Just as the history of mankind so far has been demarcated between B.C. and A.D., you can safely predict that in the future it will be divided by B.G. and A.G. (before and after Google). As for political history, you could even say before news-TV and after. But if you have been a political journalist across these two epochs, it is fascinating to find comparisons as history repeats itself.
My first really big, turning-point story in national politics was the Allahabad by-election of June 1988, when V.P. Singh, glowing in his rebellion against Rajiv Gandhi, challenged him in the seat Amitabh Bachchan had vacated. We know how the direction of Indian politics changed subsequently, beginning the destruction of Congress vote banks in the heartland.
This, however, is not why we are exhuming a 27-year-old story. The reason this becomes relevant is that a very similar story is now playing out in Delhi. Just like V.P. Singh, Arvind Kejriwal is challenging a national party at the peak of its power, helped along by assorted socialists, nationalists, polemicists and Left-Lohiaite-liberal intellectuals. Just as in Allahabad 1988, if Kejriwal were to win against such odds, it will have the potential of upsetting the very recently established new balance in Indian politics. Similarly, his contest is not against his immediate electoral rival, Kiran Bedi, or even the BJP. It is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bedi is a proxy for him as much as Sunil Shastri was for Rajiv Gandhi in Allahabad 1988.
Just as BJP has now employed Bedi to remind voters of her common activist ancestry with Kejriwal’s, thereby making it a contest between old political siblings, Congress had brought in Sunil, a son of Lal Bahadur Shastri, the very epitome of honesty and simplicity who used to call Singh his fifth son, and to whose trust Singh had willed most of his ancestral property. The aim was to pit like versus like, or “original” versus “fake”. In each case, the big establishment party was trying to evade a direct contest between a supreme leader and an upstart.
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The ploy did not work the last time; it won’t work now. Though I won’t be so nutty as to call any election before 11 am on counting day, irrespective of what the opinion polls say, including a comprehensive one conducted by India Today Group (which indicates an AAP win), the first round has gone to Kejriwal. He has stalked Modi for nearly a year now, something Rahul Gandhi never showed the audacity to do. He contested in Varanasi and finished second, which was a statement in itself because it confirmed that the traditional anti-BJP vote of the Congress was now shifting to him. There was a hint also that UP’s Muslim voter had options other than the Samajwadi Party.
Whatever the result on February 10, he has also got Modi and the BJP to blink in Delhi. India’s strongest and most ideological cadre-based national party has had to change generals weeks before the battle, borrowing a defector of sorts from the recent but dead Anna movement to fight Kejriwal. You can see the BJP, under-confident in Delhi, was hoping to prevent this becoming a Kejriwal versus Modi battle. But as shifting winds became more evident, it was left no choice but to unleash Modi in the fullest fury and put Bedi on mute. It is the cricketing equivalent of sending out a night-watchman with four overs remaining in the day to shield your main batsman in fading light. And then the night-watchman is out first ball. More than any other element in his campaign, Kejriwal is riding this show of panic by the BJP. That is why even the last-minute eclipse of some funny funding is amusing AAP’s voters as much as the St Kitts stuff had done with Singh’s.
The larger parallel, however, is in the campaign issues, method, and metaphor. Singh led an anti-corruption outrage, which is how Kejriwal first found prominence as an activist and when, indeed, his campaign was supported as fully by the RSS as that of Singh’s in 1988. In each case, the common purpose was to destroy a stable Congress government. It succeeded but soon enough Singh ended up the RSS/BJP’s main enemy as Kejriwal’s has now done. And like Singh, he is also a master at playing underdog. Singh’s humble bandana, flask of milk and motorcycle were all weapons in his underdog politics. So is Kejriwal’s formless cap (though I wish AAP had chosen khadi rather than this waxed paper, a non-biodegradable pestilence the BJP is now copying), muffler and cough.
Many of Singh’s strategists and campaigners were eminent “socialist” journalists and editors. Cartoonist and satirist Rajinder Puri would exactly have been his Kumar Vishwas if there was live TV coverage then. And at his decrepit old haveli in Allahabad, motley advisors collected each evening to plan and plot Rajiv’s destruction. These included eminent lawyers, activists, editors, retired civil servants. Sounds familiar? It’s not much different from late evenings at Kejriwal’s humble apartment in Kaushambi, east of Delhi.
Most fascinating and effective parallels than in style are in the language and metaphor used. Singh was masterful in explaining Bofors in the deepest, driest villages of rural Allahabad, that cruellest of summers in a decade (after the great drought of 1986). Your homes have been burgled, he would say (saindh lag gayi hai, in Hindi). How? He would then dramatically pull a matchbox from his kurta pocket. When you buy a matchbox, a packet of beedis, a chunk of gud (jaggery) for even “char anna” (25 paise), a paisa or two go to your sarkar as tax. With this, your money, sarkar builds your schools, hospitals and buys guns for your army. If some of this money is taken in dalaali (commissions), isn’t it the same as your home being burgled? This was his simple riposte to Congress critics who mocked him by adding, who understands Bofors in heartland villages?
Kejriwal, too, has broken down his pitch on corruption, large or petty, and inequality in a similarly comprehensible if simplistic metaphor. His “yeh sub mile huye hain” (all of them are in cahoots) is an echo of Singh’s “your homes gave been burgled”. If your audience is Delhi’s underclass living in sub-human conditions in an illegal colony or slum, where the nonexistent state forces you to live a quality of life much poorer than your income and awareness make you aspire for, you will buy his mythologies easily. The BJP and Congress, he says, are mixed up with builders, so they will demolish all slums, throw you out on the streets because they know you will then give up in 10 weeks and return to your villages. Never mind that while slums are brutally demolished, nobody in real life leaves a city. Even Peepli Live had the poor man ending up in a city looking for a less miserable life.
Kejriwal then reels off vegetable prices in his 49 days, against now. Gobi Rs 8 a kilo then, 60 now. Gaajar Rs 4 a kilo then, 40 now. Tamatar Rs 6 a kilo then, 60 now. I check at several carts selling vegetables in the same grounds as his rallies. Cauliflower is Rs 15-20, carrot Rs 8-10 and tomato Rs 18 for a kilo. But you ask those in his rally, and they say of course, prices have gone through the roof. He says LPG subsidy is being fully withdrawn, milk made more expensive and, indeed, power companies own the Congress and BJP. You can check out public opinion at any time on the issue of one side claiming prices have come down (BJP) and the other shouting they have risen (AAP). The answer will be, of course, they’ve gone through the roof, never mind the facts.
Just as Singh, despite being a westernised feudal, discovered a new vote bank among the rural poor, Muslims and backward castes, Kejriwal has carved out his own, new constituency of the vast underclass in a rapidly urbanising India. If Advani defeated Singh by fighting caste with Hindutva, Kejriwal is fighting Hindutva, Moditva, minorityism with class. If he succeeds, it will be the first new big idea in our politics after Mandal, Mandir and Moditva. I dare say its implications will be far-reaching, and remember I’ve been engaged in a tough intellectual argument with the Anna movement and then AAP, and have drawn plenty of abuse, calumny and dirty-trick attacks. But I am also more a straight reporter than a wishful opinionator.
Postscript: Twenty-seven years have passed, so I can reveal this nugget from my reporter’s diary in Allahabad. V.P. Singh insisted on clean funding and spent as little as possible, campaigning on motorcycle being his brand proposition. One morning, as he sat “strategising” with buddies, in came Prabhash Joshi, khadi-clad editor of the formidable Hindi daily Jansatta. He had a suitcase with all of Rs 7.5 lakh in it, in cash. He said Chaudhary Devi Lal had sent his campaign contribution. Singh recoiled in outrage, how could he take it, his entire campaign was against politics of this kind. Joshi smiled, and told him what Devi Lal had said: tell Raja Sahab (Singh) that campaigns need vehicles running on fuel, which comes for money. So when vehicles start running on air and water, no money will be needed. Until then, shut up, and put up with whatever goes on.
Which, of course, a chastened Singh did. Parallels with AAP’s current embarrassment over the funny Rs 2-crore contribution, therefore, are not coincidental. Any witnesses left to that 1988 story? Several other reporters (besides me), it won’t be fair for me to name. About also some of his journalist-strategists, I will only go so far as to say that one of those features in this year’s Padma awards list.
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