2014 The election that changed India by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2012. Everywhere I travelled in UP during the

elections, one encountered an overwhelming sense

of frustration. ‘ Akhilesh sarkar nahi chala sakte’

(Akhilesh can’t run the government), was a

familiar cry of anguish. It was a sullen anger

waiting for an outlet to gush out. Modi provided

the voter that escape route—he promised them

deliverance from doom and gloom. The

discredited Yadavs versus Modi’s promise of

‘hope’—it was a no-contest. I remember meeting

a young Yadav student leader in Meerut who said

he was voting for Modi. ‘Akhilesh has given us a

laptop, but no bijli,’ he told me. ‘Modi aayenge,

bijli layenge!’ (Modi will bring electricity.) UP’s

youth were ready to cross the caste Rubicon. If

even the Yadavs were looking to vote for Modi,

then UP’s political earth was truly beginning to

shake.

The erosion in support for Akhilesh’s government

was good news for Amit Shah. His UP strategy

was working perfectly. SP down and out,

Mayawati making no real headway, Rahul

missing in action and his party in disarray—

Shah’s political rehabilitation seemed complete.

Well, almost.

In the middle of November, while the country

was mourning the retirement of Sachin Tendulkar,

‘Snoopgate’ hit the headlines. A scandal had

broken out, with two websites, Cobrapost.com

and Gulail.com, releasing audio tapes with

telephone conversations that purportedly had Shah

directing the illegal surveillance of a young

woman at the behest of his ‘saheb’. I was in

Mumbai tracking the Sachin mania when the story

broke. That evening, I got a call from Shah. His

voice was as soft as ever but the message was less

comfiting:

‘Yeh kya headline story aap chala rahe ho.

Thoda zara dekh lo na, hata do usko’ (What is

this story you are running, please do see and

remove it).

I was used to politicians occasionally ringing

up, asking for negative stories to be edited out. My

standard approach was to say I didn’t know what

was airing on the channel and that I wasn’t in the

studio. The hope was always that the politician

would forget about it and the sheer pace of a 24/7

news wheel would prevent anyone from trying to

put pressure to censor content. Shah, though,

seemed pretty insistent, but I wasn’t going to be

bullied easily. ‘Don’t worry, sir, you give your

version too, story ko to chalana padega [I have to

run the story],’ I said, while asking our news team

to be careful with the facts.

By next morning, the story had acquired a

momentum of its own. The Congress had found a

new stick with which to beat the Shah–Modi duo,

this time one that they were hopeful would

actually land a decisive political blow. The party’s

women MPs were summoned to Delhi by Rahul

Gandhi’s office and asked to hold a special press

conference.

Women’s

organizations

were

particularly

irate

and

demanded

Modi’s

resignation and Shah’s prosecution. ‘Why doesn’t

Amit Shah tell us who the “saheb” is on whose

behalf he was snooping?’ asked the National

Commission for Women chairperson, Mamata

Sharma. The Central government promised to

appoint a judicial inquiry but didn’t seem to make

much progress. ‘No judge was willing to take up a

politically sensitive case,’ a senior minister told

me.

Worried about the fallout, the Shah–Modi duo

acted swiftly. The Gujarat government appointed

its own inquiry commission to look into the case.

The young woman’s father approached the

Supreme Court and asked the court to restrain the

Centre from ordering a parallel inquiry. The father

even issued

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