Modi storms Amethi, for first time Dynasty faces raw heat
Sandhya Jain5 May 2014
A chain is as strong as its weakest link. When a hard-working and tenacious politician like Smriti Irani, one of the few BJP spokespersons to prepare before speaking on any issue, was chosen to give Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi a fight in the family pocket borough of Amethi, this writer felt it marked a dimensional shift in the Indian political landscape.
As an act of political daring and political genius, it was vintage Modi. In all the months since his anointment as Prime Ministerial candidate in September 2013, in all the days since the Lok Sabha schedule was announced by the Election Commission, not once did Narendra Modi indicate that he was going to scuttle the dynasty by attacking its most vulnerable point – its non-charismatic, non-performing heir apparent.
It was only at the stage when nominations had to be filed that the Rajya Sabha Members’ name was floated, by design, and quickly finalised. As the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate revealed at the most stupendous rally Amethi has ever seen on Monday, he had always decided to put up a tough fight in the most backward district of Uttar Pradesh, as part of his design for developing the State. Narendra Modi claims he did not then have Amethi in mind, but given his penchant for garnering data and understanding the specific problems of every region he visits, that may be taken with a pinch of salt. Be that as it may be, he selected his ‘younger sister’ Smriti Irani because she had delivered in a backward district assigned to her in Gujarat, and now she seems set to craft a new chapter in political history.
Rahul Gandhi’s fate in Amethi is sealed. Analysts who till the other day claimed that the only challenge before him was to retain a respectable margin of victory would by now have reworked their sums. More importantly, Smriti Irani is no Raj Narain who won by fluke, and Rahul Gandhi is no Indira Gandhi who can make a comeback. It thus seems that the curtain has rung down on the Gandhi dynasty because Sonia Gandhi has no worthwhile political heir who can lift the Congress out of the doldrums of a crippling defeat.
The so-called charisma of Priyanka Vadra always eluded this writer. As the public controversies about her husband’s spectacular financial gains in real estate and her own mysterious business dealings show (she is involved in the National Herald land grab with her mother and brother, and has multiple Director Identification Numbers for unknown businesses), her ‘entitlement syndrome’ was always more pronounced.
Amazingly, she bought into the spin doctor’s rhetoric about her looks and charisma. If looks were enough to vanquish one’s foes, then Troy with Helen as Queen should never have lost the war against the Greeks, and Cleopatra should have vanquished the Romans. War is about strategy, and Narendra Modi is an excellent commander.
It will always be a cruel irony of the Amethi election that Priyanka Vadra actually crafted Rahul Gandhi’s defeat, because she paid no heed to the serious campaign conducted by Narendra Modi in each State. Hence, far from responding on issues, such as the complete non-delivery on basic parameters of development such as roads, electricity, schools et al, she tried to invoke phony emotionalism over Rajiv Gandhi; made pathetic excuses about Rahul Gandhi being ‘too busy’ to develop the constituency; and indulged in juvenile tricks like allegedly ditching her security to interact with villagers, while conveniently taking the media along! When the media mistakenly reported that Narendra Modi had said she was like his daughter (he actually said a daughter will naturally fight for her mother and brother and so he would not say anything against her), she petulantly claimed that she was the daughter of Rajiv Gandhi alone. The social media rose as one to assert that this was the shortest CV ever – daughter of Rajiv Gandhi!
Amethi’s untold story: Every Indian must watch before voting
However, even Priyanka Vadra read the writing on the wall in the hours before Narendra Modi landed in Amethi for his last rally before campaigning ends for the sixth phase of elections on May 7. Media watchers were amused to see a PTI alert requesting the media to delete two news alerts issued previously owing to a ‘miscommunication’. The first quoted Priyanka Vadra as stating that she is not joining politics (at the very fag end of the election, when she can’t contest anyway, it seems like an admission of Rahul Gandhi’s failure as a leader). The second quoted her as saying that ‘no party will get a majority’, which can safely be translated to read that, ‘we are losing but we will make sure that no one else wins either’.
The piece de resistance of the campaign, however, was Priyanka Vadra’s imperious and foolish ‘who?’ when asked about the prospects of Smriti Irani, who has shaken the constituency in her one-month stay there. So soon after the Congress rout in Delhi, where Sheila Dikshit also asked media persons who Arvind Kejriwal was, only to be routed in her own seat and defeated decisively in the city, Priyanka Vadra would have done well to exercise a little modesty. In the coming days, political analysts seeking the causes of Rahul Gandhi’s defeat in Amethi are likely to conclude that it was his sister who dug the final nail in the dynasty’s coffin.
Smriti Irani’s victory will, of course, be a vindication of her efforts. But for Narendra Modi it will be sweet revenge for twelve years of suffering at the hands of the dynasty and its fellow travellers. If there was ever any doubt that he intended this result, it was removed with his blitzkrieg on Monday, when he exhorted those with doubts about the election result to come and see the mood of the people at Gauriganj. Indeed, people had started collecting at the grounds from 11 am itself, though the meeting itself took place after 4pm.
Mocking the Congress for pulling convicts of the jail to make electoral pacts and fight the election, he said it was too late for even jailbirds to save the party. Reiterating his commitment to pick up the nation from its bootstraps, the BJP leader promised to begin with A for Amethi and end only with V for vikas. Thundering against those who challenged the ‘Gujarat model’, and those who claim that Gujarat was always developed, Narendra Modi said that as a new Chief Minister, he was shocked to learn that female literacy in the State was abysmal. When he went into the reasons, he discovered that the absence of separate toilets in schools caused drop outs after Class III. Thereafter, he had 76000 toilets made to enable girls to go to school. Why, he asked, have the great leaders that Amethi has elected for four decades not built toilets in schools for girls?
Promising that his “younger sister” Smriti Irani would change the face of the district, he said that in just 60 months, foreign universities will be coming here to do case studies on how a backward district can be turned around. The Congress president, he said, mocked him for seeking votes for himself, but, the BJP veteran said to thunderous applause, “your dynasty did nothing for the poor. I am proud to ask for votes from the poor, I don’t loot”. To Sonia Gandhi’s statement that ‘Modi thinks he is already the Prime Minister when the results are not yet out’, Modi responded jocularly, “Aap ke mooh mein ghee shakkar, isn’t that what we say in the village?”, adding that the Congress first family never believed that the son of a poor mother could launch such an effective challenge against it.
Challenging the Election Commission to ensure free and fair polling in Amethi, he warned that there were reports of money power being deployed. He berated the media for showing only the faces of the Congress candidates in Amethi and Rai Bareli, to deflect attention from the fact that there were no crowds at their meetings. When uncomfortable questions were posed to the family, the media would switch off the camera, but the era of such deception is now over.
The claim (by Priyanka Vadra) that the State Government did not do the development work requested in the constituency is false, he said. To begin with, the Samajwadi Party has excellent relations with the Congress, and if indeed it had not done work that was requested, then Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi should furnish evidence about specific requests made by them. The truth, he said, is that the family is lying. He added that when the BJP comes to power at the Centre and requests the Samajwadi Government in the State to help implement an irrigation scheme in the district, the State Government and the local MLAs, be they SP or BSP, and the district magistrate, will all rise to the occasion. “You cannot cry and say, ‘you knew my father,’ does the country run like this?” he chided.
Debunking Rahul Gandhi for alleging that he (Modi) practiced the politics of anger, and that he (Rahul) had taken after his father, Rajiv Gandhi, the BJP veteran asked the crowd if he should respond to this. To their loud affirmations, he pointed out that when Rajiv Gandhi was a mere general secretary of the Congress and Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister, he went to Hyderabad and the Chief Minister came to receive him personally. For no good reason, Rajiv Gandhi insulted and publicly humiliated the elected Chief Minister T Anjaiah who was twice his age; so who does the politics of anger, he asked.
A second incident involves his mother, Sonia Gandhi. After initially claiming that she had no interest in politics, when she decided that the time had come to ensure the family interests and was rebuffed by the party, then her associates entered the party office at night and physically threw out the elected president Sitaram Kesri, who was an elderly gentleman and a backward caste “like me”. Worse, when the former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao died, Sonia Gandhi did not allow his body to be brought to the party headquarters in Delhi, or the cremation to take place in the capital. As for Rahul Gandhi, he said, he had insulted the Prime Minister when he was abroad by tearing up an ordinance approved by the cabinet, calling it “nonsense”.
The Gandhi family has been in Amethi for several days now, the Gujarat strongman pointed out, but have they ever spoken about the price rise, unemployment, corruption, or development of Amethi? “I will return in 2019 and give accountability for the development of Amethi” he promised, as the crowd went into raptures. “Responsibility is the key to running the nation”, he said, insisting that a group of 2000 persons was looting the nation and needed to be cast out. Asserting that he would make and sell tea if defeated, he asked if one needs to loot the people to fill one’s stomach. “I am a four time Chief Minister of a rich state,” he pointed out, “but when my mother who is 90 years plus went to vote, she took an auto rickshaw”. There is no justification for corruption, he said, adding that his priority for the district will be education and safety of girls, irrigation and fair price for farmers, controlling the prices, and other development parameters.
Speaking briefly before Narendra Modi who released a special manifesto for the constituency, Smriti Irani pointed to the shoddy state of the area, with potholes and no school or degree college for girls, and said that FIRs were filed against young students who protested against Rahul Gandhi. What kind of women’s empowerment is this, she asked, mocking him for going around the country claiming that the party stood for women’s empowerment. Even worse was the shabby treatment meted out to the father of a Kargil martyr who went twice to Delhi but could meet Rahul Gandhi or get any support from the dynasty. Farmers faced lathi charge when they tried to meet Rahul Gandhi regarding the non-availability of fertilisers. There is no doctor in the district hospital and people die for want of medical attention, she pointed out, and asked if this was the ‘dariya dil’ that Priyanka Vadra said is needed in politics.
As Rahul Gandhi walks out of the gates of history and into oblivion, this writer is reminded of an ecstatic write up by Pakistani author and former diplomat, Hussain Haqqani. Writing soon after the anointment of Bilawal Zardari Bhutto as PPP leader after the death of Benazir Bhutto in 2007, he compared the Bhutto scion to the Gandhi scion and exulted over the future of the two countries under the two potential leaders.
This writer promptly wrote to Haqqani that India was not like Pakistan where a political party could be willed to an heir. The fate of Rahul Gandhi, the writer predicted, would be akin to the Urdu couplet, and I quote”
“Phool bhi char din khil ke bahar dikhla gaye
Hasrat to un gul-guncho pe hai jo bin khile murjha gaye”.
(The flowers bloom for four days and show us the Spring
The surprise is over those buds that fade without blooming).
There cannot be a more appropriate political epitaph for Rahul Gandhi.http://www.niticentral.com/2014/05/05/modi-storms-amethi-for-first-time-dynasty-faces-raw-heat-220171.html