General elections, UP,

April-May 2004

‘Rahul is smarter than I am’

Assembly Elections, UP | February 2012

Can star power overcome tough realities?

Assembly Elections, UP | February 2017

The first time we saw Priyanka Gandhi campaigning, not far from the family home base in Amethi, she was leaning so far out of her open vehicle she seemed about to spill into the crowd, smiling and waving like an exuberant teenager passing through a sea of friends. The crowd responded in kind, fans hanging from light poles and tree branches to catch a glimpse, jostling to get closer.The yearning for contact with major leaders is a common spectacle in India, where voters will risk bodily harm to themselves to make contact, not just to touch a hand but often to grasp, hold, shake, physically connect with their political heroes. It is not unusual to see politicians come out worse for wear, and I could see at Priyanka’s rally that her hands were bruised from the adoration of fans. The sense that Priyanka could be the one was overwhelming, but she told us she wanted to stay close to home and focus on raising her two young kids.What surprised us about Amethi was that it did not look like a ‘VIP constituency’. While leading politicians often steer funds to their home districts to transform them into oases of relative wealth, Amethi was a typical UP backwater. At a Gandhi family guesthouse, we asked Priyanka why.Her answer shocked me: it had been hard to raise funds since her father Rajiv was prime minister in the late 1980s. Opposition parties had conspired to starve Amethi of funding. If the Gandhis could not spark hometown development, it was a sign of how difficult it for politicians to deliver in India, where party rivalries and a broken bureaucracy stymy action, but also of how the Gandhis operate. On our subsequent election trips we saw that leaders like Sharad Pawar and Kamal Nath had created real VIP constituencies in Baramati and Chhindwara with first-rate roads, concrete homes, hospitals and universities.I later asked a leading Indian industrialist how it was that leaders like Nath and Pawar could develop VIP constituencies, yet the mighty Gandhis could not do the same for Amethi. He said it was about playing the game: figures like Nath and Pawar are on friendly terms with private business people and will not hesitate to tap them for development funds and assistance. The Gandhis are too wary of private business to make the necessary connections or call in direct favors.Priyanka was still limiting her campaign to the family strongholds in Amethi and Rae Bareli, yet drew huge crowds. She seemed to enjoy politics in a way her brother Rahul did not. Priyanka would later reach out to people she knew in our group to find out what we had thought of her performance following the roadshows. We passed on what voters in Amethi were saying: that with her strong features, hand-loomed saris and pinned-back hair, Priyanka reminded them of Indira.Polls still ranked Indira the most popular Indian prime minister ever, beloved as a strong woman who fought for the poor and died serving her country. This stoic image still animates Congress confidantes, who tell a story about how Indira would kiss Rahul and Priyanka before school every day, adding on the morning of her assassination these discordant words, “No matter what happens to me, you will not cry.”The 2012 Congress campaign was playing on these sympathies in a slogan: ‘Priyanka nahin aandhi hain, doosri Indira Gandhi hain.’Priyanka met us at a guest house the Gandhi family frequents in Rae Bareli, entering the large living room in a way that commanded attention without trying, launching into conversation focused on us. Then she spotted Rahul approaching the house and went to greet him. We could see them through the window, one of our traveling group members later recalled, “obviously close, steeped in the politics of their ancestors, alone in their close-knit world”.People were calling on Priyanka to run for prime minister but she deferred to Rahul, saying he “is much smarter and more knowledgeable than I am.” She cast herself as a manager, Rahul as the thinker, and expressed a timeless willingness to accept India as it is. Asked why for decades Congress rallies featured “the same boring speeches, same warm-up acts”, Priyanka responded, “It is what people expect. This is what we have to do.”In his rallies, Rahul was still prone to giving lectures on grassroots democracy and Gandhi family history, but Priyanka came across as a leader who listens even to how others listen: ‘A lot of communication amongst the masses is done at a subterranean level which we urban people don’t understand,” she said. “They spread the word about whom to vote for and what the issues are in a barely visible way.”For all her star power, Congress was losing its way in Uttar Pradesh. Rahul was having hardly any impact, Sonia’s crowds were less enthusiastic than normal. Priyanka’s husband Robert Vadra — who had often posed in front of fast cars or in tank tops, images widely seen as beneath the Gandhis — had made headlines saying he would be happy to enter politics. Priyanka issued a clarification next day, saying that as a successful businessman her husband had no time to run for office.As always Modi was reserving his harshest sarcasm for the Gandhis, ridiculing Madam Sonia and Prince Rahul, the way they invoked Indira and other members of the dynasty. Modi’s obsession with Gandhis seemed off target in UP, where Congress ran fourth behind the BJP and the regional parties of Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati. We saw a largely Dalit crowd of 50,000 wearing the blue caps of her party wait three hours for Mayawati’s helicopter to land near the hardscrabble town of Jaunpur, and still erupt in raucous cheers: ‘Behenji tum sangharsh karo, hum tumhare saath hain.’Congress was running as a junior partner to Akhilesh, who was dogged by complaints about the stagnation of UP. At this point a ‘smog belt’ was choking the subcontinent from the Ganga to the Indus and had become a huge issue in Delhi, and therefore in the English media. While upper-middle-class consumers had once clamoured for generators to guarantee their power supply, they now talked of buying air purifiers for every room in their homes. The pollution was just as thick in UP — in Lucknow you could taste it, like smoke — yet it was never mentioned during our road trip.Eastern UP voters had worse worries, including basic sanitation. They accused Akhilesh of failing to erect the toilets required by Modi’s Open Defecation Free campaign. In Gorakhpur, voters told us they had sold the free laptops distributed by Akhilesh because the city lacked the electricity to run them.Chains like Lemon Tree had begun to open mid-market hotels in second-tier cities, but Gorakhpur was beyond their reach. We stayed at the Clarks Inn Grand, which touted itself as ‘the only star hotel in Gorakhpur’, but was crawling with spiders, cockroaches and lizards. When a companion complained about bedbugs, the manager sent a bellboy to pick them off the sheets one by one.Frustration with the pace of development was a plus for the BJP and its longtime MP in Gorakhpur, Yogi Adityanath. He met us at the Gorakhnath Mutt, in a saffron-coloured room, with saffron-coloured curtains and matching sofas. Outside stood a statue of the Goddess Kali, who is usually depicted wearing only a garland of skulls. But here she appeared fully clothed. Asked why, one of the priests responded with a question: “Admi ka nazar ka kya bharosa?”In Varanasi, we found the full might of Modi’s government mobilizing to create a VVIP constituency. Everywhere we looked a national ministry seemed to be building — a cow conservation centre here, a cargo terminal there. Yet Varanasi was still India and delivery remained a challenge, with many projects stuck in the arguing stage, as BJP officials in Delhi struggled to coordinate with Akhilesh’s state government in UP.Two hours west in the city of Mirzapur, we found views of Indian economic reality dividing along political lines, with Muslim opponents of Modi saying he was killing jobs and business, upper caste backers saying he was doing just fine. Following Bollywood’s lead, Amazon would later release “Mirzapur”— a series built around its criminal underground — but as we have often found on our travels, the celluloid image did not square with the prosaic reality. Voters were less concerned about dons and hitmen than decaying public services, symbolized by the state of the central clock tower. As in many Indian cities, the clock was not working.Priyanka now faces tough realities: Modi, Adityanath, Akhilesh, and Mayawati all command loyal community support that Congress lacks in UP. It will be difficult to make inroads in those vote blocs, particularly since promises of progress ring particularly hollow to voters in a region where even the Gandhis have been unable to bring development to their own home constituency. Priyanka may need to be more than the second coming of Indira to deliver.