How Smriti Irani’s aggressive campaign in Amethi gave Rahul Gandhi a tough fight in 2014.
The Caravan
April 11, 2019
April 11, 2019
On 11 April, Smriti Irani, the union minister of textiles from the Bharatiya Janata Party, filed her nomination to contest the Lok Sabha elections from the Amethi constituency, in Uttar Pradesh. Slated to go to polls on 6 May, Amethi has been a Congress bastion for several years, and the party’s president, Rahul Gandhi, has been the member of parliament from the seat since 2004.
The BJP had polled merely 37,570 votes from Amethi in the 2009 elections. It fielded Irani against Gandhi in the next general election. Irani’s aggressive canvassing brought up the party’s vote share to an impressive 300,748 votes, only around one lakh short of Gandhi’s winning tally.
For the upcoming election, Irani is once again pitted against Gandhi. In the following extract from “Role of a Lifetime,” the cover story of The Caravan’s November 2016 issue, Rohini Mohan traces Irani’s campaign in the 2014 general election, and how she continued engaging with the constituency despite losing.
In the 2014 general election, the BJP chose Irani as its candidate for Amethi. When she came to campaign, Umashankar Pandey, the BJP’s election agent in Amethi said, the BJP workers assumed that she would lose even worse than she had before: “ladengi, haar jayengi, bhaag jayengi”—she’ll fight, lose and run. Several BJP members told me it was Modi’s idea to field Irani against Rahul Gandhi. “Modi and Amit Shah”—who was then in charge of the party’s Uttar Pradesh campaign—“are a team in themselves, and they don’t think any constituency is lost before it’s fought,” said the person in Gandhinagar close to senior BJP leaders. Amethi and neighbouring Rae Bareilly, another Congress bastion, he added, “are difficult to win, so they thought they’d get the most from it.” In Irani, the duo “saw someone who would give a good fight, and whom the media loved to chase.” A fierce campaigner would force Rahul Gandhi to spend more time in Amethi and less in other rallies across the country.
In the general election of 2009, the BJP had won an abysmal 37,570 votes in Amethi. Irani had little to lose: she would gain publicity from the electoral fight, but would not be ridiculed if she were defeated in a Congress stronghold. Unlike in 2004, this time, she had the advantages of both the wave of support that Modi was enjoying, as well as her own electioneering chops.
Gyan Singh, who runs the well-known Alok Dhaba in the town of Gauriganj, in Amethi, had a chance to watch Irani closely when the BJP team worked out of his establishment. The building has six air-conditioned rooms, where Irani’s aides and her public-relations officer stayed. During this time, party workers would mill around in the open restaurant hall, drinking tea and buttermilk as they prepared for a meeting, or resting after a day’s campaigning. The portly Singh, usually seen sporting a blue safari suit and with a red paan-filled mouth, is an old BJP loyalist—“first a bhakt of Kalyan Singh and now of Modi,” he said. BJP members recalled that he had always played a gracious host to them. “I’ve seen so many elections, but 2014 was a different atmosphere,” Singh told me in August. “Smriti-ji wasn’t fighting for its own sake. She was fighting to win, it was obvious.” He described her as an unfussy guest, who was only particular about her chilli paneer and roti.
Whether it was because of her enthusiasm or self-confidence, Irani’s spirited fight charged up browbeaten BJP workers in Amethi. “She invoked faith in us,” Pandey said. She came to be called “didi,” or elder sister, an affectionate moniker she promoted in speeches. (Rahul Gandhi is called “bhaiyya,” or elder brother, in the constituency.) Govind Singh Chauhan, the BJP’s media manager for Amethi, recounted witnessing a flash of her temper when a party worker addressed her as “madam”—he told me she snapped, “Madam is Sonia Gandhi.”
It helped Irani’s campaign immensely that she was perceived to be close to Modi. “We were in the car once and she got a call from someone on her direct mobile,” Chauhan said. “She spoke in a different style, addressing the person as ‘CM saab.’” When Chauhan instructed a loud colleague in the car to quiet down because Irani was speaking to Modi, she turned around and asked how he knew. “You’re a very dangerous man,” he recounted her teasing. “We all knew that Amit Shah, Arun Jaitley and now Smriti Irani were people who had the hotline to Modi,” Chauhan added. “We didn’t have some sacrificial lamb amidst us, we had the inner circle.”
Irani was declared as a candidate in April 2014, with only a month to go until the election. After planning and making arrangements, she effectively had 20 days on the road. The team focused on the message that “the Congress had done nothing in ten years,” Pandey said. They believed this pitch would resonate in the constituency, where over 90 percent of the population didn’t have tapped water and 65 percent did not have an electricity connection. The local BJP lined up meetings for Irani with community leaders who were disgruntled with the Congress, Samajwadi Party and BSP. “She had boundless energy,” said Pandey, with whose family Irani stayed during the campaign. “There wasn’t a day she ate before midnight.”
Irani strove to present the image of a down-to-earth leader, walking into people’s homes and sitting on the ground to talk to villagers. She would insist on seating women in the front rows of her meetings. “Our aim was that she had to feel approachable, unlike Rahul, who is popular but like a prince,” Pandey said. Ram Singh, the owner of a fertiliser shop in Amethi, said he was impressed with Irani’s campaign—particularly the fact that though the BJP’s politics often focussed on identity equations, “Irani always presented herself as a mix of cultures and therefore incapable of division.”
A few days into the campaign, Chauhan began to notice young men in T-shirts, caps and sunglasses, hovering around near campaign meetings, and often speaking to Irani privately in her car. “I started to realise that apart from us, there was a secret team,” he said.
Before launching her Amethi campaign, Irani had no significant connections in Uttar Pradesh. She also didn’t have many friends in the BJP, and depended heavily on the few she did: Modi, Gadkari and the then chief minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar. A BJP member from Gujarat explained that “it was well known that Amit Shah didn’t like Smriti very much, but knew her political importance.” He added: “She didn’t know how to build bridges with the party leaders.” Seen as the “eyes and ears of the boss,” the veteran journalist said, after she became a Rajya Sabha MP, Irani would “often be sitting totally alone in the central hall of parliament, eating her mutton biryani.”
Perhaps anxious that she wouldn’t have the full backing of the BJP’s local unit, Irani created her own crack election team, comprising fans, social-media experts, IT experts and other volunteers. “I think the average age was 30,” Shilpi Tewari, an architect and social-media junkie who headed the team, told me in August. “Not a single person in this team was from the BJP.” Tewari had met Irani for the first time in 2012, during Modi’s Sadbhavana Mission, and they had stayed in touch after. When Irani invited her to lead the Amethi campaign, “I accepted even though I was heavily pregnant, because ma’am always treated me like a sister,” Tewari said.
This secret team worked out of a newly constructed two-storey house just behind Alok Dhaba. “The primary campaign design came from the BJP,” Tewari said. “We were handling new media, which played a big role that election.” Her team sent out videos and pictures on Whatsapp groups and Facebook, created buzz on Twitter through numerous temporary handles and sent out text messages. They also gathered data on the constituency—including voting patterns, unemployment rates and poverty—and analysed demographics. Irani had a fantastic memory, she said, which “terrified the volunteers.” She was also a “very hands-on” leader, and “even if an SMS was going out, she would get every word right.”
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