ON THE MODI TRAIL
INSIDE THE MOST AUDACIOUS PRIME MINISTERIAL CAMPAIGN EVER MOUNTED IN INDIA
The Baramunda ground in Bhubaneswar is normally a barren expanse on the side of a busy artery connecting the south-western fringes of Odisha’s capital. On Tuesday, the eleventh day of February, this maidan is under siege from a meticulously created phenomenon that markets Efficiency but implicitly promises Divinity. Something special is about to transpire here in the next few hours. The secret is given away by the tens of thousands who are marching towards it like an inexorable sea of saffron—its colour getting darker as it gathers the flags, scarves and
topis that are being handed out along the way. These are not bored villagers ferried by local netas for a day in the big city. They’ve been drawn out by a Pied Piper. They want to sing, they want to scream. For he is coming to town.
Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, prime ministerial candidate of
BJP, and the most controversial mass leader in modern India, has created a personality cult like few others before him. When he hurls one-liners at his audience at the Vijay Sankalp Samabesh in Bhubaneswar, for example, it sends them into a frenzy that is difficult to encapsulate. Modi could be either: a rockstar giving his fans a beat they can head-bang to, or an evangelist casting a spell on some hysterical congregation. Whichever way you look at it, Modi commands presidential pomp in any city he marches into—from Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai to Guwahati. It’s still early to say if this attraction will translate into a mandate. But there is little doubt that Modi is running a campaign the likes of which India has never seen before. A campaign where every detail is designed to perfection. Where leaders, workers, volunteers and professionals seamlessly come together, swapping notes like a philharmonic orchestra that plays to packed houses night after heady night. Where the message may still be open to debate, but its delivery has now been perfected to an art form.
Ever since Modi was named BJP’s prime ministerial candidate last September, his core team and the machinery of the party, which had first seemed disinclined to prop him up, have con- nected for a common goal with the comforting click of a jack as it plugs into a USB port. His lingering tussles with senior leaders have been pushed to the background as BJP has ceded its experience, its knowhow, and the organisational strength of its state units into Modi’s hands. Over the last five months, Candidate Modi has addressed 78 public rallies covering a staggering 45,339 kilometres. His schedule will only get more hectic over the next two months.
A bird’s eye view of Modi’s campaign reveals a spider’s web stretched across several Indian cities: From his political chief of staff Amit Shah who is now installed in Lucknow as BJP’s election chief for Uttar Pradesh to the party’s IT Cell in Delhi that gives operational and ground support, from independent war rooms in Mumbai, Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad and Delhi to leaders in states who serve as his local ears to the ground. These threads are held together in Gandhinagar by Modi’s administrative chief of staff K. Kailashnathan, a 1979-batch IAS officer who has been serving as his chief principal secretary since he retired from the IAS last May. Snowballing as he rolls towards the General Elections, Candidate Modi is now larger than the sum of the BJP’s parts. In Tamil Nadu, internal party polls show that 45 per cent want Modi as prime minister but only 15 per cent would vote for BJP. The message from the campaign, therefore, is that votes for the party are not for local candidates but directly for him. Modi dons several hats—development icon, chai wallah, backward class boy—whatever works for whichever sex, caste, class. He wears various motifs—Hindutva leader, agent of change, young at heart—to appeal to myriad social groups. A seller of dreams, Modi has one for everyone he needs.
THE MESSAGE
The content for Modi’s rallies is created by his research team in a war room in western Ahmedabad with inputs from a 250-strong team of the Citizens for Accountable Governance ( CAG) run by effervescent tech whiz Prashant Kishore from a well-appointed office in a tower in Infocity, Gandhinagar. The team includes professionals who have
taken sabbaticals from work to help the Modi campaign. Akhil Handa, 28, is the archetype of a typical CAG member—he quit his job as an investment banker in Hong Kong last July to work for Modi, handling ground events and a rightleaning web portal. The impact of the speeches is then multiplied from a new war room in BJP’s Ashoka Road headquarters in Delhi that houses the party’s ever-growing IT Cell.
Each rally venue has been selected with care, after discussions between Modi’s team and a committee headed by former BJP president M. Venkaiah Naidu, to maximise his pan-India impact. His speeches fall into a pattern to best connect with the basest sentiments of his diverse audiences. They begin by reminding his listeners that they are a glorious people by speaking a few lines in their language, then go into the localised problems they are dealing with, sarcastically contrasting their condition with the purported comfort of BJP- ruled states such as Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and then highlight the ineffectiveness of Congress governments at the Centre over 60 years. This sets the tone for several humorous jibes at his opponents, the promise of a grand future if he is given just 60 months at the helm, and finally conclude with another vociferous invocation of why his listeners should be proud of who they are. “Main Somnath ki bhoomi se Jagannath ki bhoomi mein aaya hoon (I have come from the land of the Somnath to the land of Jagannath),” he said in Bhubaneswar, referring to the Hindu temple in Puri. “Jai Jagannath!” Modi thundered. And the crowd roared back even louder: “Jai Jagannath!”
This message is relayed live on TV channels, using BJP‘ s own video footage
that offers favourable angles of the crowds. It is broadcast on the party’s YuvaiTv Internet channel, and propagated across social media platforms by the IT Cell from a newly constructed National Digital Operations Cell, or ‘NDoc’. The control room in N-Doc has at its command a volunteer army of nearly 1 million people—none of them party karyakartas, all who had randomly connected with the IT Cell over the last four years across various platforms. These volunteers have now been “enabled”, with literature and training, and “activated”, by being handed key area-specific responsibilities, to spread the Modi gospel across the length and breadth of India. They collect donations, organise manthans (idea exchange sessions) and Chai pe Charchas (discussions over tea), and help the party create a hitherto-unimaginable database of like-minded individuals in their localities who may be willing to join this unpaid workforce.
N-Doc’s primary focus area is 155 urban constituencies, which IT Cell head Arvind Gupta describes as “digi- tal seats” that the Modi campaign believes can be won on the strength of the online army. Each of these seats will get a volunteer base of at least 5,000 ‘Modi-fiers’—or 775,000 trained campaigners armed with badges,
ID cards, pamphlets, and “most importantly,” says Gupta, “with energy and conviction”. Modi, famously a former tea-seller, gave his endorsement to Chai pe Charcha when he connected with 1,000 tea shops across the country from Ahmedabad on February 13.
Modi’s personal team of speech-