Modi’s challenge: Transforming from an Advani to Vajpayee

narendra_modi
Vivek Kaul
Tavleen Singh in her very interesting book Durbar recounts one of her earliest reporting experiences in Delhi. The year was 1977 and the state of internal emergency declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was still in effect. The opposition leaders had come together to address a rally at the Ram Lila maidan in Delhi.
The leaders started to arrive in their white Ambassador cars by around six pm in the evening. The ground was full. And the boring speeches started one after the other. As Singh writes in Durbar “I thought people might start to leave unless somebody said something more inspirational. It was past 9 p.m. and the night had got colder although the rain had stopped.”
But nobody had left. They were all waiting for a certain man called Atal Bihari Vajpayee to speak. By the time Vajpayee rose to speak it was well past 9.30 pm. The crowds clapped chanting ‘
Indira Gandhi murdabad, Atal Bihari zindabad‘. As Singh puts it “He acknowledged the slogans with hands joined in a namaste and a faint smile. Then, raising both arms to silence the crowd and closing his eyes in the manner of a practiced actor, he said, ‘Baad muddat ke mile hain deewane.’(It has been an age since we whom they call mad have had the courage to meet) He paused. The crowd went wild. When the applause died he closed his eyes again and allowed himself another long pause before saying, ‘Kehne sunne ko bahut hain afsane.’ (There are tales to tell and tales to hear). The cheering was more prolonged, the last line of a verse that he told me later he had composed on the spur of the moment. ‘Khuli hawa mein zara saans to le lein, kab tak rahegi aazadi kaun jaane.’ (But first let us breathe deeply of the free air for we know not how long our freedom will last). The crowd was now hysterical.”
Such was the connect Vajpayee had with the masses. Having heard him give speeches to a large audience of over a lakh, I can safely say his pauses which became a butt of jokes later when people saw him make speeches on television, would mesmerise the entire audience when he spoke to them live.
In the Lok Sabha election that followed the leading opposition parties came together to form the Janata party. Vajpayee’s party Jan Sangh was also a part of it. The Janata experience was soon over and by the 1984 Lok Sabha elections Jan Sangh in its new avatar as the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was down to two seats.
From there on Lal Krishna Advani built the party on the ideology of hardcore 
Hindutva, taking the number of seats that the party had in the Lok Sabha to 88 in 1989 and 120 in the 1991. This fast rise of the party was built on slogans and ideas like “saugandh Ram ki khaate hain mandir wohin (i.e. Ayodhya) banayenge” and “ye to kewal jhanki hai Kashi Mathura baaki hai”. Vajpayee took a backseat for a while. It is one thing to instantly connect with the masses when you address them and entirely another thing trying to build a political party from scratch. And this is where Advani flourished.
In the 1980s and the early 1990s the BJP espoused causes like making temples in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. It talked about banning cow slaughter, having a uniform civil code, and doing away with the Article 370, that gives special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. All this was music to the ears of voters across Northern and Western India and the party catapulted from being a political front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to having some identity of its own.
In the 1996 Lok Sabha elections the BJP won 187 seats in the Lok Sabha and was invited to form the government. At that point of time it was Vajpayee and not Advani who had played larger role in reinvigorating the party, who became the Prime Minister of the country.
While Vajpayee may have been a taller leader there was practical considerations at play as well. The BJP on its own did not have the strength to form the government. It needed other parties to support it either by joining the government or supporting it from the outside. And the chances of that happening were better with a moderate Vajpayee at the helm of things than a hardcore Advani who by then was looked upon as a man who had played an important part in bringing down the Babri Masjid. At least, that was the perception among a host of political parties.
So Advani had to make way for Vajpayee as the Prime Minister. BJP’s first tryst with power lasted less than three weeks and even with Vajpayee leading, it could not attract the support required to prove its majority in the Lok Sabha. But things changed in the years to come and Vajpayee was the Prime Minister from March 1998 to May 2004.
His moderate image and larger than life persona helped him rule the country with a rag-tag coalition of more than 20 political parties.
Narendra Modi is now trying to convert his image from that of a hardcore Advani of the 1990s to that of a more moderate Vajpayee who ruled the country. At least, that is the conclusion that one can draw from the speech he made at the Shriram College of Commerce in Delhi, yesterday.
In the speech he said several things that tried to project an image of a moderate ‘Modi’. Lets sample a few lines.
– The youth of the nation has its finger on the mouse of computers and is changing the world. India’s journey has gone from snake charmers to mouse charmers
– The ambassador of a nation asked me what major challenges India faces and I said the biggest one is that how we use opportunity. When asked what the opportunity was, I said the youth. 
Europe buddha ho chuka hai, China budha ho chuka hai.
– This nation is being ruined by vote bank politics. This nation requires development politics. If we switch to politics of development, we will soon be in a position to bring about lasting change and progress
– We need P2G2. Pro-People Good governance
– Why shouldn’t we make the ‘Made in India’ tag a statement of quality for our manufactured products?
If the above statements are viewed in isolation Modi does not come across as a hardliner that he is typically made out to be. He comes across as a man who has some vision for India.
Politically this makes sense for both BJP as well Modi. If Modi is able to soften his hardcore image in the days to come he might start to appeal to people beyond his home state of Gujarat and votaries of hardcore 
Hindutva. He might also start to appeal to political parties who currently won’t touch him with a bargepole given his hardcore pro Hindutva image.
This is very important in this era of coalition politics where no single political party can form a government on its own and sticking to any ideology becomes a burden beyond a point. If this strategy of projecting a softer Modi does work, it would mean that the BJP would be going back to its soft 
Hindutva strategy that it followed during the reign of Vajpayee. As we all know this strategy worked wonders for the BJP till it was abandoned in favour of the India Shining strategy.
A softer Modi will continue to appeal to the traditional supporters of the BJP and at the same time appeal to those who currently have doubts about him. That seems to be the idea behind the new Modi that India saw for the first time in Delhi, yesterday.
Whether that happens remains to be seen. As marketing guru Seth Godin writes in 
All Marketers are Liars “Great stories happen fast. They engage the consumer the moment the story clicks into place. First impressions are more powerful than we give them credit for.”
Given this getting rid of first impressions in the minds of the voter is very difficult unless you are the Congress party, and do not stand for anything. So it remains to be seen whether people of India will buy the new story that Modi is trying to project at the national level. But then we all have to start somewhere.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on February 7, 2013

(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected]
 

Will Rahul say “Mere Paas Ma Hai”? Or will Manmohan say “Mogambo Khush Hua”?


Vivek Kaul

I remember reading an interview with Shekhar Kapur years back in which he described his experience with Javed Akhtar during the making of Mr India.
When Akhtar first recited the line “Mogambo Khush Hua” to Kapur, he wasn’t impressed. This was the main line of Mogambo, the villain of the movie. As Kapur recounts on his blog “Hmmm, I thought – there must be more to that.”
But Akhtar was convinced about the line. “Shekhar Sahib, when Kapil Dev hits a six over the grounds, people will shout Mogambo Khush Hua, and when people play three card brag (teen patti) and if they get three aces, they will shout “Mogambo Khush Hua.” “You trust me on that,” Javed Akhtar assured me,” writes Kapur on his blog.
Kapur ran with what Akhtar told him and the rest as we all know is history. Mr India was a huge hit. Such was the power of the line that people started to use it during the course of regular conversation, whenever they felt happy about something. As Kapoor writes “And some time later as I was watching Kapail Dev hit a six over the Sharjah grounds I saw a huge banner go up in the Indian supporters. It said : “Mogambo Khush Hua.””
Mogambo Khush Hua” became one of the most famous one-liners that Hindi cinema had produced. But this wasn’t the best one-liner that Akhtar ever wrote. His best one liner clearly has to be “Mere Paas Ma Hai” from the movie Deewar. The line is simple yet so powerful.
Deewar was released on January 1, 1975. Around six months later on June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India declared a state of emergency. During the 21 month period of emergency Indira’s younger son Sanjay almost ran a parallel government along with his cronies. One of his major areas of concern was overpopulation and the government under his instructions forcefully carried vasectomies all over the country. This phenomenon got Atal Behari Vajpayee all worked up to write a poem titled “aao mardon na mard bano”. Those were the days.
Sanjay Gandhi wouldn’t have been able to force vasectomies on thousands of Indian men without the “love” and the “backing” of his mother Indira Gandhi, who is said to have had a soft corner for her ill-tempered son. “Mere Paas Ma Hai” was a line written for Sanjay Gandhi rather than Ravi, the character played by Shashi Kapoor in Deewar , who speaks the line in the movie. Chances are that if Deewar had been released six months later during the emergency, the line wouldn’t have made it past the censor board.
India is at the same stage again. The love of a mother for her only son is holding the country back. The moves are already being made. Pranab Mukjerhee has been packed off to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The next decision that is to be made is who will replace him at the Finance Ministry?
Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, wants to run the ministry with his team of economists: Montek Singh Ahulwalia, the deputy chairman of the planning commission, C Rangarajan the Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and Kaushik Basu, the Chief Economic Adviser to the government of India. He is also hoping that Raghuham Rajan from the University of Chicago, a former Chief Economist at the IMF, to join the team.
But will this be allowed to happen? The answer is no. Sonia Gandhi needs a politician as the minister of Finance. A politician who can like, P Chidambaram did, come up with schemes like the Rs 71,000 crore of farmers loans being waived off. A politician who can get the right to food act up and running.
A politician who can get onto a helicopter and drop bucket loads of money from it. Okay, not quite that. But a politician who can ensure that voters of this country have been bribed enough in the name of poverty and economic development, so that when Lok Sabha elections happen in 2014, they vote for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the Congress. All this to ensure that Rahul baba takes over the reins of the world’s biggest democracy.
This means that the fiscal deficit of the government of India will continue to go up. The government will continue to borrow more and more. And interest rates are likely to remain high. Economic sense be dammed.
And in the next few months you might hear of an A K Antony or a Digvijay Singh or a Jairam Ramesh or a Kamal Nath or a Sushil Kumar Shinde or even the all guns blazing all the time, Kapil Sibbal, taking over as the finance minister of this country. The name doesn’t really matter because none of them have voices or ideas of their own. Even if they did they have long been put on the backburner because all that matters now is that “Rahul Gandhi has to be made the PM”.
Manmohan Singh is the only person who can stop a seasoned Congress politician from taking over as the finance minister of India and limiting the serious damage to the Indian economy that would come with it. The good “doctor” has got more and “much” more, than he would have ever bargained for. He can resist moves to appoint a politician as a finance minister by threatening to resign. That is one thing that the Congress won’t be able to handle. It would set the cat among the pigeons.
It’s time for Singh to payback to the country for all that the country has given to him. But the question is will he be as docile as he has been and allow a mother’s love for her son to takeover? Will Rahul Gandhi say “Mere Paas Ma Hai”? Or will Manmohan Singh by resisting a full time politician taking over the ministry of finance, give us, you, me and everybody else, an opportunity to say “Mogambo Khush Hua”.
(The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 2,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/politics/babalog-prophecy-why-akhilesh-wont-ever-transcend-mulayam-368232.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])

What the BJP can learn from Coca Cola?


Vivek Kaul

It was October 1990. I was thirteen. In a pre cable TV, multiplexes and mall era, just about the only thing that got a teenager in a small town excited, was the twice a week Chitrahar on Wednesdays and Fridays, broadcast by Delhi Doordarshan.
Unless of course there was a cricket match on! But cricket was not played as often as it is today. And not everything was broadcast on the state owned Doordarshan.
Hence it was very exciting when Lal Krishna Advani arrived late one night to stay “overnight” in the guest house in the colony I lived in. Advani, during those days, was going around the country as a part of what he and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) called the rath yatra.
Early next morning, before he was supposed to leave, a small crowd which included me had gathered in front of the guest house. He came out and was requested to speak a few words. I don’t remember anything of what he said except the last line, which was “saugandh Ram ki khaate hain, mandir wohin banayenge”.
He was out of the place in five minutes. But the crowd that had gathered continued to mingle around. Some were happy at having seen him. Some were amazed to know that his rath wasn’t actually one. Some women spoke about the glow Advani ji had on his face. And some others were worried. “Mandir banega ki nahi?” they asked.
I pretty much had the same feeling as everyone else, but what I was most happy about was the fact that I would be a minor celebrity in the school next day, having seen Advani when none of my classmates had.
Advani was arrested a few days later before the rath yatra could enter Uttar Pradesh. As he writes in his autobiography My Country My Life “My yatra was scheduled to enter Deoria in Uttar Pradesh on 24 October. However, as I had anticipated, it was stopped at Samastipur in Bihar on 23 October and I was arrested by the Janata Dal government in the state then headed by Laloo Prasad Yadav (sic). I was taken to an inspection bungalow of the irrigation department at a place called Massanjore near Dumka on the Bihar-Bengal border (Dumka now comes under the state of Jharkhand).”
We all know what happened in the aftermath of the rath yatra. But as I grew older, I kept asking myself, why did Advani say what he did? Why was it so important to build a temple there? Didn’t the country have bigger issues which needed to be sorted out first? And so on.
Political party as a brand
All my questions were answered the day I realised that every political party is a brand and a brand needs to stand for something. It needs a story that can be told to people, so that people can go buy the brand by supporting it and by voting for it.
In the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, the Congress Party had swept the Lok Sabha elections, with the BJP winning only two seats. Given the sorry performance the party needed to stand for something in the minds of the Indian voter.
Brand BJP was built on the war cry of “saugandh Ram ki khaate hain mandir wohin banayenge”. This ensured that the party was able to increase the number of seats in the Lok Sabha from 2 in 1984, to 88 in 1989 and 118 in 1991.
The party espoused for causes like making temples in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. It talked about banning cow slaughter, having a uniform civil code, and doing away with the Article 370, that gives special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. All this was music to the ears of voters across Northern and Western India and the party catapulted from being a political front of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to having an identity of its own.
BJP’s story was that it stood for the cause of Hindus and Hindutva. And it was not the only political party that came with a story attached to it. Almost every political party that has risen in India in the last three to four decades has had a story attached to it.
The Kanshi Ram story
Kanshi Ram launched the Dalit Soshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti or DS4 as it was more popularly called, with the war cry “Thakur, Brahmin, Bania Chhod, Baki Sab Hain DS4.” This left no doubt in anybody’s mind that Kanshi Ram and DS4 stood for everyone who wasn’t an upper caste.
Kanshi Ram probably realised the power of the slogan he had hit upon. He came up with another slogan along similar lines when he launched the Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP). “Tilak Tarazu aur Talwaar, inko maaro joote chaar” was the rallying cry of the BSP (with Tilak, Tarazu and Talwar being the representation of the Brahman, Bania and Thakur castes, the upper castes).
Or let’s take the case of Left Front in West Bengal. The front which comprised of various communist parties stood for what the Sonia Gandhi led UPA calls the aam aadmi. It positioned itself as being pro-poor and anti big business. When the Left Front first came to power, share croppers where handed over land after taking it over from wealthy landlords. Teak trees were planted in front of homes by Left Front members where a girl child was born, so that the tree could be cut when she was of marriageable age and money for the wedding expenses could be raised.
In the late seventies and early eighties the Left brand also stood for “trade unions” which bargained hard in the interest of the workers. This over the years ensured that most industrialists shut shop and left for other parts of the country. But this didn’t really have any impact on the voter base of the Left Front which remained committed because what the Front was doing was in line with the story it had sold to the voters.
Why the story is important
The story that a political party sells to its voters is very important and it should hold for a very long period of time. Take the case of Janata Dal which was formed by the merger of the various factions of the erstwhile Janata Party, which were the Lok Dal, Congress (S) and the VP Singh led Jan Morcha.
The story that the party successfully sold to the voters was that it would introduced 27.5% reservation for other backward classes (OBCs) in government jobs, as had been proposed by the Mandal Commission.
The story was lapped by the votes and the party won 142 seats in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections.
Despite student protests erupting all across the country, starting with Rajiv Goswami burning himself in front of Deshbandu College in New Delhi, reservations were introduced. No political party could be seen going against this legislation.
The trouble was once Mandal Commission became a reality what did the Janata Dal stand for in the mind of the voter? Nothing. This soon led to the regional satraps forming their own parties like the Mulayam Singh Yadav led Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, Lalu Prasad Yadav led Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the Nitish Kumar-George Fernandes led Samta Party also in Bihar.
The end of Janata Dal led to the coining of one of the most memorable though underrated slogans in Indian politics: “Thakur buddhi, Yadav bal, jhandu ho gaya Janta Dal.” (where thakur was in reference to VP Singh who was a rajput).
Hence a political party needs to stand for something in the mind of the voter. If it doesn’t it meets the fate of a party like Janata Dal.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya became the Chief Minister of West Bengal in 2000, taking over after Jyoti Basu had been the Chief Minister for 23years. Bhattacharya tried to get big business to come back to Kolkata, so that jobs could be created.
But the trouble was Bengal was not a state used to the ways of professional business. If BPOs had to set shop then they had to work every day their foreign clients were working. So was the case with IT companies. But in a state where bandhs were way of life, how would that be possible?
Buddha Babu asked his party carder not to disturb BPO employees on their way to work on “bandh” days. This was the first dint to the Left brand. Then the heavy industry companies wanted to set shop, given that labour in Bengal was cheaper than other parts of the country and the government was ready to welcome them.
This was where all the trouble started. Almost all land in Bengal is agriculture land. And every time an industrialist wants to set shop it leads to some farmers being put out of job. Things escalated when the party carder in Nandigram resorted to violence against farmers who were protesting. The same was the case with Singur, where the Tata Nano plant was supposed to come up.
When a communist party (or rather parties) start beating up farmers, it need not be said that it does do any good to the identity and brand and the story they have carefully cultivated over the years.
This in no way means that industrialization is not important or should not have been pursued by the Left Front government, but it was definitely not done in the way it was. This of course went totally against the anti industry image that the Left Front carried in the minds of people. The same Left Front whose trade unions went cholbe na cholbe na against industries and industrialists was now catering to their demands, felt people of the state. Communists had become capitalists. The practitioners of all that Karl Marx had espoused for were now vouching for the principles of Adam Smith.
There was clearly a branding problem. The gap was filled by Mamata Banerjee who now stands for everything that the Left Front had stood for, warts and all.
India shining
The year was 2004 and I was travelling in a local bus in Hyderabad, excited about the new mobile phone I had bought. The phone suddenly buzzed and it was a Delhi number, the first call on my new mobile. I picked up the call and heard the voice on the other end say “main Atal Bihari Vajpayee bol raha hoon”.
It took me a few seconds to realize that it was an automated call in the voice of the Prime Minister of the country asking the voters to vote for the BJP led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
The party had decided to abandon its soft-Hindutva branding and decided to go in for what it thought was a more mass market campaign of “India shining”.
The party lost the elections and has been in opposition ever since.
What BJP can learn from Coca Cola
Donald R Keough, a former president of the Coca-Cola Company, in his book The Ten Commandments for Business Failure elaborates on what happens when the story associated with a brand is changed.
A slew of research and consultants told the top brass at Coca-Cola that people were looking for more sweetness in the product. This led to the launch the ‘New Coke’.
What followed was a disaster that went totally against what the consultants had predicted. People did not like the tinkering. And some of them started to hoard old coke, before the stocks ran out..
One day an old woman called a Coke call centre. Here is how Keough recounts this touching story.
. “It was an eighty-five year woman who convinced me we had to do something more than stay course. She had called the company in tears from a retirement home in Covina, California. I happened to be visiting the call centre and took the call. “You’ve taken away my Coke,” she sobbed. “When was the last time you had Coke?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t know. About twenty, twenty-five years ago.” “Then why are you so upset?” I asked. “Young man, you are playing around with my youth and you should stop it right now. Don’t you have any idea what Coke means to me?”
This made the top brass at Coke realise that they are not dealing with a taste or a marketing issue, but the idea or the story behind Coca-Cola. It was the “real-thing” and the consumers did not want any fiddling around with it. Immediately a decision was made to bring back the old Coke as “Coca-Cola Classic”.
To conclude
As marketing guru Seth Godin writes in All Marketers are Liars “Great stories happen fast. They engage the consumer the moment the story clicks into place. First impressions are more powerful than we give them credit for.”
Given this getting rid of first impressions in the minds of the voter is very difficult. This does not apply for the Congress Party, which has been around for so long that it doesn’t really stand for anything and hence can change forms like a chameleon.
So if the BJP has to pose any sort of challenge to the Congress led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the next Lok Sabha elections it needs to go back to what it has always stood for in the mind of the voter: Hindutva. Like Coca Cola, it has to go back to stand for what it used to in the mind of the voter.
What it needs to decide on is the degree of Hindutva? Does it want to follow the hard line approach that it did in the late 1980s and the early 1990s with slogans like “ye to kewal jhaanki hai, kaashi mathura baaki hai” or does it want to follow the soft Hindutva strategy that it did when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was at his peak.
Given this, there is no one better than leader than Narendra Modi who can project the attributes of the pro Hindutva line. The trouble of course with Modi is that he comes across as a hardliner. Hence it’s important for Modi and the BJP that the spin-doctors of the party get to work immediately trying to soften up his image, so that his acceptability goes up across sections he is not currently popular with.
(The article originally appeared at www.firstpost.com on June 6,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/politics/political-brands-what-the-bjp-can-learn-from-coca-cola-333964.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])