September 2013
‘GET UP!’
‘Mmm . . . five more minutes . . . I just went to sleep . . .’
‘It’s 6.30 already! Get up!’
Rajnath Singh woke with a groan and peered at his wife, dark circles exaggerating his sunken eyes.
‘You look like shit,’ she said matter-of-factly.
It was the 245th night-out Rajnath Singh had put since taking over as BJP president. The endless meetings over chai, pakodas, and jalebis stretching well into the night with various factions in the Sangh Parivar to engender consensus over the party’s prime ministerial candidate over the last six months were beginning to take a toll on the BJP president’s health, and it was not just because of the high sugar intake.
Rajnath was already bald and did not have any more hair to lose, so that was one less thing to worry about.
After Narendra Modi’s thumping victory in the Gujarat Assembly polls, although the cadre and the RSS were in favour of declaring Narendra Modi as the prime ministerial candidate, there remained the small matter of persuading the members of the party’s highest decision-making body.
The BJP, to its credit, prided itself on placing merit over lineage in deciding succession issues. But the reality was that the saffron party had been no different from others. After all, to decide leaders by the simple expedient of holding elections rather than through Byzantine intrigue and Machiavellian wheeling and dealing was to strip party politics of its very soul. It would cease to be the higher calling that attracted the shrewdest and the best in the country. And so, politicians, ever mindful of its dangers, had ring-fenced their craft from the insidious idea of inner-party democracy.
Under Rajnath’s watch, the race for becoming the BJP’s PM candidate was beginning to resemble an Agatha Christie plot with its meandering, slow-paced narrative, occasional twists, multiple suspects, needless red herrings and no clarity until the final chapter. New names for the PM candidate would pop up at regular intervals; each time Advani praised a leader it would trigger speculation and frenzied activity, with leaders visiting each other for another round of discussions over chai and pakoda; and just when Rajnath thought he had won over a leader to the NaMo camp, the said leader would turn around and shower effusive praise on Advani, taking negotiations back to square one. Thus the process had been dragging on for four months.
In his extreme moments of frustration, Rajnath had even wished that the party had been a bit more like the Congress, and simply declared Vajpayee’s foster son-in-law as the PM candidate. On other occasions, he had come close to writing to the Election Commission to put off the General Elections by another five years, preferably even indefi nitely, to give him sufficient time to build consensus. Indeed, many MPs would have supported him wholeheartedly had he done so.
After nine years of enjoying not being in government, the prospect of coming back to power and trying to do something useful such as running the country as opposed to staging walkouts after rushing to the well of the House haunted many BJP MPs. A British peer has said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but in this case it might seem that absolutely no power could corrupt just as absolutely as well.
Finally, after the 1234th round of confabulations, only one pocket of resistance stood between Narendra Modi and the PM candidature: the party patriarch, L.K. Advani, and his protégé, Sushma Swaraj. Rajnath was determined to persuade the Bheeshma Pitamah one way or the other. The day of reckoning had arrived.
‘And if you can’t achieve your goal today also, don’t bother coming back home,’ Mrs Rajnath Singh said sternly, after placing a cup of tea on the desk.
‘Don’t worry, darling. It will be done today,’ he assured her, keeping his fingers crossed.
Smriti Irani was already on her way to Sushma Swaraj’s residence. Their confrontation would not be about the PM candidate, but also the clash over who would take over in the BJP as the epitome of the traditional Hindu, sindhoor-sporting, kohl-lined pavitra Bhartiya nari. If Swaraj could disarm opponents with her emotion-laced shrill oratory, Smriti was second to none in inducing pangs of guilt with dialogue delivery honed on the sets of various daily soaps. If Sushma could shake her leg to patriotic songs set to vigorous Punjabi beats, Smriti was second to none in Antakshari.
And then he received this message from Advani that turned his sallow, haggard face pallid:
Dear Raj,
To say that I am pissed with your style of functioning would be an understatement. I told you let’s put off the decision over the party’s PM candidate till at least the results of the Assembly elections, but you did not heed my sagacious advice. What is the hurry in announcing a PM candidate? Isn’t it enough that the Congress is being led by Shri Rahul Gandhi?
I will not be coming for today’s meeting of the Parliamentary Board. Instead, I’m going to ponder over where we are heading as a party. Please don’t call me.
Yours poutingly,
Lal
PS: All other office-bearers have been CC’D.
***
Nine hundred kilometres south-west of Delhi, sitting in his spartan office, the Gujarat CM was staring into his computer, lost deep in thought. He had finished playing solitaire for the fifteenth time. He was supposed to hear from Rajnath the previous night, but the call still hadn’t come. His Gmail status message was also not comforting. ‘One of those f***ed up days,’ it read.
Should he call up Rajnath or wait for another twenty minutes? He decided to play another round of solitaire.
Amit Shah barged in to interrupt his boss’s line of thought.
‘Saheb, quarry has now gone into Haldiram’s. Ordering a dhokla and one cup of tea, as we speak.’
‘Not today, Amit. I’m preoccupied with other things,’ Modi said, waving him away.
‘Jee, saheb,’ Shah said, and went out of the room.
Modi couldn’t take it any more and decided to call up the BJP president.
‘Vande Mataram, Rajnathji. Aa jaon kya?’ he asked.
‘Jai Shri Ram, Modibhai. Things are a bit messed up right now . . . I’ll call you back,’ Rajnath replied. Modi could hear the unmistakable din of traffic in the background.
‘Rajnathji, where are you?’
‘I was on the way to Jaitley’s house, but it turned out he was on the way to my house. Now we have decided to meet at Andhra Bhavan for breakfast,’ gibbered Rajnath.
‘Arre bhai, I told you to get more tech-savvy and install WhatsApp to avoid such snafus. Anyway, what’s the hungama about?’
‘Advaniji has refused to attend the Parliamentary Board meeting. No one knows what he’s thinking. Everyone’s in a state of panic. Listen, I’ll call you back in a while . . . or maybe not. Hai Bhagwan, I hate my job,’ Rajnath whined, and disconnected.
Modi slouched back on his swivel chair and began to stroke his beard, wondering what was going through Advani’s mind.
A minute later, he straightened and pulled his laptop closer. He opened a secure shell console, and began typing furiously. As his fingers flew across the keyboard, a mass of text, numerals and special characters scrolled up the screen at a dizzying speed, too fast for anyone to follow. Modi himself barely looked at the screen or the keyboard. At one point, he yawned, and nonchalantly took his right hand off the keyboard to take a sip of masala chai he’d made himself, without any let-up in the typing speed, and seamlessly put it back on the keyboard a moment later. After a few minutes of work, he sat back, exhaled, and with a smile of satisfaction, slammed the return key.
The screen split into four panels, each panel featuring a different image. The first panel contained a mirror, the second a bed that seemed to be occupied, the third a dining table and the fourth a computer. The panels were titled Camera 1, Camera 2, Camera 3 and Camera 4. For a few minutes, Modi slouched in his chair and watched the screen, munching on a bag of theplas. The screen remained unchanged while the digital clock on the bottom right of the screen ticked by. When the theplas and his patience ran out, he leaned forward and pressed a function key.
A rooster crowed. Modi pressed the key again. The rooster crowed again. The sheets on the bed in the second panel stirred and, a moment later, L.K. Advani rose from his bed, yawning and stretching. Modi watched with interest, as Advani moved from the second panel to the first and began brushing his teeth vigorously. Moments later, he appeared in the third panel to make himself a sandwich, and then eventually settled in panel four in front of the computer.
Modi switched to the console, and typed a few more lines of gibberish. The camera feeds were promptly replaced by a Windows desktop screen, but it wasn’t Modi’s. Modi took another sip of his tea, and watched as the mouse pointer twitched and began to make an agonizingly slow journey towards the Chrome icon on the left end of the screen.
‘Come on, come on, come on,’ muttered Modi.
The browser opened with Blogger.com’s login screen. Then in slow motion, the username ‘Lal’ and a four-letter password appeared letter by letter in the login fields. A moment later, Blogger’s dashboard opened. The mouse then moved upwards and homed in on the ‘new post’ link. Modi leaned closer to the screen as letters began to appear in the title field of the form that followed.
‘Why . . . Narendra . . . Modi . . . will . . . make . . . a . . . disastrous . . . PM . . .’ he read it aloud slowly.
‘Maa Jagdamba!’ Modi cried.
(Find out what happens next in Unreal Elections, (298 pages, Rs 250), Amazon India Top 10 bestseller. Available on Amazon, Flipkart and bookstores. Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India and first published in Mint)