It takes two hours and a bit, on any given day to climb the 1000 steps cut into the steep hillside to get to the Chotila temple near Rajkot in Gujarat. Rahul Gandhi, they say, did it in half an hour. And he scampered down in less! Granted, he’s 47, nimble of foot, as opposed to the man, who has the bigger chest, ‘chappan ni chaathi’ aka Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is a good deal older, more dyed in the wool.
But its apocryphal stories like these in this bitterly fought, rancour-laced race to secure Gujarat, that have coloured the bruising election campaign. Depending on who you talk to, it has, of course, already been won. Or lost. True, the Congress has no organizational grass-roots structure to speak of, no volunteers of the size and enthusiasm as the ruling party has in its ranks, who go from door to door, armed with a voters list. It is they who make the face to face connect with the voter that galvanises the women and the older people, and draw the legions of the reluctant, out of their homes and into the polling stations.
Despite Gujarat being flagged as this do or die battle for months now, there’s little question that Rahul Gandhi – and the rest of the Congress - has been asleep on the job, coming awake to the exigencies of what it means to be leading the opposition charge when it could be too late. Throwing in a constitutional expert like Kapil Sibal to draw in the Patidar poster boy Hardik Patel, and the line that still has most people in paroxysms of laughter – I’m talking of the Gabbar Singh Tax – that taps a deep vein of resentment against the prime minister, may have changed perceptions. But will it be enough?
Visiting temples? That’s so fake, snigger the BJP, self-appointed guardians of the Hindu way of life. Does he know the mantras and the chants, does he know the way to even pay obeisance before the gods, they ask. And isn’t it nothing more and nothing less than a ploy to shed the Islampasand party of its pro-Muslim tag that once brought them the Muslim vote, but lost them the Hindu vote? The Hindus, once divided, finally came together and voted solidly for the BJP. Is this excessive temple-hopping an attempt to reel in, even a portion of that Hindu vote then? One isn’t sure if the faction-ridden Congress, filled with leaders who have been on the wrong side of the electorate for some 22 years, stand even a smidgen of a chance when faced with the supremely well-oiled machine of the saffron family. Nobody brings up how they may have allowed the BJP full reign in the past but no longer have the luxury of doing nothing under Rahul's watch. After all, Narendra Modi, he of the silken tongue and the demagoguery and verbal flourish that mesemerises the faithful, hasn’t even begun his campaign blitzkrieg yet. Come Monday, that will be something to watch and behold, to see how far, the personalization of this as a Rahul versus Modi tussle, pitting a novice versus a seasoned campaigner, will take the Congress.
The Youth Congress website and its men and women, armed with a death wish have already gifted the PM another chai-wallah lifeline a la Mani Shankar Aiyar and Sonia Gandhi’s terribly inappropriate ‘maut ka …” Who even wrote that!! And even if it was in the speech, who, in their right minds, would say it out loud?
How to shoot yourself in the foot…tell me the ways!
The BJP, as Brahminical as it gets, has sought to reinvent itself as the voice of the people, the voice of the repressed, with the Prime Minister being the face of the OBC and the pride of Gujarat, at home and abroad. An old friend from Dubai and a Gujarati, bristled at the implication that any Gujarati would vote against “their” prime minister. “He never ever does anything for himself. The party, the country always comes first,” she said. “Hardik? Who cares about Hardik, he’ll never be Modi,” she said of the 24 year old challenger to the Modi legacy, who’s giving the party heartburn over the fractured Patel vote. Universal Gujarati pride pitted against domestic bile? There’s no knowing where that will go.
So let’s see why the Congress actually believes it may become the unwitting beneficiary of a Rahul hawa. If, there is even one… No-one has missed the parallels. Just as the BJP threw everything it had into the U.P. election, and dispatched the shudh-Hindi spewing Smriti Irani to target the Gandhi pocketborough of Amethi-Rae Bareli-Sultanpur, the Congress has homed in on the home state of the prime minister and his supremely savvy lieutenant Amit Shah, to make it as difficult as possible for the BJP, to win Gujarat. Or at the very least, win with the kind of margins that had reduced the Congress to complete irrelevance in the past.
The Congress is riding high on the belief that there is a demographic dividend that is there for the taking. Rahul, who cashed in on the ‘vikas gando thay gayo che’ – watch the Kolaveri di version, it's well, kolaveri di - feels he is tapping into the angst of a whole new generation that is going to vote for the very first time. This adds up to 14 lakh new voters, who would relate to the younger man’s anti-establishment rant, particularly the line that seeks to overturn the ‘Modi, man of the people’ trope that the PM has used to his advantage in the past, into the prime minister as a friend of the corporates, that he went to town with, on Friday.
Listening to all those who have traveled the length and breadth of Gujarat, the one takeaway is the anger over the manner in which thriving small and medium businesses – that actually supported and were a vital feeder system for the big corporates - have been bled dry by GST. And the catch-all phrase – agrarian distress – that doesn’t even begin to describe how the once self-sufficient Gujarati farmer has been reduced to penury…ask the Rajkot Chamber of Commerce said one inveterate poll analyst, and you’ll get the startling stats.
Voting day is exactly a fortnight away. If the EC and India’s celebrated democratic voice is allowed to speak freely - murmurs over EVMs notwithstanding - December could mean the beginning of the end, the final unravelling for one of these two contenders. Whose feet will be held to the fire?
