HOW MODI WON IT: NOTES FROM THE 2014 ELECTION
Harish Khare
Hachette
241 pages; Rs 599
Much of history, when seen in retrospect, can take on an air of inevitability. Most susceptible to this illusion, in a way, are elections, especially wave elections. Once the results are in, and the extent of the wave is known, then it becomes as if we always knew - for we were walking through the very country that delivered the landslide, so surely we must have known.
Something of that is at work already in discussions of the 2014 election. It is as if Narendra Modi's unprecedented majority in the Lok Sabha, his sweep of the north, was obvious to all even as it was happening. Books are being written in which this is the subtext. Harish Khare's How Modi Won It, therefore, is a doubly useful book: for it reminds us that while the 2014 election may not have been a close-run thing in the end, nevertheless few knew how it would turn out while it was happening. It sets out, in fact, to do precisely that. "We owe it to history," it begins, "to put winners and losers in the context of the day - as well as to locate them amid the larger historical forces at play."
Mr Khare's book is part journal, part essay, part newspaper digest and part gossip column. For most days between March and May 2014, Mr Khare writes down what the newspapers were saying, what his companions at lunch told him, what Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians were whispering to each other, and what the various sources he had cultivated over a long career as a journalist thought about the state of the election campaign. There are, as he points out, no scoops; there are only a few short passages of on-the-ground reporting; there is no clever analysis of data. There is, however, a series of sharp observations from various interlocutors - some of which are absolutely wrong, in retrospect - and Mr Khare's own brief notes on what those observations meant. There is also the occasional digression into contemporary history - on V K Singh versus A K Antony, for example, or on what the decision to bifurcate Andhra led to. These are never too long - fortunately, because the more didactic Mr Khare is, the less easy his writing is to read.
Reading this book, with its endless little tidbits of information from reporters and editors and politicians and policemen, one is impressed by the number of people Mr Khare talked to daily. Still, he cannot always conceal his contempt for such things as television journalism or the Congress' ruling family. These are, of course, two of the bugbears that helped doom Mr Khare's alternate career, as media advisor to former prime minister Manmohan Singh in the early years of the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). As Dr Singh and his government lost control of the narrative, it was Mr Khare's job to try and recapture it; but he failed. There is unsurprisingly little acknowledgement of that in this book. But one gets a sense, from the tone and the concerns of the book, of the tragedy of UPA-II: patrician and unimaginative, perceptive and empathetic and contemptuous all rolled up together. A man with Mr Khare's contacts, energy and intelligence could not do as much as one would have expected for Dr Singh and his government; through this book, one inadvertently gets a sense of why.
Certainly, some of the analysis is top-notch. For example, Mr Khare says there were "five major ingredients to Modi's journey" to 7 Race Course Road. First, using Gujarat as a sort of beach-head, the first part of the new republic; second, pushing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak into his corner and on to the streets; third, wooing India Inc; fourth, turning the Uttar Pradesh numbers in his favour through communal polarisation; and fifth, enlisting new and old media in his cause. This is not just a useful break-down of what was happening, but when each of these five is examined in greater detail, there's some A-1 political analysis, too. It is cynical and observant and, in my opinion, largely right. (For example, he correctly argues that had Uttar Pradesh gone to the polls east to west, as it had in 2009, the results might have been completely different from how it did go to the polls, from riot-hit west to toss-up east.)
Perhaps this tone of detachment, honesty and accuracy is because Mr Khare pulls no punches. After his stint in government, he is too associated with the ancien regime to even attempt to moderate his views on Mr Modi or the BJP, or on the nature of the mandate that swept Mr Modi to power. This is, in many ways, the most refreshing aspect of the book. Standing outside power now, Mr Khare does not have to pretend the prime minister is a miraculously changed man. Instead, he says: "At every milestone in his political journey that began in 2002, [Mr Modi] has craftily experimented with polarisation as a strategy. The 2014 campaign was no different." In an atmosphere heavy with the comforting lies of retrospective narrative-building - in which Narendra Modi was a messiah of jobs and nothing else, and in which his coming was inevitable - Mr Khare cuts handily through the fog of obfuscation.
Harish Khare
Hachette
241 pages; Rs 599
Much of history, when seen in retrospect, can take on an air of inevitability. Most susceptible to this illusion, in a way, are elections, especially wave elections. Once the results are in, and the extent of the wave is known, then it becomes as if we always knew - for we were walking through the very country that delivered the landslide, so surely we must have known.
Also Read
Something of that is at work already in discussions of the 2014 election. It is as if Narendra Modi's unprecedented majority in the Lok Sabha, his sweep of the north, was obvious to all even as it was happening. Books are being written in which this is the subtext. Harish Khare's How Modi Won It, therefore, is a doubly useful book: for it reminds us that while the 2014 election may not have been a close-run thing in the end, nevertheless few knew how it would turn out while it was happening. It sets out, in fact, to do precisely that. "We owe it to history," it begins, "to put winners and losers in the context of the day - as well as to locate them amid the larger historical forces at play."
Mr Khare's book is part journal, part essay, part newspaper digest and part gossip column. For most days between March and May 2014, Mr Khare writes down what the newspapers were saying, what his companions at lunch told him, what Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians were whispering to each other, and what the various sources he had cultivated over a long career as a journalist thought about the state of the election campaign. There are, as he points out, no scoops; there are only a few short passages of on-the-ground reporting; there is no clever analysis of data. There is, however, a series of sharp observations from various interlocutors - some of which are absolutely wrong, in retrospect - and Mr Khare's own brief notes on what those observations meant. There is also the occasional digression into contemporary history - on V K Singh versus A K Antony, for example, or on what the decision to bifurcate Andhra led to. These are never too long - fortunately, because the more didactic Mr Khare is, the less easy his writing is to read.
Reading this book, with its endless little tidbits of information from reporters and editors and politicians and policemen, one is impressed by the number of people Mr Khare talked to daily. Still, he cannot always conceal his contempt for such things as television journalism or the Congress' ruling family. These are, of course, two of the bugbears that helped doom Mr Khare's alternate career, as media advisor to former prime minister Manmohan Singh in the early years of the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). As Dr Singh and his government lost control of the narrative, it was Mr Khare's job to try and recapture it; but he failed. There is unsurprisingly little acknowledgement of that in this book. But one gets a sense, from the tone and the concerns of the book, of the tragedy of UPA-II: patrician and unimaginative, perceptive and empathetic and contemptuous all rolled up together. A man with Mr Khare's contacts, energy and intelligence could not do as much as one would have expected for Dr Singh and his government; through this book, one inadvertently gets a sense of why.
Certainly, some of the analysis is top-notch. For example, Mr Khare says there were "five major ingredients to Modi's journey" to 7 Race Course Road. First, using Gujarat as a sort of beach-head, the first part of the new republic; second, pushing the Rashtriya Swayamsevak into his corner and on to the streets; third, wooing India Inc; fourth, turning the Uttar Pradesh numbers in his favour through communal polarisation; and fifth, enlisting new and old media in his cause. This is not just a useful break-down of what was happening, but when each of these five is examined in greater detail, there's some A-1 political analysis, too. It is cynical and observant and, in my opinion, largely right. (For example, he correctly argues that had Uttar Pradesh gone to the polls east to west, as it had in 2009, the results might have been completely different from how it did go to the polls, from riot-hit west to toss-up east.)
Perhaps this tone of detachment, honesty and accuracy is because Mr Khare pulls no punches. After his stint in government, he is too associated with the ancien regime to even attempt to moderate his views on Mr Modi or the BJP, or on the nature of the mandate that swept Mr Modi to power. This is, in many ways, the most refreshing aspect of the book. Standing outside power now, Mr Khare does not have to pretend the prime minister is a miraculously changed man. Instead, he says: "At every milestone in his political journey that began in 2002, [Mr Modi] has craftily experimented with polarisation as a strategy. The 2014 campaign was no different." In an atmosphere heavy with the comforting lies of retrospective narrative-building - in which Narendra Modi was a messiah of jobs and nothing else, and in which his coming was inevitable - Mr Khare cuts handily through the fog of obfuscation.