on the spot
Tavleen Singh
Anyone following Narendra Modi’s campaign knows by now that the wind he has caught in his sails rises from the deep despair that is the predominant mood in India after ten years of the Sonia-Manmohan Government. But, it is only when you drive through Uttar Pradesh that you begin to understand why this despair caused by bad policies and bad governance is so deep. Having just driven to Kanpur from Delhi to attend his first rally in our biggest and electorally most important State allow me to tell you what I saw on the way.
The journey began well enough. The Yamuna Expressway is by far the best road in India. It cuts the journey to Agra by at least two hours, is access controlled and modern by any standards. Its flaw is that unlike similar highways in other countries it seems to have not given local communities en route to share in its benefits by allowing them the chance to make a living through highway hotels, restaurants, cafes and shops. Farmers who lose their land to big infrastructure projects are less likely to be hostile towards them if they can see their own lives improved as a consequence. For some reason the planners of the Yamuna Expressway overlooked this just as successive Governments of Uttar Pradesh have overlooked the incredible tourism potential of our biggest State. Tourism could transform Uttar Pradesh from being one of our poorest states to being one of our richest. Tourism officials calculate that nearly every foreign visitor to India visits the Taj Mahal. And, then there are Varanasi and Allahabad that draw Hindu pilgrims in millions and Moghul single trade towns like Khurja, Aligarh, Ferozabad, Kannauj and Moradabad that if cleaned up and restored to their medieval splendor could attract foreign visitors in droves.
On the way to Agra lies Mathura that has magnificent sculptures from the Kushan period that lie forgotten in a decrepit museum. My despair deepened from the minute we got off the expressway and found ourselves in the squalid, smelly bazaars of Agra that have remained this way for decades. The waters of the Yamuna are stagnant with filth and although on one of its banks stand the majestic ruins of Moghul forts and tombs on the other bank there are hideous slums. If any of the chief ministers of this state had understood the importance of tourism to the economy they would at least have cleaned up the city of the Taj.
If Agra’s neglect saddened me Kanpur horrified me. We entered this former ‘Manchester of India’ through a colony that seemed to be made entirely of rotting garbage. People had built their hovels from it, children played in it, garbage pickers hovered over it in search of material to sell and pigs, dogs and rats infested it in search of food. Out of this landscape rose a mosque and a temple and not too far from it a shopping mall made of glass and steel.
So when I got to Modi’s rally and saw that none of the big local leaders of the BJP evoked even a hint of applause from the vast seething crowd I understood why. I arrived three hours before Modi and this gave me more than enough time to listen to Kalyan Singh, Lalji Tandon and Vinay Katiyar. They droned on about corruption and the evil Congress Party and the crowd seemed not to be listening. The sun was intensely hot and the air so still it was hard to breathe but people continued to come and come only because of Modi. When he finally appeared people behaved as if they were suddenly in the presence of a messiah. They gazed at him with wonder and reverence.
He told them that he had been totally won over by their love and promised that he would not betray their trust in him. He told them that India had been betrayed by her leaders over and over again and that it was time to dream a new dream and hope for a better future for their children. He told them that it pained him personally when the Congress Party’s prince mocked the poor for their poverty by describing it as a state of mind. When you are born with a golden spoon in your mouth you can do this, he said, but he who had been born in poverty and spent his childhood mired in it could never do this because he knew intimately how awful poverty could be.
Of the speeches he has made it was one of the best I have heard and of the rallies he has addressed it was one of the biggest but on the drive back to Agra I found myself wondering how he was going to win the fifty seats he needs in U.P. with the sort of leaders that sat beside him on the stage. Rajnath Singh and Lalji Tandon have spent their time bringing their sons into politics and not on building the party. And, Kalyan Singh’s supposed appeal to the lower castes vanished long ago. As for Vinay Katiyar’s hardline Hindutva it is so much yesterday’s idea that the old slogan ‘Jai Shree Ram’ barely got a response from the crowd.
When I got to my hotel in Agra late that night I noticed that it was bursting with foreign tourists. They filled the restaurants and shops and seemed to come from all over Europe and England. This without any effort on the part of the state government to do even what Rajasthan and Kerala have done to build a strong tourism economy. I went to bed that night dreaming of a day when just the city of Agra would attract more foreign tourists than the measly six million India does today. Had caste and creed mattered less to the state’s politicians and development and bettering people’s lives mattered more this would already have happened. Ordinary people I talked to in Kanpur at the rally said that the reason why they liked Modi was because he had brought ‘vikas’ to Gujarat and this is what they hoped he would bring to Uttar Pradesh when he became prime minister. Modi appears to be the only political leader today who has understood that the main issue in the next general election is going to be ‘vikas’ and linked to its absence in the voters’ minds is price rise and the economic downturn.
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