It all started in the lanes and bylanes and a tea stall at Vadnagar, a small town in North Gujarat’s Mehsana district. On Thursday, May 26, it will be exactly two years when this boy, who balanced his studies and worked at the family-owned tea stall as the family struggled to make ends meet, took the oath as Prime Minister of India. Narendra Damodardas Modi, who took India by storm and rewrote the history of the Bharatiya Janata Party, is now on his way to “change India”.
Once described as a “Hindutva hawk”, Mr Modi has emerged and evolved as India’s “Vikas Purush”. Despite the Opposition and a section of the intelligentsia’s attempts to brand him as a “polarising figure selling a communal brand of politics”, reports suggest that Mr Modi tops the popularity charts in the nation with a staggering 74 per cent rating. None of the top leaders in the country, not even Sonia Gandhi or Nitish Kumar, come anywhere near this figure.
Addressing an election rally in Bihar, the Prime Minister saw people streaming in. But there was no place to sit. The man who had caught the attention of the world with his oratorical skill, addressed the crowd looking for a place to sit, “Bhaiyon baithne ki jagah nahi mil rahi hai? Koi baat nahi, mere dil mein aap ke liye jagah hai (Brothers, you can’t find a place to sit? Doesn’t matter, there’s place in my heart for you).” The remark was greeted with thunderous applause. The BJP lost Bihar, but that’s a different story.
He is one of the few political leaders, besides Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Behari Vajpayee, who can mesmerise the crowd with his oratory and rhetoric. An article on his speaking read: “When he is at an investor conclave, he means business. In Parliament, you see him presenting like a statesman inspiring his country to do better.” And at public rallies he makes eye contact with the crowd, uses the right body language and speaks their language. After the Modi tsunami in the general election and in states like Haryana, Maharashtra, Jammu and Kashmir, back-to-back electoral debacles in Delhi and Bihar dented his armour a bit.
But none saw the mercury rising in Assam, a state with a Muslim population of nearly 34 per cent. Before the results, the confident but complacent Congress chief minister Tarun Gogoi told the media: “For the last two-three days I have even stopped taking my blood pressure pills.” Well, nobody knows what Mr Gogoi is doing at this juncture. With a victory in Assam and making the party’s presence felt in West Bengal and Kerala, he truly transformed the BJP into a national party and pushed the nation closer to the BJP mantra of a “Congress-mukt Bharat”.
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Corruption had become “the issue” in the previous Congress-led UPA regime. The party paid for it in the 2014 general elections. Under the Modi sarkar so far there’s not been any major corruption issue in the government. Though controversies surrounding former IPL boss Lalit Modi and Union minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje did rattle the government, yet the scale of the controversies did not rock the Modi boat. The Vyapam scam in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh is an ongoing issue but so far has been confined to the state.
During his tenure as Gujarat chief minister, the state was known for cleanliness. As Prime Minister he is now pushing for a “Swachchh Bharat”. He touched a chord with a slew of initiatives, including “Make in India”, “Jan Dhan Yojana” and the “Crop Insurance Programme”. His journey from a tea stall to 7 Race Course Road “is proof that nothing is impossible”, say his admirers in the BJP. He has come out unscathed even as the Opposition and the national and international media tried to pin him down on the 2002 communal carnage in Gujarat. The evolution from being branded as a “maut ka saudagar (merchant of death)” to “Karma Yogi” and “Vikas Purush” had not been easy for Narendra Modi.
In the 2014 polls he rose above sectarian politics and chose the “development” plank. He sold dreams to the people of India, who were looking for an avatar to rid the country of the scam-tainted UPA government. Absolutely nothing, no accusations, ranging from the Gujarat carnage to Ishrat Jahan, stuck on him. Mr Modi led the saffron flag march across the nation and demolished each and every political outfit that stood in his way. He rebranded himself as an “apostle of development” by pointing to his successful record in Gujarat, a state of high growth rates. The BJP, which had never won more than 186 seats, stormed the Lower House with 282 seats. The total tally of the NDA was 333. The Congress was relegated to its worst showing in history with only 44 seats.
After the victory, former Union minister and Congress leader Shashi Tharoor wrote: “...In the couple of weeks since his election, Modi has been conciliatory and inclusive in both his pronouncements and his actions. I was a beneficiary of this unexpected generosity on the very day of his victory, when I received a startling tweet of congratulations from him on my own victory in my constituency. ‘Let us work together to move India forward,’ he declared in his message to me.”
On the diplomatic front, he delivered a masterstroke when he invited all the Saarc leaders to his swearing-in-ceremony on the lawns of Rashtrapati Bhavan. Like others in the country, and even the RSS, former foreign secretary Sujatha Singh was surprised when she was conveyed the PMO’s decision to extend an invitation to Saarc leaders for the swearing-in ceremony.
It was claimed that the “invitation to the Saarc leaders created history, raised Modi’s stature from regional to national, and initiated a leadership role in South Asia”. At this juncture, after the Assam victory, the BJP looks confident, and if the victory juggernaut rolls on in the tough terrain of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, there will be no stopping Narendra Modi in 2019.
