Narendra Modi's Kolkata rally is measured as all rallies in Kolkata are by the question - was it bigger than Mamata's? But one could also ask was it even more Bengali than Didi's rallies.

Kolkata: “Uni eshey gechhen. Uni eshey gechhen, (He has come, he has come)” goes the excited rumour at the dusty Brigade Parade Ground in Kolkata. Since much of the crowd is occupied in tossing pebbles to try and get the people in front to sit down, no one can quite see who the “he” is at first.

It turns out it is not Narendra Modi. It’s the BJP’s latest inductee – Bappi Lahiri.

Fortunately the rotund Bappi Lahiri makes for quite an unmistakable landmark on the faraway stage.

“See Bappi-da over there” a man orients his young son. And then points out other luminaries like Varun Gandhi relative to Bappi-da as if he is the pole star.

In Kolkata rallies, size clearly matters.

Once upon a time the CPM had scoffed at the BJP’s ambitions in West Bengal saying one needed a telescope to see the BJP. A man standing at the back of Narendra Modi’s jan samudra of a rally in Brigade Parade Ground unknowingly turns that quip on it’s head.

“I wish I had brought a telescope,” he complains. “The stage is so far away and there are so many people.”

As I said, when Kolkata has a rally, size matters. A lot. More than anything anyone says at a rally what people relive with a sort of masochistic relish is the pain. People remember historic rallies by how long it took them to get home from work. A political party’s mettle is measured by its ability to bring the city’s already chaotic traffic to its knees.

As the Modi rally got underway, Ram Vilas, standing wrapped in a shawl and monkey cap (though he is from Uttar Pradesh not West Bengal) says he’s been coming to rallies here for thirty years.

He was here for Mamata’s mega rally on 30 January. That was quite something he says. “After thirty years I really saw the Brigade ground filled up,” he says admiringly. “Jyoti Basu could not do it. Indira Gandhi could no do it.” He does not think Modi can either though he says “the whole world is waiting for Modi.”

That’s to be expected. This is Mamata-land and she cannot be shown up by a party which is not even the main opposition in the state. The BJP alleges their buses are being blocked. But the crowd Modi can draw in a state where the BJP is not even the main opposition is impressive. The Telegraph estimates that over 1.5 lakh came to the Brigade Parade Ground.

“The size of this rally will surely give Mamata sleepless nights. She’ll have to take a sleeping pill tonight,” chuckles Mousumi Bhattacharya from Debagram in Nadia close to the famous battlefield of Plassey. Bhattacharya ran as a zilla parishad candidate on the BJP ticket. But she’s stuck at the back of the rally, sitting on a newspaper and all she can see are the backs of green plastic chairs where Modi fans are piled up, sometimes four to a chair.

“I could have seen it better on TV at home,” admits Bhattacharya. “But the crush of the crowd has its own enjoyment.”

Modi plays the huge crowd to the hilt. The poster above the stage includes him into a Bengali pantheon of Tagore, Subhas Bose, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Swami Vivekananda and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee. If the poster is subtle in its Bengali canonization, the speakers are more blatant, one exhorting the crowd to put their vishwas in Narendrabhai the same way they once put their faith in another Naren (Vivekananda).

As the choir breathlessly sings the old Bengali patriotic song “Muktir mondiro sopanotoley” this could be a hammer-and-sickle roadside rally. Rallies in Bengal, no matter the political colour, apparently have a certain cast-in-stone song list. One expects the choir to break into “Negro bhai aamaar Paul Robeson” any minute.

Modi, clearly delighted by the mammoth crowd, Bengali-name drops throughout his speech, stroking Bengali pride and stoking Bengali hurts. Subhas Bose or Subhas-babu didn’t get his rightful place in history because of Congress conspiracies. Pranab-dada, he reminds the audience was denied the prime ministership after Indira Gandhi’s assassination though he was the senior-most member in her cabinet. (Jyoti Basu too was denied the prime ministership too but he does not mention that.)

While all political leaders try and play to their audiences in their speeches, Modi goes above and beyond the call of duty in his flattery. He coos “Aami tomaay bhalobashi” to his “sonar Bangla”. He quotes Tagore’s Where the Mind is Without Fear in stentorian Bengali. And if he slips and calls a rosogolla a rosogollo, the crowd is forgiving. Especially because he leads them in a chant of “cholbe na, cholbe na” (will not work, will not work) and slyly mocks Mamata’s favourite slogan “poriborton” showing he understands not just the state’s history but gets its political lingo as well to deliver a few jabs.

“The speech shows he has done his homework,” smiles Soumit De Sarkar, a civil engineer from Kolkata dressed in the Bengali intellectual’s uniform of kurta and jeans. “For a non-Bengali to have this many Bengali touches is quite unusual.”

Of course, the irony is much of the audience is as Bengalis quaintly put it, “non-Bengali” as well – from Jharkhand, Bihar, UP, Kolkata’s Marwari business community. Modi’s laboured Bengali is not exactly wasted on them but they are rather bemused. They are more interested in his plans for the future of India than his rumination on the wonder that was Bengal and the debt owed to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Gurudev Tagore.

Many are here to see Modi as a sort of tourist attraction while they drink the lebu-cha (lemon tea) and suck on chutney lozenges. Mahadev Bala has come with his wife Bakul from Purbastali, a two-and-half hour journey by train. He says he does not want to stay and visit the Indian Museum or the Zoo. “I have a rabbit, dogs, guinea pigs and all kind of birds at home,” he says. “I will go back right after the rally.” For him a Modi sighting even from afar is accomplishment enough.

A young woman in a grubby salwar, a baby on her hip, dodges through the crowd, picking up plastic bottles discarded by rally-goers and crushing them in a big cement sack she is carrying. She says it’s her first rally. “I heard there would be huge crowds so I came,” she says. She will get twenty rupees per kilo but she has no idea yet how much she has collected. I ask her name and she just looks at me and shrugs and then crawls under the bamboo railing to pursue a bottle being kicked underfoot by the teeming crowds.

Finally in her I encounter someone for whom the size of the rally really matters beyond ego trips, potential votes and competitive oneupmanship. For her the success of a Narendra Modi rally is really a bread-and-butter issue.