Modi’s Nehru moment

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, led the Congress Party to an exceptional victory in the country’s first general elections in 1951-52. Not until Modi’s triumph 62 years later has something as spectacular happened in post-independent India.

Nehru, like Modi much later, was in his sixties when he went into the elections.

Biographer Michael Brecher noted with awe the blitzkrieg of a campaign Nehru unleashed: “Nehru’s election tour in 1951 was a prodigious feat of endurance… He travelled by almost every conceivable means of transport — plane, train, boat, automobile, horse and even on foot… According to one person who accompanied him on his campaign, they covered over 30,000 miles in 43 days. Often Nehru delivered as many as nine speeches a day beside brief roadside talks. Despite this blistering pace, with an average of five hours rest a day, he seemed tireless.”

Modi too proved to be an indefatigable campaigner. In a flattering imitation of Nehru, Modi was always nattily turned out, at no stage looked hurried, and connected with his audience immediately and intimately.

Modi’s saturation campaign was a rerun of Nehru’s in 1951, only with much more technical wizardry built into it and a television coverage that brought him to millions of viewers across India in real time.

Modi’s electoral success was achieved in the face of overwhelming odds. He overcame strident in-house efforts to dislodge him as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, especially by his former mentor, LK Advani as well as powerful insiders with aspirations for the top post such as Sushma Swaraj.

Nehru too had had to contend with and marginalise powerful insiders. Nehru had cajoled and bullied the Congress Party to be firmly behind him after pushing the old guard out of the way. Prominent amongst them were PC Ghosh and JB Kripalani.

Similarly, Modi successfully got the BJP to back him unequivocally after outmanoeuvring his party’s old guard. Advani and Joshi were silenced, Jaswant Singh was forced to leave the party.

Nehru won 362 of the 489 Lok Sabha seats for the Congress; Modi won 336 for the NDA out of 543. True, Indira Gandhi had engineered a great comeback for the Congress in 1980 while Rajiv Gandhi rode a huge sympathy wave in 1984.

But they were favoured by extraordinary circumstances. The 2014 election, by contrast, was a routine one happening in relatively normal times.

Nehru had a vision of leading a strong and centralised government out of impoverishment and backwardness, through socialism and planning.

Modi too has come with a vision: of scrapping Article 370, reducing the size of government, educating and skilling India’s young, and making the country competitive globally.

Mani Shankar Aiyar may not like this, but Modi in politics is remarkably like Nehru.

When push came to shove Nehru displayed a kind of imperious disdain for democracy that saw him incarcerate Sheikh Abdullah for years, send Angami Phizo to an exile from which he never returned, steer India towards planned economic development and reform Hindu personal law — all in the face of opposition. Modi’s management of Gujarat for over a decade indicates that he is as dogged a ‘centraliser’ as Nehru was and no less focused.

Like Nehru, Modi comes across as his own man and not one managed by minders. His determination to make development the central objective of his government and not Ayodhya, has made the hard core in the BJP as well as the RSS wince and lump it; both are aware that Modi owes his electoral triumph to none but himself — exactly what the Congress Party realised after the first general election in which Nehru rather than his party was seen to have triumphed.

Not everyone will agree with the way Modi proposes to go, but we are getting coherence and clarity, along with an occasional sound byte for the first time in over six decades. With this mandate,Modi also has a fighting chance of implementing what he stands for.

Modi is basking in a Nehruvian dawn — a moment that is pregnant with possibilities of big changes and radical course alterations.

The writer is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The views are personal