“Minarets are our bayonets”

Lord, satisfy the hope Modi has unleashed. His
political machine has been hammering home the message of how he brought
new business, new roads, new jobs and less crime to Gujarat, and now
everyone outside Gujarat seems to know all this is true. They see Modi
as an efficient strongman who will restore growth, lower the price of
onions and, as one voter put it “make the trains run on time.”

Tiwari ticks off the usual gripes against Congress, including
corruption, inflation, and crime. The folks he knows around Allahabad
are switching to Modi because “the public needs change, and Modi is
their guy.” Not far off, in the village of Saidabad, there is no
electricity at one in the afternoon when the sun is high and the
temperature hits 43 degrees Celsius, and people speak of how Modi will
turn the fans back on. Modi hardly discourages this optimism, stealing
Congress’s socialist thunder by promising every Indian a cool brick
house with a toilet.

Some of the roads along the Ganges are so
crowded or just so broken that on our road trip we often average less
than 30 kilometres an hour, but so many people living along it are now
hopeful that Modi will fill life’s potholes. In the town of Pali, Rakesh
Kumar Verma is fed up after winning two masters degrees but ending up
underemployed at the age of 42 because “the goons are in control.” Loan
officers skim 15% of a one lakh loan for themselves. The bribes required
to get even menial jobs make the jobs not worth taking. Verma gets by
selling cheap jewellery. But Modi cleaned up corruption in Gujarat, he
can handle the goons. My colleagues start joking, every time a window
jams or a toilet won’t flush, “Modi will fix it.”

To many
voters, though, Modi is more than a repair man. He was once a tea seller
in a railway station, but now he is the self-made leader of the world’s
largest democracy, a harbinger of disruptive change. In the district of
Bhigunia, we crawl along a pontoon bridge over the Ganges to a tiny
settlement accessible in no other way. On the far side we meet a young
Brahmin, university educated and upper caste but not working, because it
would be too embarrassing to take a job below his station in a place so
small, where his family is well known. Under Modi though, the hope is it
will be different. Pathetic job creation under Congress will give way
to job growth. The Brahmin can go find work in a city, where he is
anonymous. Caste barriers are eroded by urbanization and
industrialization.

Traveling these bumpy roads, it becomes
clear that the Modi wave did not spread only on modern channels. One
high member of the Gandhi clan once allowed that the very poor
communicate at a level that “we”, the literate and privileged, don’t
understand. Perhaps it was this subaltern frequency that transmitted the
Modi sunbeam from the smartphone elite and the TV-watching middle class
to the rest of the 814 million. The candidate was relentless, too,
showing up on so many stages voters wondered if there was more than one
of him, not even counting the holograms. In Bihar we hear him speak in
the town of Hajipur and he is as always spellbinding, intimate,
hilarious. He says headlines scream in Gujarat if the power goes off for
a few minutes, but celebrate in Bihar if the power goes on for a few
hours.

Modi emerges as something of an old-fashioned strongman,
delivering a multimedia message of modern development. What goes unsaid
is equally revealing. Modi and the BJP have been largely silent on
flammable foreign policy and sectarian issues, the words “Pakistan” and
“Muslims” have fallen from the party lexicon. Asked about how Modi will
deal with Muslims, many of whom fear the BJP, the farmer Tiwari cites an
interview in which Modi dismissed such questions as “the language of
those who want to divide India.” Besides, Tiwari suggests, sectarian
strife is common in his part of the world and that in Gujarat there had
been no further violence once the scores were settled in 2002.

Modi now seems set to govern all of India, the 150 million Muslims
included and there is reason to be cautious. Though the popular vote for
the BJP is expected to come in at the highest for any single party in
three decades, it is still just around a third of the total vote. Two
thirds of India and 90% of Muslims probably did not vote for Modi or
BJP.

Modi has promised the moon. In the final weeks he
often targeted his promise that “better days are ahead” to the vast
population of Indians under the age of 28, including the roughly 100
million who were voting for the first time in this election. The
difficulty is that to create enough jobs for all these youths, India
needs to create 10 million jobs a year for the next five years, or four
times more than it has been creating over the past five years. It will
be virtually impossible for Modi to hit the ground running on this
challenge, because his first task should be to contain India’s double
digit inflation, which means restrained government spending, high
interest rates, and job growth remaining weak until inflation is
whipped.

What then? It’s easy to imagine jobless, disappointed
youths getting angry, and the hardcore Hindu fundamentalists reviving
their old accusations that it is Muslims, with their high birth rate,
who are to blame for India’s “population bomb” and the unemployment
problem it is now creating. In a tense environment, it’s hard to know
whether Modi would fuel the tension through innuendo, allow it to fester
by remaining silent, or defuse it by trying to quiet the mob.  On the
road the Modi wave keeps bringing to mind the tale of Turkish leader
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another former street vendor (lemonade, not tea)
who emerged from a pious political sect (Islamic, not Hindu) to become a
self-made prime minister much to chagrin of the secular elite. In his
early years, Erdogan shelved his social and cultural agenda to focus on
stabilizing the inflation ridden economy, and became widely popular.
After taking office with 34% vote in 2002 elections, Erdogan was
reelected with 50% in 2011. At the height of the boom, Erdogan’s name
rang throughout the land, his voice dominated all discussion echoes of
Modi in India today.  But then success went to Erdogan’s head, he
stretched two terms into three, his autocratic instincts began bubbling
to the surface as he pushed an increasingly Islamist social agenda. To
stifle the resulting protests, Erdogan rolled out riot police, blamed
foreign conspiracies, rallied his pious supporters to counter
demonstrations, and recently attempted to ban Twitter, which his
opponents are using to organize the anti-Erdogan campaign. One wonders
if one day India’s new political messiah may also go the Erdogan way.
For now, as in Turkey during Erdogan’s early years, India is focused on
Modi’s promise that “better days are ahead.”