Democracy on the Road - Penguin Random House India
Ruchir in this book takes you on a dusty, bumpy road trip from Kutch to Guwahati and then from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, crisscrossing the entire country West to East and then North to South. He traverses through the politically significant Uttar Pradesh and every possible mofussil that you can find on the map to cover Lok sabha and state polls. India is the largest democracy in the world. Elections are held every five years, and it’s a complicated task to decode this country because of its sheer diversity. Each taluk in the country has its unique characteristics. The caste structure is incredibly complex, and the growing number of regional political parties compound this complexity.
Ruchir by profession is an Investment banker in New York. His earlier book “Rise and Fall of Nations” narrates his encounters with political leaders and global honchos and his account of the transformation in the last 25 years was a runaway success. The timing of the release of this book “Democracy on the road” was a masterstroke as the publisher released it in February 2019, just a few weeks before the start of 2019 Lok Sabha elections. To give an insight into how democracy works, let alone predict whether Modi will do an encore is an uphill task. The fluidity with which he narrates the major political events in the last 25 years is something worth the read.
His lucid writing style draws from the accumulated experience he has gained in the last two decades while travelling along with India’s leading journalists in Prannoy Roy, Shekar Gupta, Rajeev Shukla, Pravin Swamy and psephologist Dorab Sopariwala, to name a few. The book is a collection of their road trips to attend rallies of both small and large leaders. It carries interviews with the urban and rural voter, describes their stay in shabby hotels, battling the hot summer, potholed roads and the queasiness while covering thousands of kilometres to get the real pulse of the voter. The writer also shares his helplessness while covering some parts of Southern India of not being able to understand the language and matters becoming worse when no one in the team can translate the local leader’s speech.
The book starts at Bijnor, a town in Moradabad in western Uttar Pradesh where Ruchir’s family lived for decades. His maternal grandfather, who everyone called Babuji, was a criminal defence lawyer and a wealthy landlord in Bijnor. Ruchir’s dad was a naval officer, and his career took him to Mumbai and Singapore where Ruchir grew up and did his schooling. During the summer vacation, they would visit his grandfather in Bijnor. The political winds of Uttar Pradesh during the emergency in 1977, which toppled Indira Gandhi intrigued young Ruchir. In years to come, he realized that caste, poverty and religion were a formidable mix in national politics.
In 1992 BJP under L K Advani and his cohort demanded construction of a temple honouring Lord Rama at his birthplace in Ayodhya. They argued that Mughal emperors had usurped this sacred Hindu land, which inflamed Hindu passions and set the foundation of a Hindu movement that propelled BJP to become the single largest party in 1996. By 1998, BJP had emerged as a national alternative to Congress, and Vajpayee had already achieved a level of popularity previously only attained by the Gandhi clan. The voters rued the collapse of Vajpayee’s last government by one vote. BJP’s Tamil allies had withdrawn their backing apparently over ethnic concerns. Vajpayee was also riding a wave of patriotic fervour stirred up by the recent Kargil war, in which India had dislodged Pakistani invaders. These foreign policy successes established Vajpayee’s reputation as a strong leader worldwide. In this section, he also talks about the emergence of new stars like Chandrababu Naidu. In the late 1990s, there was a visible excitement around him, with the rise of outsourcing in India and Naidu’s vision to put Andhra Pradesh on the map. Leaders like Bill Gates and the World Bank president visit Hyderabad to attend his presentations on the role of technology in developing the state of Andhra Pradesh. He would mesmerize journalists with the use of technology to connect remotely with his state staffers on demand, thus earning him the epithet “the laptop chief minister”.
Different stories were unfolding in other states. In the 1980s the impoverished northern states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh were known by the acronym “BIMARU” which means sick in Hindi. In the 1990s Rajasthan had made significant progress under a Rajput chief minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and no longer fit in the BIMARU category. The Jat community was unhappy and complained of rising prices of onions and Shekawat’s advancing age. The period also saw the rise of Ashok Gehlot who was from a backward caste known as Mali. In Rajasthan in 1998 November Congress won 153 out of 200 seats and named Gehlot as the new chief minister. This loss was shocking as the BJP was defeated in a state election that did not mirror the Lok Sabha trend despite being a Hindi speaking heartland which BJP considered its stronghold.
Emboldened by its performance at the centre in the last five years and a bull run in the stock markets based on a global buzz of 8 per cent growth the BJP decided to advance the general elections by six months and launched a campaign called “India shining”. This campaign looked more capitalist and less socialist. The mainstream media believed that BJP had reinvented itself as an economic catalyst. The golden quadrilateral highway project, the opening of the telecom sector, Vajpayee’s moderate approach with minorities and his amiable nature seemed to augur well for another term as prime minister.
In the Andhra Pradesh state elections of 2004, the laptop chief minister, Naidu, a close ally of BJP was trounced badly. After delivering a growth rate at par with the national average, it was a painful drought in rural areas that he could not tackle effectively leading to an impression that he favoured the elite and not the masses. Voters threw him out bringing Congress back in power under Y.S Rajashekar Reddy. India shining also looked like a joke; rural India bore no signs of development, no tube wells, no electricity, no factories. The jobs available were only on the farm. Teachers failed to show up in government schools. Hospitals did not have doctors. There was discontent, and India shining seemed more like a feel-good campaign without substance when you looked closely at the miserable conditions in rural India. There was alienation in the heart of India.
Congress, with the help of its allies, formed the government. Sonia Gandhi announced she would not be the prime minister, in the end, the choice for prime minister was Dr Manmohan Singh the technocrat who after losing an election in 1991 had said that he would never seek office again. When Ruchir met him, he told him with his usual humility “Ruchir, Please pray for me”.
In this era, we witness the rise of Behan Ji, Mayawati as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. She had encouraged cult personality on a massive scale, building towering statues of herself and her party all over the state, especially in Lucknow. While spending millions in self-glorification, her Dalit vote bank was still languishing in abject poverty. Mayawati blamed corruption and attributed the lack of progress to the previous government run by Mulayam Singh Yadav. She also mocked at the Congress, nor did she trust the BJP. Mulayam meanwhile was fighting to regain power in the UP. He was already passing the leadership to his thirty-eight-year-old son Akhilesh promising a more modern Uttar Pradesh.
In Gujarat Modi had completed a decade as chief minister. He was the man of the moment with the moniker “Sher of Gujarat”. Modi was clear-sighted in his goal. He wanted to take on India’s ruling family. Gujarat was the first step, he mocked Madam Sonia, ridiculed Rahul baba and called Man Mohan as Maunmohan which means silent—turning a blind eye to the pervasive corruption around him. Modi projected his bachelorhood as his proof of purity and commitment to India. He said your money is safe with me as I have no son, no daughter, no brother and no sister. My family is one hundred crore Indians. Modi’s popularity was real; he further strengthened Gujarat to a state almost like China, a manufacturing powerhouse with world-class roads and infrastructure.
Ruchir and his group had met Modi twice. The first meeting was in 2007 during Gujarat elections, where Pranoy Roy aggressively pushed Narendra Modi to apologize for 2002 riots. Modi abruptly ended the conversation and refused to stay for dinner. He told Ruchir “what happened here is not good”. The second meeting was in 2009, at a rally in Maharashtra. The first question to him was about Ishrat Jahan. Modi walked out and refused to meet them ever after that.
Manmohan Singh’s decade rule was plagued with corruption scandals and now inflation too. Late 2013 saw the emergence of AAM Aadmi Party eliminating Sheila Dixit in Delhi. Modi and BJP were looking more muscular, and Modi had established himself as the inevitable Prime Minister in waiting.