJP Prime Minister heading a government supported by one of these two principal parties is, however, feasible.”

This is not all. Advani manifestly had no plan or desire to tap—much less magnify--the growing disillusionment with the Congress, and turn into a positive vote for the BJP. Worse, despite concrete evidence to the contrary, as we shall presently see, a passive, ill-advised Advani was content with the findings of opinion surveys which, in his imagination,“clearly reveal that the principal beneficiary of the Congress Party’s fast eroding reputation continues to be the BJP !”

Incidentally, surveys were showing even then that Advani’s “Do nothing, get apple” mantra for electoral success was not working for the BJP. A key finding of the ABP-Neilson survey held in May 2012 was that while the vote share for the Congress had dipped by 8%, the BJP was gaining only 1%, while regional parties were taking away 7%. Surveys of India Today and NDTV a couple of months later threw up a similarly dismal picture for the BJP, despite the Congress slide. In the top six states of UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the BJP was seen faring as badly as ever, with a gain of just five seats over 2009. Thanks to the Anna movement, by November 2012 things had got even worse for a comatose BJP. As per a Hansa poll, a majority, 32%, saw culprit Congress, not BJP, as the party best suited to pull the country out of the economic slump.

Did Advani not know then as to why the BJP was unable to become the “principle beneficiary” of the decline in support for the Congress? The answer was there for all to see: top leaders of Congress, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh, were still more popular—or less unpopular--than BJP’s controlling trinity of LK Advani, Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj. Did Advani not notice that one man, Narendra Modi, then not even on the national stage, had already beaten them all to emerge as the the most favoured choice for Prime Minister, and was growing more popular by the day? Could Advani not deduce from the survey findings he selectively quoted, that had Modi not been on the scene, and had there not been a popular expectation that he would eventually lead the party, the BJP would not only not have got the little benefit it had from the drop in Congress’ popularity, but would most likely have suffered a similar decline?

Advani  missed nothing then, and is missing nothing now. But when a man is possessed by the devil of an incurable personal ambition, he will, if he can, burn the very rope he is climbing on.

A few days back, the ageing, still-not-retired general suddenly told his troops—now raring to go under the command of an outstanding general who has breathed life back into them--that the 2014 victory is going to be their finest ever: the BJP will win the highest-ever number of seats in the Lok Sabha. If anyone thought that this was an unstated endorsement of Narendra Modi’s brilliant leadership, or an acknowledgment of his searing popularity that, as per every opinion poll, far exceeds that of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani cleared it by adding, slyly, that people “now want to bring back the Vajpayee government-like regime.”

What did you know? Contrary to what every survey is screaming, people are actually rooting for Loh Purush Advani, not for Narendra Modi. It is memories of the Vajpayee-Advani government,—and expectations of Advani’s return--not Modi’s model of governance and his visionary, honest, decisive, no-nonsense leadership, that has turned BJP’s fortunes around dramatically across large parts of the country—particularly in the key, 120-seat states of UP and Bihar--in the last few months!

If you still had any doubts left about Advani’s intentions, head for his latest blog—written after yet another drama over his Lok Sabha seat—where he makes yet another pitch for himself as the next PM, by recounting achievements of the Vajpayee-led government. He omits to mention, quite naturally, that that government lasted only one term, was roundly rejected by voters who sent it packing with 30% fewer seats, and that the 2004 defeat was topped by a rout in 2009 under his able leadership.

How can you project yourself as the best choice as PM, at 86 years, without trashing the one who you believe is taking away your undeserved prize, again? Advani does it in two ways in his blog: he hits out Narendra Modi the person, by talking about the absence of a trace of ego or arrogance in Vajpayee, and he trashes Modi’s massive, virtually single-handed contribution to BJP’s impending victory, by attributing it solely to, yes, Sonia and Manmohan: “we should be grateful to the U.P.A. duo for working systematically and steadfastly to ensure that in 2014, once again a BJP led government comes into power!” Narendra Modi, the BJP owes you nothing. The spark of hope that you have ignited in the hearts of crores of despairing Indians is illusory; the lakhs of enthusiastic Indians who come to listen to you and respond to you rally after rally are not going to vote for you; the doubling of BJP’s 2009 vote share, after you became BJP's PM candidate, is proof that people want me back, not you.

That Advani is continuing to fire barrage after barrage at the BJP’s new commander from the comfort of his retirement home even after the poll bugle has been sounded and a fierce battle has begun, is proof that he cares neither for the party that has given him so much, nor for the country. Unfortunately, he is not alone. The coterie that guided him and the BJP to a rout in 2009—no it wasn’t the EVMs—is still at it along with him. See this.

In a recent interview, BJP President Rajnath Singh—he was President in 2009 too—was asked by Arnab Goswami, in the context of the Modi wave, whether the party comes first or the individual. If only Rajnath Singh had asked Arnab Goswami whether Times Now comes first or Arnab. That he did not suggests that there could be a twist in the tale still. The battle has yet to be won. And the real enemy is within.

MODI: TURNING BLEATERS INTO BEATERS

“India has decided to uproot Congress,” thundered Narendra Modi at the recently concluded National Council Meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party. And when he added -- to rapturous applause of BJP workers who had jampacked Talkatora Stadium to listen to him -- that “sweat and hardwork of BJP Karyakartas will ensure that this happens,” he re-ignited the flame that had forgotten itself and breathed life back into BJP’s drooping Lotus.

In that incandescent moment, Narendra Modi turned bleaters into beaters. In that power moment, many of the millions of Indians glued to the TV were transformed from despondent doubters to enthusiastic believers. In that electric moment, BJP’s baton finally went into the hand it had been gasping for.

Lal Krishna Advani, a veteran of 85 summers, epitomises almost everything that went right and then wrong with the BJP. While he can rightly claim credit for turning a once two-MP party into a party of beaters, he equally is responsible for turning it into a flock of bleaters, particularly after the BJP lost power in 2004.

What has been the constant wail of Advani and his key advisors/acolytes? The one thing that has troubled them – continues to – most is “political untouchability”, ostensibly due to BJP’s communal agenda, as defined by the party’s irreconcilable political foes, led by the Congress party which preaches secularism but practices nothing but naked communalism.

Advani, as he himself admitted during his valedictory address at the council meeting, suffers from a deep-rooted inferiority complex, one manifestation of which is his self-perceived lack of eloquence compared to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and even Sushma Swaraj. Add to it the fact that none of those he picked to give direction to the party after its defeat have either a popular base anywhere or a record of governance to speak about, and you know why BJP looks like a warship stranded in the high seas, sails torn, engines seized, oars broken, rudder gone, GPS knocked out.

When you constantly bemoan political untouchability and, to get rid of it, crave quick-fix political and not popular acceptance, you not only lose direction and purpose, but also the vigour necessary to beat your political opponents where you are meant to: at the hustings. Your readiness to bed anyone -- no matter what the compromise – as strategy to snatch power, conveys to the voter and worker alike that this leaderless, rudderless, self-serving party is no different from the one it seeks to unseat, why take a risk?

When you speak to your party workers and leaders, you are expected to connect to them, convince them that victory is going to be theirs, and motivate them with a few big ideas and slogans that catch, if not fire, their imagination.

But if you heard Advani speak on March 03, 2013, minus shots of the audience, you would never have known who his target group was. There was nothing to differentiate the speech from an op-ed in a newspaper or a blog post for an entirely different, remote audience. There was not one word in there to enthuse the cadre he was addressing.

You don’t tell your workers, as Advani did, that the only hope for the party is in seeking more and more alliance partners – NDA Plus. This is tantamout to an admission by the leader that he has no idea or plan -- perhaps even desire -- to deepen and increase the footprint of the party and make it win on its own. No better way to promise defeat and demoralise everyone. Copy-pasting old templates that have little relevance in the present is a sure way of ensuring that your party has no future.

You can also not enthuse your party workers by telling them to rubbish the Congress – in whose bed some top party leaders are widely perceived to be in -- while maintaining strict Omerta about the principal threat, the Sonia Gandhi family. On top of that if you tell them to praise the performance of BJP's state governments, but go to the people and ask for votes for an unnamed PM, or for a leader who has contributed nothing to that fine record and has no base of his own, you can be sure no one is going to do so with any conviction, if at all.

And if the only innovative idea you have is a xerox of the one that the Congress party has been flogging to death, one whose ever widening range and scope is disturbingly divisive and worse, then you should not be surprised if you are roundly rejected by voters again.

Fortunately, this time Advani's word was not the last. He knew it too, even as he spoke, without conviction, without applause.

No one went to Talkatora Stadium to listen to the same speeches, the same ideas, the same leaders who cannot win more than their own seat and have not figured out in years how to win one more for the party. They went there to listen to the man they believed had the torch to light their way to the destination they had lost hope of ever reaching.

Narendra Modi was acutely aware of and alive to their -- and the nation's -- pent up frustrations and high expectations. He realised that they needed to be made to believe that victory was going to be theirs. He knew he had to show them the bull's eye, and also how to shoot at it.

Yet, no one was prepared for the vehemence with which he went for the holy jugular of the 'Termite' party - the Nehru-Gandhi Family. The impact was immediate. It was as if a door had been opened to the forbidden fortress, without taking which victory is not possible. No more potting around this side of the moat, hoping that the fortress will fall on its own; no more letting the defenders within fearlessly fire all weapons and keep you helplessly pinned down.

To convince them that the fortress was ready to be stormed, Modi also identified a few weak spots in its walls as well as weapons in his and BJP's impressive, proven armoury: mission vs commission; aspiration vs despondency; participatory governance vs rule by 5-star NAC activists; great CMs vs ordinary puppets; surajya vs destructive dynastic rajya.

Not once did Modi tell his workers -- and voters listening with rapt attention -- that they were not good enough to beat Congress, that he had more faith than them in workers and leaders of other political parties whose support he was desperate for, that the BJP was in no position to form a government that would not be as hobbled as the Congress-led government is due to difficult, unprincipled allies.

If you tell your troops all this before you launch them into battle, they won't fight for you. If you tell voters fed up of weak, corrupt coalition governments that you can offer no better, they won't vote for you. This is something that BJP had, mysteriously, forgotten.

Lions don't bleat. Narendra Modi has always fought and will fight to win. For India -- he was never the regional satrap that he was made out to be. This is the spirit he suffused Talkatora Stadium and many Indian hearts with, when he called upon the people of India to treat defeating the family enterprise called Congress a national duty, and outlined his and his party's mission and vision for India. This is the spirit that the BJP sorely lacked. This is the spirit he wants to fill all 125 crore Indians with. This is the spirit that India needs.
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MOVE OVER LSP, INDIA NEEDS LJP!

They are rich, they are famous, they are powerful. Their debating skills are unbeatable, their ability to twist facts unparalleled, their talent for dramatising the mundane unmatched. Their ideology is as flexible as a snake’s spine, ethics never seem to hold them up, money drives them crazy.

Together, they have everything that it takes to make the most explosive political combination India has ever seen. If ever there was an opportunity for them to lead the India of their, repeat their, dreams, it is now, what with Congress falling apart and BJP trying harder to fall faster and lower.

Move over poverty-stricken, value-driven LSP, – Lok Satta Party – your time is up at the starting block itself. Jayaprakash Narayan, the studios gave you air time but plain air was never going to get your political plane to fly. The fuel of values – probity, integrity, unity – that you put into the tank was never going to get it to even taxi on the runway. You were destined to remain in the hangar of your imagination while others were making their ‘Dreamliner’ built of and fuelled by stuff that the ‘unsuccessful’ secretly envy – that’s what they say – but publicly deride. All that they need to do now is to paint and unveil their gleaming machine. And unleash it on a despondent India.

Imagine Kaapi Zibal, I Cheetambaram, A-one Jeetley, Mu-salman Khurshit, Sookshma So-raj, Annoy Roy, Shikhar Gupt and Radias Hajdeep Sardard, Pir Sanghi and Burka Butt on a political stage, each others' hands firmly clasped and raised high in solidarity, nay, victory. The Terrific (Terrifying, if you are still awake) Ten Together! What an electrifying picture! one that will drive every television channel and newspaper to multiple orgasms of an intensity never witnessed ever, not even when Mahatma Gandhi picked up a fistful of salt in Dandi or when Nehru raised free India’s flag for the first time in Delhi.

India is ready for the LJP – the Lawyer Journo Party – the first such political outfit formally launched anywhere in the world, the first such official acknowledgement of the clout of opponents and adversaries who are effectively running India together, while pretending to be at each others’ throats. Lawyers fake-fighting lawyers in different parties, journos doing the same with journos in different media houses and also lawyer-politicians -- what a waste of quality hamam and precious national time.

Come on guys, give us this exciting party, a party with a real difference, a party that will party better than Vijay Mallya, fly higher than Kingfisher, and even make all poor Indians rich. By setting and selling a sexy “Zero” Poverty Line! Tell us why corruption is cool and how this nation is actually becoming richer faster due to multi-billion dollar scams because the corrupt are saints engaged in creating wealth for the country! Expose the honest who outrage only because they are jealous of the rich and do not have it in them to do anything constructive for India. Celebrate those who have billions in Swiss banks as great Indians who have saved all that money only for India and will bring it back the moment India needs it badly enough to beg them for it. Above all, present yourselves as the finest examples of India's genius for making money.

No existing political party will stand a chance in front of LJP! With the best legal and media minds working together in the political and media landscape to paint India in the most vivid and beautiful of colours, even as they laugh all the way to Swiss vaults, the new well edited India will start looking classier than a K Jo film, and those shouting “Lies, Lies” will be removed like black-and-white irritants of the silent film era. In this 24/7 movie, the hidden India will also quietly move up, though slowly – if the corrupt get so much richer, so will their maids and drivers. A raise of a hundred for every million is fair, no? – after all, how much do these poor people need, and what for?

The only problem – and this is almost insurmountable – with the launch of the LJP is the one that bedevils the Congress (after Rahul’s failure) and the BJP: who should be PM?

A-one Jeetley won’t give up his burning desire for Annoy Roy, no matter how much how much the latter may have pushed for him as a Bekaar Jhagdaalu Party (BJP) candidate. Why will 200 IQ Cheetambaram leave it all for the less gifted? Hajdeep Sardard tripped Roy once (Annoying him forever), will trip anyone given a chance, whatever it takes. Burka Butt has had enough of asking “What should I...?”; she would want to be the one telling now – doesn’t she have the highest numbers of followers on Twitter after Pir Sanghi who is, for now, in no position to claim the post, but won’t accept anyone else in that chair? Sookshma So-raj, for long in the shadow of Jeetley, would rather remain in BJP than let any one of them overtake her. Shikhar Gupt is not one to be underestimated by anyone anywhere, and Mu-salman Khurshit has The Trump Card that even Buka can’t use against him! Kaapi Zibal may have nothing going for him, but the magician with Zero will not just throw in the towel!

Can The Terrific Ten, then, not agree to becoming PMs by rotation for, say, six months at a time? No one will want to be the last one to take the shot – little juice and much headache will be left for him and, worse, he might never get there at all, as someone is bound to try and stay on and trip the rest!

Avarice is such a bitch.

There will be, alas, no LJP, it seems. India ain’t so, so lucky. It has to keep suffering them all where they are, just as they are!
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MODI ON HIS WAY TO ACCOMPLISHING 'MISSION IMPOSSIBLE'

Men are often put through fire by the Gods. Ordinary men are consumed or burnt by it; a chosen few emerge from it cleansed, purified and strengthened, and rise to meet the great demands that Destiny has penned for them.

The life-chart of Narendra Modi seems to have been scripted elsewhere. Right from childhood, this brahmachari leader who has been most inspired by Swami Vivekananda, has tread a path uncommon among and with the common masses. At 17, Modi left his home, penniless, and went to the Himalayas in search of the Supreme Truth. For two years he was incommunicado, and when he returned, he joined the RSS which subsequently made his services available to the BJP.

On October 7, 2001, Modi was unexpectedly made Chief Minister of Gujarat, less than 10 months after a devastating earthquake had killed 20,000 people and destroyed 400,000 homes, and when the economy of the state was sinking and growth was stagnant. This was his first ever assignment in any government, and at a difficult time. Little did he know then that in less than five months, Gujarat would be engulfed in horrific communal violence, one that would be exploited relentlessly, remorselessly, endlessly to target, tarnish and terminate him politically, even physically.

A greenhorn administrator who was still on the first steps of the ladder of learning the ropes of his job – he did not have the benefit of imbibing knowledge from his family --Modi did, in my view, based on records available, a better job in controlling the riots and taking on the rioters than any other Chief Minister or Prime Minister had ever done before him. This is not the place to labour on what he did or did not do or what he could or should have done and did not; that will only deflect from the main thrust of my argument.

I am not being cynical or disrespectful of those who died or suffered in Godhra and the riots that followed. But I do believe that along an extremely significant dimension – the kind that destiny show its hand in – 2002 was actually a blessing for Narendra Modi.

When pushed into the pit of calumny, hounded day in and out, condemned for everything and praised for nothing, most men crack. They lose control of themselves and interest in their jobs, and soon become forgotten or hated chapters of history or corners of memory. Men of destiny – and they appear only ever so rarely – on the other hand, take the daunting, seemingly impossible challenge head on, activate and energise their full potential to rise and go on to achieve what they would never have been able to in the placid but enervating routine and red tape that dulls even the sharpest minds.

That is precisely what Narendra Modi has done. While India has languished and regressed and lost hope, he has worked tirelessly and furiously to take Gujarat to unscaled heights with an integrity and at a pace that, as per the accepted logic of the few who have benefitted obscenely disproportionately from graft and drift, is simply not possible in a democracy. Even more significantly – and this is where his irreplaceable ground-level experience with and empathy for the people has proved to be invaluable – he has, in the process, discovered that there is much wrong in the manner in which India has been governed, and that there is an entirely different model of politics and governance that needs to be put in place so that every Indian, irrespective of caste and religion, can reap the benefits of India’s growth and rise which can and should be much higher than has been achieved till now.

Those who ask Modi the politician to unambiguously apologise for 2002 – so that they can then say ‘gotcha’ -- obviously are either not connected or educated enough to see the silent and rigorous penance that has gone into what Modi the man has achieved in Gujarat during the last 10 years. Caught in their narrow prisms of politics, power, pelf and perfidy, they cannot fathom that a fakir-like leader – no family to propagate, no lavish life-style to sustain, no desire to make and hoard/hide money – is doing things differently because he thinks differently and is energised by different values that are nobler and higher than theirs.

Modi has a dream. For India. And that dream is big. It is a dream we should have dreamt before 1947 and started working to achieve on 15 August of that year. On that day, Nehru did speak of India’s tryst with destiny. But, in hindsight it is evident that he was not equipped to fulfill that tryst; the words meant for the world were big, the dream meant for India was not. That set the "happy-to-be-second-best" tone for India, one that can still be heard through the static of the rot that has grown around it.

It has taken 64 years for a leader to realise that the root cause of many of India’s problems is that it does not dream big, ask: “Why can’t we dream like China, Europe or America?” and hit: “Sapne nahin hain toh sankalp kaise hoga, aur sankalp nahin to jodne ki iccha kaise hogi.” (Not translatable by me without unacceptable loss of energy)

Almost exactly two years back, when fresh assaults had been launched against Modi by an embedded media masquerading as free, I was not sure whether he would be able to survive the remorseless and fanatic attacks, and lead his party in the 2014 elections to victory. At that time even to me it seemed to be “Mission Impossible.”

Then I was not sure whether destiny was playing the pivotal role; now I have no doubt it is. The Supreme Court judgement sending back all cases against Modi to the trial court and discontinuation of their monitoring by it has opened the magic door that the entire might of the Indian state had tried to keep closed and hang him on, knowing very well what its opening meant.

Suddenly, what seemed impossible till a few days back, now seems to be the only real possibility. Bar the never-ending shouting, Modi has passed Destiny's fire test. His 'Mission Impossible' is on its way to becoming 'Mission Accomplished.'
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P.S. The almost prescient post that I wrote two years back, when I knew much less than I do now, is reproduced below.

WILL MODI ACCOMPLISH HIS 'MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?'

The stature of a leader can often be accurately determined not by observing the effusive praise showered on him by his die-hard supporters but by carefully examining the vicious attacks launched against him by his die-harder detractors. By that measure, there can be no two opinions that Narendra Modi is the BJP's tallest leader by many miles, and has been so for some time now.

Pretences apart, no one knows this better than the Congress party. Even more importantly, that party also knows that it has no weapon to counter him, and that if he ever gets to that chair in Delhi, governance will take centre-stage in a manner that will most likely marginalise the Congress nationally in almost the same manner as it has in Gujarat.

Let us tackle the ghost of 2002 straightaway. Those riots in Gujarat were not the first in India, nor are they going to be the last. If one goes by statistics, many more Sikhs and Muslims have been killed in Congress-ruled states and in Delhi, and plenty of its Neros have played more than the fiddle, often deliberately. But, not a single one of them, Rajiv Gandhi included, has been subject to the kind of calumny that Modi has faced and will continue to face.

Let us get one more thing straight: this onslaught has little to do with 2002; it has everything to do with the fear that the Congress has no answer to Modi along any other dimension. He is scrupulously honest; he does not fake austerity - he lives it; he has shown that a clear-headed leader can deliver good governance even with the existing system; he has put Gujarat on an unprecedented path of explosive and inclusive economic growth; he has no family to promote and is manifestly devoted selflessly to his state and its people; he cannot be corrupted and does not tolerate those who can be.

The culture of governance that Modi has put in place in Gujarat is almost the exact opposite of the culture of unbridled corruption and sycophancy that the Congress party has spawned during its long years of reign at the Centre and the states. Things have reached a stage where corruption at the highest political and bureaucratic levels has become institutionalised as an entitlement. The whole nation knows that these guys are becoming rich by foul means alone. Such systems and laws have been put in place that it is almost impossible to catch anyone, and even if caught, little can be done. Terrorists and corrupt leaders cannot find a better environment where they can so fearlessly go about their business of destroying a nation from within.

In such a scenario, if leader emerges who is honest as well as intolerant of the nonsense that has been passing off as sense for decades, the people of this country will have before them, for the first time ever, the real alternative that they have been looking for but have been unable to find. The BJP's decline at the national level has, in no small measure, to do with its embracing of the corrupt and hollow value system that India associates with the Congress. That is why in states where its Chief Ministers are focused on governance and probity, the party remains strong.

The results of the recent Assembly by-polls bear this out. Within months of its morale-sapping defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has done surprisingly well, unlike the communists whose downhill ride has only accelerated after the Lok Sabha debacle. In MP, the BJP has wrested on seat from the Congress which has retained one. In Uttarakhand, it has wrested the lone seat from the Congress.

But it is in Gujarat that the results have dramatically defined once again what the Congress and its "Bhaare ke tattoos" (hired ponies) in the "intelligentsia", media and other powerful organs, who have benefitted disproportionately due to Congress rule, are mortally afraid of. Of the seven seats that went to the polls, six were held by the Congress. Now it has just two while the BJP's tally has gone from one to five. This result has come in despite Modi not campaigning in any constituency personally.

No matter what anyone might say, it is difficult to believe that magistrate Tamang accidentally released his report on the Ishrat Jahan killing just before the polls. It is also difficult to believe that the media coincidentally went into hyper-excited overdrive to claim Modi's head because of a fake encounter killing by Gujarat police. But what must shock every Indian's conscience is the fact that sections of the media and the Congress were willing to go to the extent of sleeping with the LeT only to discredit Modi. It needs to be mentioned that the LeT is a Pakistani terror outfit that is waging war against India with the full patronage of the Pakistani establishment, and has already killed thousands of innocent Indians. It also executed Mumbai 26/11. Sleeping with this enemy of India is only one small step short of giving it a "supari" for Modi.

Does this shock you? It must. But remember, this has happened in India's history even earlier. The British, for example, would have found the going very difficult had India's selfish and myopic kings not sided with them only to defeat other Indian kings. Now too, do you not similarly hear Indians who find Pakistan and Pakistanis more friendly and "Just Like Us" than they do their political opponents? Do you not hear them talk about giving disastrous concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir, possibly in the fond hope that it will prevent future loss of votes due to terrorism? Did they even react to the exposure by the SIT of Teesta Setalvad, their award-winning loud voice, for cooking up tales of macabre and wanton killings, and tutoring and threatening witnesses to fraudulently portray Modi and Hindus at large as cold-blooded rapists and murderers?

Personally, like everyone else, I do not know how guilty Narendra Modi is or Rajiv Gandhi was for the killings in Gujarat and Delhi respectively. Unlike some sponsored fellow Indians, I am not going to pass judgment on Modi like they have and tell the whole world that he is a mass murderer. They have a lot to lose personally if Modi comes to power in Delhi; I have nothing to gain or lose, except as an Indian citizen. Like them, I also know that Modi will most likely prove to be the best Prime Minister India has ever had, not for Hindus but all Indians. Like them, I also believe that Modi as PM will bring about a paradigm shift in the manner that this country is governed. Like them, I also know that it will be the death knell for many of them. That is why they have to do everything they can to destroy him before he gets to Delhi.

Since they cannot find any chink in his armour at all, they have to keep 2002 alive, no matter what, till he is brought down.

The next Lok Sabha elections, barring unforeseen developments, will be held in 2014. Four and a half years is a very long time. The misfired cacophony over Ishrat Jahan is a clear indicator that there is no limit that Modi's political opponents and their henchmen will not cross to ensure that he is not the BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate in that election. The stakes are so high that there will, without an iota of doubt, be very serious attempts to physically eliminate him if nothing sticks in the manner that his opponents want.

Whether you like Narendra Modi or not, do not underestimate what he is up against. Will he be able to survive this remorseless, fanatic onslaught, as he has till now, and lead his party in the 2014 elections?

If there was ever a 'Mission Impossible' for Modi to accomplish, it is this.
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