Rajdeep Sardesai

2014
The Election That Changed India

Contents
Dedication
Introduction
1. Narendrabhai, the Man from Gujarat
2. Prisoner of a Family Legacy
3. A Government in ICU
4. I Want to Be Prime Minister
5. Battle for the Heartland
6. Kings, Queens and X Factors
7. Multimedia Is the Message
8. The Making of a Wave

9. The Big Fight: Amethi and Varanasi

10. Its a Tsunami!
Epilogue
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright

To Sagarika, for keeping the faith

Introduction
On a hot, steamy day on the campaign trail in
Varanasi, I was given another reminder of the
enduring attraction of an Indian election. Stopping
for a cool drink at the citys famous Pehelwan
Lassi shop, we asked the owner whom he was
going to vote for. Twirling his luxuriant
moustache, Pehelwan Chacha looked at us. Jo
Baba Jagannath aur dil kahe! (Whatever God
and my heart tell me.) I tried to press him further
Narendra Modi or Arvind Kejriwal? As he
lovingly laced the lassi with sinful dollops of
rabri, he shot back, Dekhiye, sir, vote hamara
hai, aap ko kyon batayein? (The vote is mine,
why should I tell you?)
For more than five decades now, millions of
Indians like Pehelwan Chacha have lined up
across the country to exercise their franchise with

hope and resolve. It is the one day when the gap

between the khaas aadmi and the aam aadmi,
between the lal-batti car and the auto rickshaw,
between a Forbes billionaire and a BPL family,
dissolves. We all stand in line waiting to have our
fingers inked. If someone tries to break the queue
as actor-MP Chiranjeevi tried to in Hyderabad
this timeyou can find your voice and ask them
to get back in line.
It is a truism that the higher income groups in
India tend to vote less than the poorthe quest for
equality is a constant motivator for the have-nots.
Georgina from north Bengal, mainstay of our
household for two decades, had never voted in her
life and didnt have a voter card for the Delhi
assembly elections. When we finally managed to
get her one before the 2014 elections she was
overjoyed. On voting day, she just couldnt stop
smiling, showing her finger to anyone who would
care to see. Her twinkling eyes reflected a sense of

feeling genuinely empowered. Sir, hamne bhi

vote daala (I voted too), she reported to me
triumphantly.
I n India After Gandhi, historian Ramachandra
Guha suggests that the first election in 1952 was
an article of faith for our Constitution makers.
The first election commissioner, Sukumar Sen,
described it as the biggest experiment in
democracy in human history. A Chennai editor
was less kind: a very large majority will exercise
their votes for the first time; not many know what
the vote is, why they should vote and for whom
they should vote; no wonder the whole adventure
is rated as the biggest gamble in history.
Sixty-two years later, we can proudly say the
faith has triumphed; the experiment has
succeeded; the gamble was well worth it. The
2014 elections, in a sense, were a reaffirmation of
the process that started in 1952. More than 550
million Indians voted in these elections, larger

than the entire population of the worlds oldest

democracy, the United States. I shall never forget
what a Pakistani friend once told me. In Pakistan,
when we want to change the government, we
bring in the army; in India, you just use the ballot
box. Indeed, we do.
Each of the sixteen general elections in this
country has been special, though some are more
significant than others. The first election was
obviously a landmark onea leap in the dark for
a country that many western commentators were
convinced would rapidly disintegrate. Nineteen
seventy-seven was a historic election as wellin
the aftermath of the Emergency, it restored public
confidence in democracy and was a resounding
rejection of creeping dictatorship. I was just
twelve years old at the time, but I do remember
reading the bold headlines: Indira Gandhi is
defeated by the people of India. I am sure it must
have been a remarkable election to track as a

journalistjust imagine profiling Raj Narain after

he had defeated Indira.
I would rank 2014 in the same league as 1952
and 1977. Having had a privileged ringside view
of Indian elections as a journalist since 1989, I do
believe that the sixteenth general elections mark a
tectonic shift in Indian politics. It has been, and I
use the word judiciously, a political tsunami (or
tsuNamo). Its a term that was first used by the
key BJP strategist Amit Shah to suggest that this
was more than just a wave electionit was
something bigger, much bigger.
Tsunami in India is associated with the terrible
disaster that hit the southern coast of the country
in December 2004, spreading death and
destruction. This election did not result in deaths,
but it did destroy certain rigidly held beliefs about
politics in this country. It was the death in a way
of long-held orthodoxies about voting patterns.
The death of a conventional ruralurban divide, of

traditional caste and regional loyalties, of family

ties, of paternalistic governance, maybe even of
the Nehruvian consensus that had dominated
Indian politics for decades. To quote Guha from a
column written a day after the verdict: The
sometimes noble, sometimes ignoble, structure of
renown erected by Motilal Nehru and his
descendants is now merely a heap of rubble.
Stereotypes of which social groups voted for the
Congress, which for the Bharatiya Janata Party
and which for caste-based parties have been
demolished. The political earth of India shook,
moving the centre of gravity of an Indian election
from identity politics to aspirational politics. Its a
new plus factor that now gets you the crucial
additional support, beyond narrow appeals to caste
and community vote banks.
Election 2014 saw a shift in outcomes,
processes and personalities. The outcome itself
was staggering. The BJP became the first non-

Congress party to win a clear majority on its own

(the Janata Party in 1977 was a collection of
several parties). In its original avatar as the Jana
Sangh, the party had won just three seats and 3.1
per cent of the vote in the 1952 election. Now, it
has won 282 seats and 31 per cent of the national
voteastonishing figures when you consider that
the BJPs catchment area of winnable seats was
less than 350 seats. The lotus has truly bloomed
and come a very long way from the time when it
was pigeonholed as a BrahminBania party.
In six states, the BJP won each and every seat
on offer. Its strike rate across north and west India
was over 80 per cent, with the party winning more
than four of every five seats it contested in this
belt. It is in Uttar Pradesh and Bihartwo states
that we believed were locked into an enduring
caste matrixthat the BJP achieved some of its
more dramatic results. Almost every community,
except the Muslims, voted overwhelmingly for the

BJP. Not only was there strong upper-caste

consolidation, even Other Backward Castes
(OBCs), Dalits and tribals voted for the BJP in
large numbers. The BJP was, at least in 2014, the
new rainbow coalition.
In contrast, the 129-year-old Congress party,
with its roots in the freedom movement, has been
decimated, its monopoly over power challenged
like never before. Even in the 1977 elections, the
party at least managed to save face south of the
Vindhyas. This time, Kerala is the only state
where the Congress won more than ten seats. Its
final tally of forty-four seats and just 19.3 per cent
of the votethe first time its percentage slipped
below 20represents a critical inflexion point in
its history. The Congress performance has also
been the subject of rather cruel jokes. Returning
on a flight to Delhi in June, my co-passenger said,
Looks like the national capitals temperature will
soon be more than the seats the Congress has in

the Lok Sabha!

But its not just the final result that made this
2014 election so distinctive. The election has
unleashed a chain of processeslatent and overt
that could change the way elections are fought
in the future. Never before has so much money
been spent in fighting an Indian election
inflation doesnt just affect the price of tomatoes,
it also influences the cost of an election. The BJP,
bolstered by unflinching corporate support, easily
outspent its rivals, but the more worrisome aspect
is just the quantum of money that is now needed
by every member of Parliament to win an election.
Because, with every rupee donated, the IOUs need
to be encashed post-election.
A candidate in Andhra Pradesh admitted to me
that he needed at least Rs 15 to 20 crore to just
stay in the fight. The massive inflow of cash
suggests that a level playing field is simply not
possible any longer. It is practically impossible to

win an Indian election unless you are a crorepati

several times over, or have funders to back you.
The case for state funding could not be stronger.
The brazen use of money power imperils
democracy and shrinks the basket of choices
before the voter. Not that every Indian voter is
complaining. In Mumbai, I met a fisherwoman at
the Sassoon Docks who said she had been offered
Rs 1000 by the Congress and Rs 1500 by the BJP
candidate for her vote. I will take money from
both and then decide whom to vote for! she
laughed.
If money is a threat, technology is not. In the
first election, the ballot boxes stuffed with votes
were carried by camels across deserts and by
horses over mountains. The counting went on for
weeks. Now, in the age of the electronic voting
machines (EVMs), the process is faster, surer and
cleaner. Yes, there are still complaints of
malfunctioning EVMs, of names missing from

rolls, of occasional intimidation. But the

bahubalis (musclemen) have less of a role to play
in an Indian election. The musclemen have been
replaced in 2014 by the machine men
technology whiz-kids who are able to plot every
constituency down to the last booth. The level of
micro messaging in this election, with the aid of
technology, is unprecedented. Never before has an
SMS got a political party as many volunteers as it
did for the BJP this time.
Indeed, one of the more fascinating aspects for
me while researching this book was meeting
several young men and women who designed the
BJPs strategy using technology solutions. Many
of them were alumni from top institutesIITs and
IIMswho had given up lucrative jobs to be part
of the election planning. It was almost as if you
were in a business school and were being asked to
assist in a corporate management plan. Certainly,
there is enough reason to believe that the BJPs

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