 "Ballot ground Uttar Pradesh")
These are men of modest means: landless and poor. Their white kurtas and pajamas are frayed and dirty. Their leather sandals are worn out and their heads are uncovered. The men belong to the Kol tribe and have sacrificed a day's earnings to travel 90 kilometres from their village to come here. All their lives they have voted for the Congress. And now they are bitter. "What did the Congress give us?" asks Mema Lal, 45, who laments the lack of jobs. Ganesh, 40, has heard of "development" in Gujarat from his villagers who went there. "If he (Modi) wins, I would want him to just ensure that water is available in our village for farming." These men have been won over by BJP as a part of the strategy to get tribes on its side. The party's recent wins in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan - states with large tribal populations - suggest the strategy may have begun to work. The image of Modi in their mind is of one who can create jobs and facilitate development.
If Modi has to become prime minister, he has to win UP. In the 543-member Lok Sabha, the state has 80 members. Modi knows UP can make or break him. That is why he has put Amit Shah, his trusted lieutenant, in charge of the state. He has already done five rallies here, more than in any other state. There is buzz that Modi will contest the elections from somewhere in UP. A section of the party wants him to fight from either Varanasi or from Lucknow (to carry forward Atal Bihari Vajpayee's legacy). A small section wants him to stick to Gujarat, a safe bet.
But UP is complex. The caste and community loyalties hold strong: a factor milked to maximum by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Development is patchy but political awareness is high. Agrarian prosperity can be found along with abject poverty. To compound the problem, Modi is an outsider. That's why Modi wears more than one mask in UP. He brands himself a chaiwala who rose to become chief minister but remains a Hindu nationalist who encourages economic development. By projecting himself this way, Modi is trying to reach out to a cross-section of voters, the majority of whom say they will vote Modi and not BJP. In UP, the man is bigger than his party.
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Throughout UP, Modi's spin doctors have projected him as a performer of economic miracles. As I travel from Mauranipur to Jhansi on the Khajuraho-Jhansi passenger train (it takes four hours to cover the 65-km distance), the vistas of less-developed Bundelkhand roll past the window: arid fields, crumbling houses, emaciated cattle. Wrecked by years of drought, there are no chimneys or factory sheds visible here. The conversation in the train turns to Modi. "Has any government ever brought down prices?" asks the most vocal of four middle-aged men with red cards that say North Central Railway Men's Union stuck on their shirts. "Even Modi cannot bring prices down." The other passengers agree but add that Modi will stop prices from rising any further. i don't ask them how. Magic wands need no explanation.
Later in the day, I hitch a hike with Rahul Sharma, 27, in Jhansi. Sharma has a master's degree in commerce and works as a manager in an automobile company. He can cite parts of a speech Modi recently made in the city. "He said when a man from UP visits Gujarat he works for 12 hours daily for a year. He suggested that instead, that person should be made to work for 16 hours, but for just six months. The other six months he should be sent back to his village so that he can work on his fields," Sharma says when I ask him what appeals to him about Modi. It may sound impractical to economists but has struck a chord with Sharma. He will vote for Modi in the general elections and BSP in the state elections. "If instead of Modi, (Lal Krishna) Advani was BJP's candidate, I would have voted for the Aam Aadmi Party."
In his speeches, Modi cleverly mixes the promise of development with electoral rhetoric. A usual Modi speech begins with Bharat Mata ki jai and ends with Vande mataram. The core of the speech is stringent criticism of the Congress, especially its first family. In Jhansi, Modi launches a broadside at Rahul Gandhi for saying that he was briefed by "intelligence" that Muzaffarnagar, after the recent communal riots, has become a recruiting ground for Pakistan's spy service. SP and BSP too draw his ire. In Kanpur, he criticises SP for dropping terror cases against Muslim youth. Then, he argues his own case by referring to development and governance in Gujarat. Somewhere in the performance are subtle elements of Hindutva. For instance, his welcome to the stage in Varanasi is preceded with slogans of Har Har Modi, which soon change to Har Har Modi, ghar ghar Modi. During the speech in the holiest of holy Hindu cities, he talks of Ramrajya: development alone can alienate the hardliner Hindu.
His rivals say that this pandering to the hardliners will alienate secular Hindus and Muslims, and will prove Modi's undoing in the elections. The Muslims, for sure, are cut up with BJP. Idu Khan, 62, who lives in the Kutba relief camp in Muzaffarnagar, is afraid of being killed; so much so, he has no plans to reclaim the land his family cultivated for generations. His one bigha of farmland, he claims, has been acquired by "a Jat". For Khan, BJP alone is responsible for his plight. "The local BJP may have had a role in the riots in Muzaffarnagar," he says. Four others huddled around him agree. Without work and money, they survive on donations.
Khan's charge is yet unproven. But one thing is for sure: for over a year, UP has been a communal tinderbox. The riots in Muzaffarnagar may have driven the Muslims away forever from BJP (they anyway never voted for it), but have consolidated the Hindu vote bank in western UP. The party is on stronger footing here than ever before. Disaffection amongst Hindus also runs high against SP, thanks to its Hamari Beti Uska Kal scheme to give Rs 30,000 to all girls of the economically backward sections of the minority community who pass Class X. Modi, they feel, will stop such appeasement.
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In an interview to Reuters, Modi described himself as a Hindu nationalist. Most people in UP tend to buy this image. Modi has so far refrained from raking up the issue of the Ram temple at Ayodhya, though it was the demolition of the mosque in this town on the banks of the Sarayu that caused a definite upswing in BJP's fortunes. Lalu Singh, the former five-time BJP MLA from Ayodhya, hosts me at a restaurant, Shane Awadh, in neighbouring Faizabad. "Ask any Muslim in my constituency ...he will not say a word against me," Singh says in a very low voice. "But I know he will not vote for me... They have been taught that BJP is against Muslims." More important, he says building the Ram temple is not his party's work, but it will help if 'sadhu and sant' decide to build it. The issue may be on the backburner, but it's not dead. If the tide turns against the party, it may revive, who knows?
Years of electoral defeats have left the BJP cadre demoralised. It has also exposed the serious gaps in its leadership. Shah realised quickly that time is too short to re-build the party apparatus, and the safest bet is to leverage Modi's popularity. Shah and his team have divided the state into eight parts: Avadh, Kashi, Gorakhpur, Western UP, Braj, Rohilkhand, Bundelkhand and Kanpur. It was decided to hold a Modi rally in each of these eight divisions. "The western UP rally was kept for the end. The party feared that an early rally there could be made a law-and-order issue by the UP government to ban all Modi rallies," says a party leader. Since then, Modi has held a public meeting each in Jhansi, Kanpur, Agra, Bahraich and Varanasi. Before January-end, Modi will address a rally in Gorakhpur and another in either Moradabad or Meerut. A final concluding rally will be held in Lucknow.
In Lucknow, the Congress office is in a spacious white mansion, purchased in a public auction from a sugar baron in the 1970s, who used it as his farmhouse before fortune ran out. Party workers sit outside to enjoy the winter sun. There is tranquillity all around -till I ask them how they rate Modi's chances. "Modi's name will not be taken inside the Congress office," shouts one worker. A few walk out of the meeting. One worker explains that the party is sure of support from its "silent voter" and people will eventually get "bored" of Modi. But he admits the Congress is on the "back foot" and almost concedes it has no strategy to counter Modi. The only hope for the party, he says, is the various welfare schemes launched by the Centre.
Most analysts say Congress is on weak ground, and two years of misrule have turned the people against SP. Therefore, Modi's main rival is Mayawati and her BSP. She alone can stop Modi's march in UP. The victory of the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi has made it a talking point. Analysts expect Arvind Kejriwal's party to make some impact in urban constituencies. Some BJP leaders too feel the road to victory is strewn with problems. Excessive focus on Modi has caused disjunction between the central and regional leadership. "Many things can be streamlined if we know who is going to fight from where. The cadre can work and campaign in a more organised manner," says Rajesh, party in-charge in Bundelkhand. The pressure from the cadre has now forced BJP President Rajnath Singh to commit on candidates being announced this month. In some constituencies, BJP has got leaders from other parties to get the caste equation right; this has put off the local leaders.
Anup Gupta is a junior BJP leader who works on a laptop. He is dressed in a khadi kurta, with a splash of vermilion on his forehead. His room, which overlooks the UP Vidhan Sabha, has posters of Hindu gods and BJP ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya. "You know who interrupted Ram's ashwamedha yajna?" he asks. "It wasn't Ravan's son, but Ram's own," he says.