Omidyar! What do we have here? This was unpleasant, uncomfortable, unsettling! Yashwant Sinha, the former Finance and Foreign Minister, has clearly decided there’s no point in holding back. He is making the kind of telling, pointed barbs that must be making the NextGen BJP, the Modi-Shah duo, inheritors of the mantle from the old guard of Atal Behari Vajpayee, L.K.Advani, Jaswant Singh and Murali Manohar Joshi who took the party from 2 to 80 to 303 seats, squirm. Or not.
Sinha hasn’t minced his words. Not since his open and visceral attack on the Finance Minister who he says should be shown the door, the Modi government’s handling of the economy, the demonetization shocker and the GST - all of which descended into a slanging match between him and his son, who still holds a post in the Narendra Modi cabinet, has he stopped himself from airing his views. Repeatedly!
As trenchant as these views are, they are also deeply embarrassing. In saying he has no issue with his son Jayant Sinha, being investigated for investments abroad as revealed by the Paradise Papers, as long as the BJP’s president Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah is also investigated, what he’s doing is both subtle and clever. The Modi government’s USP has always been that it is utterly clean, that its ministers have indulged in no hanky-panky, no scandals, financial, sexual or otherwise, no unsavoury links with anything or anybody who is even remotely questionable.
Modi himself, made a tactical course correction when he was seen as close to the elite and big business, doing a 360 degree turn and reinventing himself as a voice of the poor and the downtrodden, the man who puts, not his family, but the nation first. And that’s the story that Sinha is going for. If he takes the implied hint of wrong-doing by Modi’s inner circle to a larger audience, throwing it into the heat and dust of an election campaign in a key state like Gujarat, there’s no telling what effect the emotions and the rhetoric of electioneering will have on the BJP's fortunes.
Sinha, who has worked the trenches in his youth, knows the alchemy of the voter. No voter is moved by statistics and numbers alone. He is drawn instead into the charmed circle by the orator’s fork-tongued mastery and power of language, of innuendo and suggestion rather than fact. And if there is even the slightest hint that the man they see as a demi-god has done a Manmohan Singh and looked the other way as the state was plundered by his cohorts, there’s no saying which way the Gujarat voter will go.
The power of suggestion! It’s every politician’s USP. Rahul Gandhi has discovered it, belatedly, as have so many before him. The task before Modi-Shah will be to turn the story around, when they still have the chance. The drop in the BJP’s vote share, since surveys were conducted in August and again in October is a mere 6 per cent. Not enough to lose them the state. The election is still four to five weeks away. Time for all of them to play catch up! To spin a new story.
Especially as the prime minister has always kept a close eye on Gujarat, with insiders saying that while Chief Minister Vijay Rupani may be a Shah proxy, the actual administration of the state, right down to the last file, is still overseen, minutely, by the PM. Now that his promise of reducing the GST burden has been kept, the BJP’s Modi mantra has kept the faith with the masses. What can the Congress get at now? Will it shift its strategy to appeal to the aspirations of an ever younger electorate who hunger for an end to the old way of life and an entry to the new, and who, having no memory of any government other than the BJP, do crave a change? One doesn’t quite know if the Congress knows how to tap into that angst and beat the BJP at its own game. Its war of words on social media has won Rahul a much followed status on Twitter. But it isn’t original. The Congress has taken a leaf out of the BJP’s book.
As the BJP and the Congress face off in Gujarat, the difference between the politics of the north and the south couldn’t be more stark. Look at how the Dravidian core remained unimpressed by the PM’s visit to ailing spinmeister Muthuvel Karunanidhi whose oratory left one spellbound; at how throwing mud at Oommen Chandy for a sexual peccadillo and financial indiscretions have not been given much credence, given the dubious credentials of the woman at the centre of it all. What matters to the voter is the legilsators' record in office. It is when these politicians fail at their job, that the people punish them; religion, caste and ideology, notwithstanding. Barring MGR and NTR – and Jayalalitha - the south rarely deifies its political class. Ramakrishna Hegde, Deve Gowda, Ambareesh know what it is to face the electoral dust.
In marked contrast, few expect the Gujarati to punish the BJP for its financial faux pas. As one Marwari businessman from Rajasthan told me, take the cash away from the Marwari and he may just forgive you, but divest a Gujarati of his hoard and there’s no telling what he’ll do. Tax his khakra!!? The Modi government crossed the line here, but with the Centre amending the GST, he will as quickly step back into his home state's good books.
This is where one must remark on Chief Minister Siddarmaiah, master at this game of innuendo and doublespeak. After the incredible comment, delivered oh so subtly, that the IT officials who raided state power minister D.K.Shivakumar’s homes and offices had asked DKShi why he wasn’t joining the BJP, Siddu achieved one of two objectives – he amplified to the world, the doubts that most ordinary mortals now have that the administration and the police, investigating agencies at every level at the Centre is run by the Delhi government, and two, he’s ensured that neither D.K.Shivakumar, nor his brother D.K. Suresh will jump ship. He’s locked them in so tight that neither can move to the BJP as other stalwarts have! There’s going to be no Mukul Roy to contend with in Karnataka!
The IT chief raider has, of course, stoutly denied the Chief Minister’s charge, that he and his men had suggested that DKShi should join the BJP. But the damage has been done. But with people well outside the political circle talking about it, the larger electorate can hardly stay immune. There’s one more troubling point. Even after DKShi’s homes and offices were raided, a good 90 days ago, and his entire family paraded before the taxmen, in the kind of public humiliation that is normally reserved for rapists and killers, the IT raiders have not slapped the man with a panchnama! If that isn’t holding a man by the short and cxxxxxs, I don’t know what is!
There’s talk now, of course, that the battle will be joined by a whole bunch of the disgruntled top guns forced out of the BJP and other top parties who have switched sides and grown closer to the saffronists, leaving them with one foot out of the door, and no political party to call their own - the other Yashwant Sinhas across the political spectrum, all of whom will come together and campaign in Gujarat, in a last ditch attempt to bring the BJP to its knees. So the two questions I am leaving you with - Will the Sinha clones who have no political following, make a difference? Can they throw the Shah-Modi duo off their game?
Come November 18, we will know whether Yashwant Sinha set off the wave, the unexpected deluge or whether it will be just another false dawn.
