[After a meeting of top
party members, Mr. Modi departed for Varanasi, the holiest city in Hinduism,
where he won election to the lower house of Parliament. He went to the famous
Kashi Vishwanath temple, which is devoted to Lord Shiva, a virile, muscular and
meditative god. He then went to the banks of the Ganges, India’s holiest river
and one Mr. Modi has promised to clean. In some spots, the Ganges is little
more than an open sewer.]
By Gardiner harris
 |
Credit Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Narendra
Modi greeted supporters outside the
Bharatiya Janata Party's
headquarters in Delhi, on Saturday.
|
Mr. Modi, who
engineered a historic victory over India’s long-governing Gandhi family, was
surrounded at several places along the route by well-wishers who chanted paeans
to him. When he stopped to greet the crowds, they showered him with rose
petals.
Mr. Modi gave a brief
speech at the headquarters of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which on Friday won a
decisive majority in Parliament. It is the first time in India’s history that
any party other than the Indian National Congress Party, led by the Gandhi
family, has managed such a feat.
“I am thankful to you
for the way in which you received me with so much gratitude from the airport,”
Mr. Modi said.
After a meeting of top
party members, Mr. Modi departed for Varanasi, the holiest city in Hinduism,
where he won election to the lower house of Parliament. He went to the famous
Kashi Vishwanath temple, which is devoted to Lord Shiva, a virile, muscular and
meditative god. He then went to the banks of the Ganges, India’s holiest river
and one Mr. Modi has promised to clean. In some spots, the Ganges is little
more than an open sewer.
One of the onlookers,
Rajeev Bind, 26, had come from a village nearly 30 miles away from Varanasi
because Mr. Modi “is the only politician who can make this country strong and
powerful.”
“All politicians say
that they will do something but when he speaks you believe it,” Mr. Bind said.
“He makes you believe.”
The electricity in much
of Varanasi was disrupted Friday as the election returns made clear the size of
Mr. Modi’s victory, and the power failure led many to wonder whether Mr. Modi
could truly fix India’s huge problems.
While Mr. Modi was
accepting congratulations in New Delhi, not far away Manmohan Singh, who has
been India’s prime minister for 10 years, delivered a brief farewell address,
tendered his resignation and wished the new government well.
“I owe everything to
this country, this great land of ours where I, an underprivileged child of
Partition, was empowered enough to rise and occupy high office,” Mr. Singh
said. “It is both a debt that I will never be able to repay and a decoration
that I will always wear with pride.”
Mr. Singh will retire
to a simple bungalow and a $1,000-a-month pension. He is widely acknowledged to
be an honest man who presided over a government riddled with corruption. And
his humble acceptance of his role as a seat-warmer for Rahul Gandhi, the scion
of the country’s leading political family, was eventually seen as undercutting
the institution of the prime minister’s office.
It is an office that
Mr. Modi has promised to restore, and in his own speech he said his victory
“belongs to 1.25 billion Indians.”
Among those listening
to Mr. Modi was Byas Tiwari, 68, who struggled to make his way through the
throng of party supporters. Mr. Tiwari took a train on Friday night from a
distant village in a neighboring state so that he could see Mr. Modi with his
own eyes. He said that he had not eaten or bathed for nearly 30 hours.
Mr. Modi “is an honest
politician, and I had prayed to God to give him a huge mandate,” Mr. Tiwari
said.
Like hundreds of
millions of others, Mr. Tiwari has high hopes for Mr. Modi. For instance, Mr.
Tiwari said he believed that Mr. Modi would provide pensions to old people like
him.
In fact, Mr. Modi’s
party has largely promised to end the redistribution efforts that have long
been the accepted political formula of the Gandhi family, policies that have
not been terribly beneficial for India’s economy. Disgust with the governing
Congress Party was so intense that Mr. Modi managed to avoid having to detail
many of his policies during the campaign, but expectations are so high that he
may face keen disappointment if he does not rapidly improve the country’s
struggling economy.
Nearly a million
people in India join the search for work every month, and the economy is not
creating nearly enough jobs for them all. Half of India’s population is under
the age of 25. Mr. Modi must find a way to accommodate this youth bulge, and
fairly quickly, or Friday’s electoral earthquake may not be the last.
Hari Kumar and Vishnu Varma
contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Betwa Sharma from Varanasi, India.
@ The New York Times
CONGRESS’S RANK AND FILE LAMENT DEMISE OF PARTY ONCE BELOVED
[Though most polls had predicted a crushing defeat for the party on Friday, none foretold the magnitude of that defeat. The Indian National Congress secured only 44 seats, an unprecedented low for a party that is integral to the founding narrative of independent India. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party will not only replace Congress as the governing party in the capital, it also won enough seats on its own to form a government without the help of coalition partners — a historic mandate.]
[Though most polls had predicted a crushing defeat for the party on Friday, none foretold the magnitude of that defeat. The Indian National Congress secured only 44 seats, an unprecedented low for a party that is integral to the founding narrative of independent India. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party will not only replace Congress as the governing party in the capital, it also won enough seats on its own to form a government without the help of coalition partners — a historic mandate.]
By Suhasini Raj
The leafy boulevard leading up to the Indian National Congress party’s headquarters in the Lutyens’ Delhi neighborhood was deserted early in the afternoon on Friday. Trends in voting were becoming more apparent, and it did not look good for the party that governs the central government. With time, it only looked worse.
Rajendra Pal Singh, 55, has been a clerk with the party for more than 30 years, ferrying files from one general secretary’s office across a vast courtyard to another’s, fetching endless cups of tea. He remembered when the party was run by the iron hand of Indira Gandhi, when the party workers, faced with her uncompromising authority, fell in line.
He looked out at the courtyard and recalled Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi, the grandchildren of Mrs. Gandhi, playing badminton there as children years ago.
The Congress headquarters on 24 Akbar Road used to be like a sacred place, he said, “where people came to wash their sins” through visits with leaders.
“It’s nothing anymore,” he said.
Though most polls had predicted a crushing defeat for the party on Friday, none foretold the magnitude of that defeat. The Indian National Congress secured only 44 seats, an unprecedented low for a party that is integral to the founding narrative of independent India. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party will not only replace Congress as the governing party in the capital, it also won enough seats on its own to form a government without the help of coalition partners — a historic mandate.
Theories abound for the reversal of fortunes — an anti-incumbent mood, voter disgust with corruption and a sluggish economy — but those gathered at the party headquarters on Friday said the culture of the leadership had changed.
Mukesh Naik, 55, a member of the state legislative assembly in the dry, dusty district of Panna in Madhya Pradesh, was devastated by the crushing defeat of his party, but he also felt vindicated.
He said the party fostered no connection between workers on the ground and the top leadership, represented by a small circle of Mr. Gandhi’s closest aides.
The common refrain among party workers was that the youth of this country wanted a change, for which the Congress party needed to make a collective effort. Workers could be heard grousing about unfair distribution of party ticket spots, improper monitoring at state levels and the appointment of the wrong people at the wrong positions in the party hierarchy.
The canteen behind the headquarters’ courtyard was bustling, though an employee explained that normally it was even busier. Rekha Arvind Tailing, 51, had taken a two-day train ride from her town in Maharashtra to catch a glimpse of the Gandhi family. She wept as she showed a photo from her scrapbook that featured Sonia Gandhi, the party’s current president, holding Ms. Tailing’s hand in a rare appearance at headquarters after Congress’s victory in the 2009 national elections.
Though the outcome of the vote was reversed in this year’s elections, she waited for Mrs. Gandhi once again on Friday.
“We have lived with the Congress, and we will die with the Congress,” she said.
But for many who toiled for the party, the Gandhis lived in a sanitized world, away from the din of 24 Akbar Road, where a slice of Congress supporters and workers provided a glimpse of the teeming dissatisfaction within the party’s rank and file.
Pervez Ansari, 40, had come from Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, where was tasked with mobilizing voters in the Congress party’s favor. Perhaps a failure to do so informed his anger as he lamented his stasis at the lower rungs of the party, blaming it on his lack of a patron in Mr. Gandhi’s inner circle.
“Give me one name from Rahul Gandhi’s coterie or national leaders close to him who are from one of us,” he said. To him, they were of a different ilk — an elite, educated, upper crust that had come to populate the capital’s corridors of power under the party’s rule.
As workers bemoaned the fate of the party, the throng of journalists outside was feasting on the party’s decline. They waited expectantly at tents lined up on the front lawn for a leader to show them the face of the Congress’ defeat.
Many crowded outside of the office of Ajay Maken, the party’s general secretary, hoping to know when Mrs. Gandhi would land.
One journalist came out grumbling. “The power is gone,” he remarked to colleagues, “but they’re still acting pricey.”