The Pickle Post

by Aashti Bhartia on 4 Apr 2009

A fly-on-the-wall gets a look at Arun Jaitley’s strand of the BJP and his personal politics

In a quiet official bungalow in central Delhi, in a small conference room, Arun Jaitley, the BJP’s Chief Election Strategist, conducts the BJP’s strategy team meetings for the coming elections. A small team, a prominent economic journalist, a business executive who moonlights on policy formation, Party media managers, and a few other trusted advisors surround Jaitley on the conference table.

News channels flit on the T.V. screen as everyone gets a sense of the issues for the day. People from the ad agency, the Party media office drop by with bytes, videos. The projector screen, connected to one of the laptops in the room, plays the BJP’s main 60 second campaign commercial. The video shows clips of unemployed workers, terror attacks and more hopeful agricultural scenes – farmers talking on cell phones, children with laptops interspersed with clips of Advani making forceful hand gestures and addressing audiences. ‘Mazboot Neta, Nirnayak Sarkar,’ (A Strong Leader, A Decisive Government), the BJP campaign slogan, flashes over the screen.

The advisors in the room hum and shuffle. “It’s good,” the business executive ventures, “but, are we highlighting the issues enough?” “Is it a repeat of India Shining?” – Nobody wants to repeat the over-optimistic, glossy campaign the BJP had put out in 2004. Someone on the media team explains it’s the print campaign that’s really meant to focus on issues one by one – unemployment, farmer suicides, terror – while the T.V. ad captures the essence of the campaign. Murmurs go through the room. “This is essentially an issueless election,” Arun Jaitley interjects, the room falling quiet. “Can you tell me what the Congress’ main slogan is?” he asks the business executive who had been dissatisfied. “There are four weeks left to the general election and the Congress hasn’t been able to come up with a slogan.” Sometimes they put Rahul’s face forward, sometimes Manmohan’s, sometime Sonia Gandhi’s – there is an “optical illusion” of leadership in the party. He explains, “Manmohan is seen as weak by everyone, so we have chosen the slogan of Mazboot Neta.”

As election strategist for a number of successful state elections, Jaitley knows well how to tease out issues, spin nailing slogans, crunch numbers and build majorities in tough elections. He managed the 2007 Gujarat election that re-elected Narendra Modi; the campaign slogan he chose, ‘In your hearts, you know that this man is right’ shifted light from the media’s mixed portrayals of Modi and asked people in Gujarat to dwell on their personal belief in him. “Pandra Saal, Bura Haal,’ the aggressive NDA campaign in the 2005 Bihar election that brought Nitesh Kumar to power, flipped Lalu Yadav’s fifteen-year hold on Bihar into a weakness. But, even for Jaitley, the strategy around a general election, with its vast variables, proves far more intractable than the more focused activity of state elections. “There are no real issues,” Jaitley concludes, “it all depends on an aggregate of regional parties and which way they fall.” The room of advisors slumps into quiet contemplation as adrenaline levels fall for a moment before everyone begins, once again, to pass around print dummies and scan the T.V., to pummel out the issues in this issueless general election.

At an interactive talk for young executives at the Imperial hotel, Jaitley identified 1991 as the turning point in Indian politics. “One basic change was that Pre-1991, one issue could sweep the entire country – broad trends were similar throughout the country.” Single issues rocked elections – anti-emergency meetings in ’77, the Janata Split in 1980, Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination in ’84, the Bofors scandal in ’89. Only after 1991, and the eventful Narasimha Rao term – a term which saw economic liberalization, a break in Gandhi family rule, the destruction of the Babri Masjid by the VHP, the first repercussions and enforcements of the Mandal Commission reservations – did caste-based vote-bank politics take speed.

Now, Post-91, Jaitley said, the most important thing was your “alliance quotient.” “If you don’t have an adequate alliance quotient” – the ability to make alliances – “there is no personality, there are no issues with you.” The regional parties are using this alliance dependency to their advantage, with the Third Front as a convenient “parking lot”. All regional parties want to be part of the government, he said, and they don’t know who the next government will be, so they’ve adopted non-ideological, non-committal positions for the future. This is what had been giving recent general elections their bland, disjointed flavour – one knew that the real decisions on who would make the government would take place only after the election results were out.

Back in the BJP’s strategic back office, away from the larger Party mayhem, the campaign’s Kakaji jingles circulating on FM are being vetted. Jaitley had been listening to golden hour on FM in the car back from the airport after his trip to Orissa – the hotly contested state – and he recites a few words from Gopal Das Neeraj’s ‘Caarvan guzar gaya.’ He’d gone to a Kavi Sammelan on 2nd October, Gandhi Jayanti, in Malviya Nagar, Jaitley tells the team of advisors and friends, where he’d met some of the best new Hindi poets. Kaka Hathrasi, a poet, political satirist and humorist from the 1920s to the 1960s has been Jaitley and his campaign’s inspiration for the BJP’s satirical ‘Suno Kaka ji ki’ campaign. Someone from the ad agency plays a couple of the jingles, Kakaji’s humorous take on IPL and security, and joblessness. He suggests making brief videos on Kakaji, using an actor for the Kakaji character. “An Udham Singh type of character,” he muses, citing Channel V. The table appreciates this idea – some ask him questions, others think out aloud on their vision of Kakaji.

One campaign victory is BJP’s ‘Bhay Ho’ spoof on the Congress’ ‘Jai Ho’ campaign – a Pepsi on Coke kind of advertising coup. The video has two street kids with expressive faces banging out ‘Bhay Ho!’ with tambourines and drums in a train compartment, singing over messages of the Congress failures on security, unemployment, hunger, and rising prices. Suhel Seth, adman and political commentator, drops by the strategy room to watch the video; “This is good stuff,” Seth says animatedly. “To make it more powerful, you need to quantify this,” he says, leaning over the table, his untameable mop of hair striking out. “Consumers want answers,” Seth says with advertising assurance – they want to know not only that this paste makes their teeth yellow but which one will make their teeth shine, not only that the Congress has increased unemployment but how the BJP will get rid of it. “They want numbers – ‘15 million people unemployed in four years – Bhay Ho ya Jai Ho?’” Seth announces, his theatre voice projecting all over the room.

While the BJP’s add campaign uses poetic satire and tongue-in-cheek wordplay, Jaitley himself avoids all forms of cynicism – apart from jibes at the current government. At a ‘Friends of BJP’ initiative in Mumbai, he argued that the biggest threat to India’s democracy came from a weakness in the democratic polity. “It shapes us in terms of indifference,” he said, “and indifference further graduates to cynicism.” Indifference, cynicism lacks positivism, he said, encouraging the lawyers, accountants, executives and other professionals to become engaged in politics and in changing the quality of leadership. Cynicism and satire – the recourse of writers, academics, commentators, all those who rake up questions without having to give answers, couldn’t be the refuge of an able lawyer.
Confronted with a political morass, Jaitley has the amazingly adept lawyer’s ability to distil vast amounts of contradictory information and crystallize it into a clear line of thought. Young English columnists write with disdain about the “alphabet soup of Indian politics”, with its burgeoning regional parties, wondering if they should vote at all, but Jaitley, even as he mulls over regional parties influence on national elections, doesn’t despair. At a conference, a worried observer asked Jaitley if the proliferation of regional parties shouldn’t be somehow stopped, or constitutionally barred. “The strength of the Indian democracy is that it brings extremists into the democratic processes of parliamentary government,” he responded, “If you try to stop this on the basis of constitutionalism, strikes would break the country in less than 24 hours.” Parliamentary democracy is still a world where “everybody jumps into the decision-making process.” Good politics was the “art of the possible”, managing to create consensus among different factions and not derail decision-making. The one downfall of regional parties was corruption – insecure parties, unsure if they’ll come to power again, get one chance and milk it for all its worth, he said.

Before conversation at the strategy meetings begins, flicking channels on the T.V., the team assesses the coverage of the day. They nod their heads with dismay over Varun Gandhi’s antics; they despair over footage of Jaswant Sinha distributing notes; they become glum over the questions on the corrupt Neera Yadav’s appointment in the BJP. At one point, at a strategy meet, Friends of BJP volunteer coordinators – a few businessmen who have come to Delhi for the four weeks before the elections – are talking about the ‘drawing room conversations’ they are organizing – neighbourhood meets being hosted by party volunteers who will be given talking points and powerpoint presentations to kickstart conversation. Some non-party volunteers want to host meetings. “They could be loose canons,” one of the coordinators says. “What if they start talking about Hindutva?” someone agrees. The plan is slashed. This small group, sequestered in the strategic bungalow office, is trying to brush Hindutva off the BJP and steer it towards a secular, professional-looking, technology and economy-oriented image.
Waiting outside the meeting room, one of the business executives explained that he’d gotten involved with the BJP after a policy presentation he’d sent to Vajpayee through a contact at the PM’s office had actually been read and used in one of Vajpayee’s speeches. He’d been invited to be ‘Advisor’ to the PM and had been part of the excitement that lowered BSNL tariffs, opened up the telecom sector, and thought out disinvestment. “But, I’m secular,” he said, point black, insisting that the BJP had better leadership than the Congress and one had to engage somewhere. The Hindutva dimension of BJP politics bugged him – He was mixed up about Narendra Modi. He thought Modi might have taken political advantage of the riots after the fact, he said uneasily, yet, he couldn’t imagine that Modi had fanned the riots. “He’s an excellent administrator,” he concluded. In his own speeches, Jaitley avoids Hindutva. He was asked his stand on the Ram Mandir at a recent Friends of BJP meet; he replied that a BJP government would take whatever decision was consensual, glazing over the question uncomfortably.
Jaitley joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad while he was still in College. What drew him to the ABVP, I asked him, expecting him to talk about morality and integrity. Instead, Jaitley rolled back his head and mused, “When you initially join a movement, you’re young, and therefore it’s not necessary that you agree or disagree. You join by association, you join by some initial attraction, and when you’re in it, then you grow with it.” It was a non-effusive, matter-of-fact Jaitley-like response.

His personal politics can perhaps be illuminated, by association, through the politics of Jai Prakash Narayan. JP, as he was known, had launched movements against corruption that Jaitley had been part of as a student and it was JP who had appointed him Convenor of a National students and youth organization. In 1975, JP led the anti-Emergency movement, which saw Jaitley going to jail for 19 months. Jaitley says, fondly, that JP Narayan influenced him, “quite a lot.”
JP Narayan started off as a student of Gandhian politics. After studying political science and sociology at a number of universities across America, he drifted towards Marxism. Back in India in the 30s, on Nehru’s invitation, he joined the Congress. He participated, under Gandhi, in civil disobedience and the Quit India movement. He founded, at some point, the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), a splinter group that split from the Congress after Gandhi’s death. He became restive with the soft practice of socialism in Nehru’s India and became involved with Vinoba Bhave’s Sarvodaya, a movement to promote the redistribution of land to harijans. By the mid-1950s, JP became interested in ‘lokniti,’ or polity of the people, a consensus-based, participatory democracy movement in the villages. In the 70s, JP was at the forefront of an effort to protect civil liberties.
When Indira Gandhi was found guilty of manipulating the state machinery to win elections, JP organized a protest that she retaliated with by declaring Emergency. JP, with all his supporters, landed up in jail. When elections were finally declared in 1977, JP brought together all the opposition groups, from the Left and the Congress Socialist group to the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and the RSS, to make the Janata Party. While the media followed the Congress’ campaign, JP brought together one lakh people in the Ramlila Maidan in Old Delhi and recited Dinkar’s upturning poetry, ‘Singhasan Khaali Karo Ke Janata Aati Hai.’ (In his talks, Jaitley often remembers JP’s recitation at the Ramlila grounds – it was his introduction to the stirring power of poetry in politics.) JP’s energy inspired many young people – Jaitley, Nanaji Deshmukh and others – to galvanize to bring the Janata Part to power in the 1977 elections. After JP’s sudden death two years later, the Janata Party, an alliance between socialists and RSS backed groups, fractured and splintered once again into various parties.
JP had the flexibility, throughout his life, of being able to caste aside old ideological skins – from Gandhism, to Marxism, to Socialism, back to Gandhian struggle, to local governance and on – if he found they’d become impracticable, of adjusting ideology to bring it closer to practicable form. Jaitley shares his freedom from Party thought, his tirelessness and, most of all, his unstinting focus on consensus building. At a conference, breaking from Party culture, Jaitley admitted that the BJP had erred on the choice of ministerial candidate and in its tactics in the Delhi state elections. While Commerce Minister under the BJP, Jaitley – not an opponent of global trade – had argued against the fairness of WTO free trade policies on agriculture while Western farmers were subsidized. At a Friends of BJP meet, Jaitley indefatigably explained the legal reforms that he backed: He’d wanted uniform civil code, one that protected women adequately, but the issue had too many religious overtones. A law against criminals standing for elections – Jaitley had proposed to make the law workable with an amendment that identified a category of heinous offences and barred candidates only if they had more than two heinous offences on the list. An anti-terror law like TADA or POTA; human rights’ groups complain that such laws might bring aberrations, but he argued that human rights groups could play a role in regulating such a law. Some of the reforms had been stalled due to lack of consensus and POTA had been withdrawn by the Congress.

His main gripe with the present Congress-led government is that it deferred decisions in order to hold onto seats – “leadership is about creating consensus.” Since the economic slowdown, he argued recently, the government hasn’t come up with a single economic measure. Sonia Gandhi, like her mother-in-law, prefers slogan to serious decisions, he said, perhaps echoing JP complaints years earlier. His other criticism of the Congress is that it’s fallen from a structured party to “a crowd around the family.” Since the first slot is occupied by the family and other slots by people the family favours, the natural evolution of leadership in the Party goes down. “The family is an albatross around the neck of the Congress,” he said – an identifying strength and a burden.

Addressing one of the first ‘Friends of BJP’ meets in Mumbai, entrepreneur-volunteer and Jaitley fan, Piyush Goyal encouraged professionals to engage in the political process, to vote, promising that a “two-way engagement” would continue post elections and the Friends of BJP would act as an advisory watchdog to the government. The two-month-old Friends of BJP is, in some ways, Jaitley’s adaptation of JP’s efforts at participatory government. While JP and Gandhi canvassed in villages, Jaitley calls upon and connects with urban, educated professionals. When Jaitley spoke at the meet in Mumbai, he explained that with the new delimitation of constituencies and changing rural-urban demographics, larger segments of the population would come under urban influence. Maharashtra would soon be 65% urban, Haryana and Punjab 80% urban – the middle segment of the population would become more and more influential in national politics. Apart from the metros, in April, the Friends of BJP will have 500-1000 people forums in small towns with unlikely names across the country – in Mahbubnagar and Mahabubabad in Andhra, in Kalahandi and Sundargarh in Orissa, in Chatra and Kodarma in Jharkhand to name a few.

Jaitley is building his constituency in the urban areas, yet his constituency is not one that actually votes. Friends of BJP exhort supporters to text message their 500 contacts, email their 1000 people address books. After the 26/11 terror attacks, they believe that middle India wants to participate. Yet, the Friends of BJP will, most likely, not be supplying number just yet, though, as the list of towns with unlikely names becomes longer and rural areas continue to be morphed over by cities, that could change. Away from the conference rooms and auditoriums, for now, it’s still the big rallies that Narendra Modi speaks at, with splashes of Hindutva and self-referential cult-building, that really turn the tide of the elections.

The 2009 manifestoes of the Congress and the BJP don’t actually seem much different. Having turned away from India Shining, BJP’s manifesto courts the rural poor with promises of rations and lower prices. The major difference in economics is policy on taxation – the BJP promises lower taxes for the middle and upper income classes. Another economic difference could be disinvestment – the Congress would be more reluctant than the BJP.

The main difference, however, is that the BJP’s manifesto bows to the Sangh Parivar in promising to construct a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. As much as Arun Jaitley and his friends try to push Hindutva away and move the Party towards a secular, Conservative stand, Hindutva still colours the BJP. More than affecting the Party’s vote bank, or even its new urban constituents, this does, perhaps, affect its ability to make alliances. The Left parties forswear an alliance with the BJP citing secularism, not economics, as the main reason. Lalu Prasad Yadav, announcing his new alliance, said that he was doing all he could to defend secular politics against the BJP. In an election where there ‘alliance quotient’ is uppermost, the BJP’s Hindutva colouring is, perhaps, stalling alliances with regional parties that have minority, sensitive vote-banks. In 1977 too, the Janata Party alliance had broken because the Socialists had objected to dual membership in the Janata Party and the RSS. When the RSS withdrew support of the Janata government, Vajpayee and Advani had left to begin the Bharatiya Janata Party. If the family is the Congress’ albatross, perhaps Hindutva is the albatross hanging around the BJP’s neck – its biggest identifying strength and also its indelible marker.