Modi is following Indira Gandhi playbook—election wins are personal triumphs, CMs don’t matter

Modi's charisma and vision for India is the only mandate for elections. Local leaders become no more than facilitators. They are not expected to win votes in their own names.

Supporters of Modi wear masks of the PM during an election campaign | Representational image | ANI

Those of us who find parallels in the working styles of Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi will not be surprised by the latest round of BJP’s chief ministerial appointments. Modi, and possibly Amit Shah, ignored the expectations of the party, confounded the analysts who had made several predictions, and risked the wrath of many well-established BJP leaders.

For instance, Madhya Pradesh was considered a no-hope state for the BJP because of the prevailing anti-incumbency sentiment. Under veteran Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, though, the party turned its fortunes around and went on to win by an astonishing landslide. In Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje is a two-time chief minister whose hold on the party’s state unit was so strong that during the ticket distribution, the central leadership eventually bowed to her clout and gave tickets to many of her supporters despite its original intention to marginalise her people. In Chhattisgarh, where the Congress was the favourite, nobody had bothered much about possible chief ministerial candidates but it was generally assumed that if the BJP won, the former chief minister Raman Singh would get the job.

But Modi chose to surprise his party in every state, appointing individuals few even knew about and who had not appeared on many shortlists. People looked for caste calculations to explain the choices. Others said that the new chief ministers were party men who had served the Sangh Parivar for years, often since their student days.

Both explanations are probably valid. But they miss the essential feature of the now super-confident Narendra Modi’s style: he does whatever he likes with whoever he likes.

Gandhi set the template

To understand the parallels with Indira Gandhi, we need to go back a little in history. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, state Congress leaders wielded enormous clout. Chief ministers were rarely disturbed and the Congress operated with a federal structure where Delhi left it to the states to sort out their own affairs.

When Nehru died, these leaders gathered together and chose Lal Bahadur Shastri as his successor who would probably have been Nehru’s own choice anyway. When Shastri died suddenly in 1966, there was no obvious successor. The leaders huddled together again and came up with the name of Indira Gandhi. There was considerable opposition from at least one state leader, Gujarat’s Morarji Desai, but all the other leaders united against him. They liked the idea of Indira Gandhi as prime minister because they believed her parentage would provide a link with the glory days of the Congress. (They thus unwittingly created the cult of dynasty that still plagues Indian politics.) But mostly, they wanted her because they thought she would do as she was told.

All went well until the Congress took a real beating in the 1967 general election (though it retained power with a smaller majority at the Centre). That defeat convinced Gandhi that the Congress, run by the old regional leaders (now derisively referred to as the Syndicate), was collapsing. In 1969, she broke free of the Syndicate and split the Congress.

The Syndicate, now called the Congress-O, retained the mighty party organisation and when a midterm election was called in 1971, it contested, claiming to be the real Congress because it was supremely confident of forcing Indira Gandhi out. She gambled that the Syndicate was wrong and that India would vote for her personal charisma and her ideology (a muddled version of socialism).

She was right: they were wrong. She won by a landslide. The Syndicate was finished.

After that, Indira Gandhi never let powerful regional leaders emerge. She realised that state elections could be turned into Presidential-style contests where the electorate was asked to vote for her and her vision of India, not for specific regional leaders. And while the going was good, she was absolutely right.

Modi is the mandate

Fast forward to the present day. Narendra Modi was largely a creation of LK Advani who sent him to Gujarat and stuck by him through thick and thin. Just as Indira Gandhi dumped the Syndicate and destroyed its political influence, Modi has done the same to Advani and all other leaders who facilitated his rise.

He approaches all elections as Indira Gandhi used to: as referenda on his personal charisma and his vision of India, which is Hindutva. At least in the Hindi belt, that formula works. (It doesn’t work in Karnataka, West Bengal, etc. as we have seen.)

In such a scenario, local leaders become no more than facilitators. They can help with the organisation of elections, but they are not expected to win votes in their own names. When some regional leaders get too uppity and begin to believe that they have a right to rule their states, they are swiftly set right. Non-entities—or at the very least, little-known politicians who are not great vote-winners and have no independent stature—are appointed to replace them.

This is what happened to Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Vasundhara Raje. (And possibly to Raman Singh as well.) Modi isn’t interested in their vote-winning capabilities. Like Indira Gandhi, he treats every electoral victory as a personal triumph and believes that the people have voted for him, not for any regional figure.

He gets away with this because he is right.

The iron law of Indian politics is that if you can get your followers elected, then you can do pretty much what you want. That is how Indira Gandhi came to be seen as the empress of India. Her party prostrated before her because its members knew that she could put them in power.

Foregoing the iron law

Today, the Congress lost sight of this iron law. You can only push regional leaders around if the party regards you as the primary vote-winner. By the time Narasimha Rao took office, he had played dirty with so many senior leaders that when the Congress went down to defeat in 1996, many Congressmen celebrated and nobody gave Rao a second look.

During the UPA rule, the Congress started out by recognising the importance of regional leaders but by the end, it had forgotten this iron law and needlessly antagonised YSR’s family and kissed Andhra Pradesh goodbye.

Now, the Congress is confused about what to do. It recognises that the Indira Gandhi-style of functioning won’t work because Rahul Gandhi cannot necessarily get MPs and MLAs elected all over India. So, it has gone back to a Syndicate-style approach, counting on leaders like Ashok Gehlot and Kamal Nath to win elections. But even that has failed.

Indira Gandhi was so confident during her time that she could create chief ministers out of nothing, that she even let her son Sanjay do the selecting: which is how the likes of VP Singh were elevated.

Except for one bad patch (the immediate aftermath of the Emergency), it was an approach that worked for the Congress. And when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, there was not a single regional leader of consequence left who could possibly have succeeded her. (Pranab Mukherjee, who may have made an abortive stab at the top job, was her creation: but he would have had difficulty winning a municipal election on his own.)

Will this Indira Gandhi-like approach continue to work for Narendra Modi? My guess is yes, it will.

As long as the Hindi belt is in thrall to Modi, he can do whatever he likes in that region. And with the Hindi heartland sewn up, he is all set to become an absolute emperor just as Indira Gandhi was the empress of India.

Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)