I certainly wouldn't have been the first member of my fraternity to have experienced a Modi rally (out of choice or compulsion) in this immersive manner, wedged between cheering, aggressive young men with saffron bandanas and orange AAP-style caps, who participate in his call-and-response style of public speaking as though they have done this many times before. And perhaps they might have, too, before their TV screens or on YouTube, where he has been an omnipresence, but in person they hadn't, at least here. It was Modi's first time in Lalganj, a reserved seat two hours northeast of Varanasi, now part of his adopted political karmabhoomi of eastern Uttar Pradesh.
At some point, I twisted my neck to get a sense of the scale of the crowds. When we arrived, the numbers seemed thin. By the time Modi took the stage, it had swelled, still far short of the mega-audiences that have become a hallmark of his rallies, but given the context (and the enthusiasm), not a bad showing at all. This was his last urgent push, making short, surgical stops at almost every one of the 18 constituencies of the last phase, a calculated attempt to tilt this heartland of Dalits and Muslims in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s favour (the BJP had won only four of the 18 in 2009).
The Lalganj speech was typical of the late stage of this long, overheated campaign, light on the elaborate expositions one had heard in his earlier speeches on how he will repair this or that aspect of a malfunctioning "system", packed instead with sharp political jibes. "Have you been to the Taj Mahal?" "Yes!" "Do you take pictures of it? Do you share them on WhatsApp?" "Yes, yes!" "Rahul Gandhi doesn't go to the Taj Mahal". Laughter. "He goes to the homes of the poor. He then gets the media to film it and shows it to the whole world." More laughter. "I am born to a poor mother. I don't need to do this poverty tourism!" Applause.
Towards the end, he asks, "I have a slogan. Will you chant it with me?" "Yes!" "Will you!?" "Yes, yes". They are charged up, waiting for the sucker punch. "Pehle matdaan, phir jalpaan," he roars [First cast your vote, only then eat]. They respond, but somewhat weakly. This may not be the final rousing call to arms the crowd had in mind.
Nonetheless, after the helicopter has lifted off, the young men with whom there has been an enforced intimacy of 40-odd minutes tell me it was a good show. Why Modi, I ask? Why this enthusiasm? The answers are never delivered in a normal pitch. Each of them wants to be a mini-version of their icon, a speechmaker in his own right. "Modiji says he is a nationalist," says one of them, "he has a lot of love for India. And if any other politician says that he is a nationalist, then I will clap for him. But no one else does."
Are you all traditional BJP supporters, I ask. One them - a boy, in his teens - says, laughing, "Yes I am. Should I rip open my chaati, [chest], to show you?" And what do you expect from him? "Jobs. We have no future here. We want him to make UP into Gujarat". Have you been to Gujarat, I ask. No, they say, but they have heard about it, via TV and social media, through someone who has visited. How women can walk the streets of Ahmedabad at night. How there is round-the-clock electricity in villages. An older man, burly, with the air of a political worker cuts in. "These ladke log are here because of Hindutva, nothing else". I look enquiringly at the young men. They smile back. "There are three types of communities here," says the older man. "Dalits, OBCs and Guinness Book-wallahs". The last is a crude reference to Muslims, to the myth of their record-breaking high birth rates, framed in the casual bigotry of the Hindi belt. "You know where we are?" he asks pointedly. We are a few miles from Muslim-dominated Azamgarh, a constituency which has been for several years Mulayam Singh Yadav's bridgehead into eastern Uttar Pradesh. A week earlier, Amit Shah was in Azamgarh, calling it a "base of terrorists".
I turn away from him to the young men. One of them asks me what Gujarat is really like. I tell them it's one of India's better-developed states, but that it has always been, and that there is a fierce debate as to whether Modi has exaggerated his transformation of it. "It doesn't matter," they say. "Marketing is also a kala [an art]". Another one cuts in. "There has to be some substance why this man has been chosen to run as prime minister. There are so many tea-sellers, groundnut vendors. You never know about them, right? There must be something about this tea-seller from Gujarat. There has to be."
The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7