At its recent National Council meet, the BJP virtually declared Narendra Modi the Party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
With BJP President Rajnath Singh — who got a helping hand from Modi for his post — hailing Modi for his great work in Gujarat and joyfully taking a back seat to make way for the BJP’s hero, other aspirants for the position, such as L. K. Advani or Sushma Swaraj, kept a straight face and cheered the man of the moment. Sushma appeared to do it more willingly than Advani, whose body language displayed he wasn’t too happy with the “jai jai Modi” clamour at the meet.
The hero
But let’s first talk about the hero. Modi himself sent out clear signals that he was ready for the challenge, by ripping through the Congress and its first family.
In his moment of glory, he did what he does best… Play to the gallery by calling his opponents names.
The softest target was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was described by Modi as the Congress’ night watchman.
Adding insult to injury, he further denigrated the PM by comparing him to Sitaram Kesri, who he said stood guard for Sonia Gandhi before she took over the Congress party’s leadership.
In the next shot, perhaps visualising himself already on 7, Race Course Road, he had a shy at winning brownie points at Raisina Hill by saying that had Pranab Mukherjee, instead of Manmohan Singh, got the PM’s job, the country wouldn’t have suffered this much. His passionate call to rid the country of the “termites” called Congress got him thunderous applause.
But there were several undercurrents too at the party meet which sent out strong signals that everything would not be hunkydory for Modi’s scripted journey to the top slot.
The aspirant
Advani sat through the meeting giving the right smiles at the right time. But he must have been devastated to hear he would now only play the role of an “advisor”. However, he did enough to puncture the BJP’s feel-good balloon by striking a discordant chord, and that too on corruption, for which Modi had lambasted the Congress. Not mincing words, he said the BJP’s “wavering and unprincipled” stance in handling the corruption issue in Karnataka had “caused great damage to our image. We forgot that the people judge the commitment of any political party to fight corruption not by its pronouncements but its practice and punitive action.”
He also went on to heap praise on Sushma Swaraj’s oratorical skills by saying that while earlier Vajpayee used to give him a complex by being a brilliant orator, now it was Sushma’s turn to do so!
Significantly, in his speech, Modi had made his first pitch to adorn a more acceptable, and moderate persona by harping all the time on issues related to good governance and development. He underplayed his Hindutva image by not raising saffron issues such as Ram Mandir, appeasement of minorities and the like. Instead, craftily, he recalled A. B. Vajpayee, the most moderate face of the BJP, as the party’s role model. Referring to Vajpayee five times in his speech, he said he had represented the BJP’s best.
So, by comparing Sushma’s oratory to the silver-tongued Vajpayee’s, was Advani sending a signal to Modi?
The dark horse
There was more at the meet to remind Modi that he can’t take his supremacy in the BJP for granted. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan waxed eloquent on the several welfare schemes enacted by his Government to improve the lot of the girl child, enable women to take to the husband’s house goodies worth Rs 1.18 lakh, so that “she could hold her head high”, (that he was indirectly endorsing dowry needs to be condemned) and give cycles to boys as well as girls. Chauhan has neither Modi’s charisma nor his PR and oratorical skills. But there is no denying that he has done good work in Madhya Pradesh.
Obviously, in no mood to play second fiddle to the Gujarat Chief Minister for all time, he announced that, under his leadership, MP had registered an average GDP growth rate of 10.2 per cent and agricultural growth rate of 18.91 per cent. No other State in India — not even Gujarat was the sub-text — had achieved this, he thundered. Surely, Chauhan’s supporters would be telling him that if at all the NDA is in the position to form a government, and at the nth hour allies like Nitish Kumar’s JD (U) are not willing to accept Modi, Chauhan could be an acceptable choice!
A black mark or two…
Anyway, at this moment, it is Modi, and only Modi, who has caught the imagination of the BJP cadres and its supporters. But as though it’s a curse, at every high moment in his life, the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 comes to haunt Modi.
This time too, even as he was being hailed in Delhi at the BJP meet, in the big, bad, wild west called the US, he received a quiet but substantial snub.
Bowing to the displeasure of some of its professors and alumni, the Wharton Business School dumped Modi as the keynote speaker at an event scheduled for March 22. Students at Wharton — after all, the US NRI community is among Modi’s topmost support base — had invited Modi to address the Wharton India Economic Forum. Only through video conference; as the dissenting letter written by the professors and alumni pointed out, he was “the same politician who was refused a diplomatic visa by the United States State Department on March 18, 2005 on the ground that he, as Chief Minister, did nothing to prevent a series of orchestrated riots that targeted Muslims in Gujarat.”
In another snub, which the mainstream media seems to have missed or deliberately ignored, a printer’s conference titled ‘Romancing Print 2013’ which had invited Modi as the chief guest met with stiff resistance from some senior members, who questioned Modi’s choice and threatened to pull out.
I read the report titled For once, a royal snub for Modi in the Free Press Journal on a Mumbai-Chennai flight on February 26. It quoted representatives of Tulika Books, Print Week India, and so on, questioning Modi’s choice for the conference. One of them went as far as to say that his publication “stood by the principles of good taste, decency, progressive values, democratic principles and, above all, the Constitution of India. I don’t think Narendra Modi stands by these values and hence the withdrawal of support.” Significantly, not one of those who pulled out and was quoted, was a Muslim. They were all Hindus. The meet was held in Delhi on March 2 without Modi’s participation, and a Gujarat government official said that anyway, Modi had not accepted the invitation.