Narendra
Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has spent this campaign
season standing above oceans of people — a stern, commanding figure who
brags of his “56-inch chest.” He has offered himself as a C.E.O. for
the nation, poised to slice through India’s bureaucracy with the sure
hand of an experienced manager.
This
message has won him the confidence of India’s working and middle
classes, who are pinched by food inflation, disillusioned with the
Gandhi dynasty and wearied of the corruption scandals that have
accumulated around the governing Congress party.
The
election, which began on Monday as the first of India’s 814 million
registered voters cast ballots in the country’s remote northeast, is
less about policies than a desire for change.
He
is enthusiastically embraced by international corporations, but he also
answers to an electoral base of small traders dead set against
globalization.
His
sometimes autocratic style may collide with several constraints, among
them a boisterous press, activist courts and fractious allies, that have
slowed his predecessors.
His
method of governing may be determined by arithmetic. Opinion polls
suggest that his National Democratic Alliance will emerge with the
largest number parliamentary seats. Though Hindus make up 80 percent of
India’s population, the country is a kaleidoscope of religious
diversity, including a large Muslim population along with Christians,
Sikhs and Buddhists. The Constitution enshrines a secular state, and the
country has a long history of accommodating a wide range of religious
and ethnic diversity.
Mr.
Modi will look to the margin of victory as a measure of his popular
mandate, said Ashok Malik, a prominent columnist who has supported Mr.
Modi’s candidacy. A haul of 220 out of 545 seats in the lower house, he
said, would signal “a mandate for revolutionary change.” For Mr. Malik,
that mandate matters for economic reasons, giving Mr. Modi the
independence to challenge powerful state lobbies and restructure the
economy to create jobs and integrate India in global supply chains.
But
Mr. Modi’s critics worry that a sweeping victory would embolden Mr.
Modi to pursue a risky and divisive Hindu nationalist agenda sought by
some of his most loyal supporters.
“He
will look around and decide what he can do — whether he can make India
into a Hindu nation or not,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadyay, the author of a
biography of Mr. Modi. “If it takes too much risk, he will not do it. If
he can, he will. Initially, he will focus on growth.”
If
Indians disagree about Mr. Modi’s intentions, it is partly because he
has reinvented himself several times. The son of a tea-stall owner in a
small town, he traces his political awakening to the age of 8, when he
began taking part in the evening drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh, a Hindu nationalist right-wing organization.
The
R.S.S. offered him a way to break from family obligations, and he
bucked his parents’ authority by walking away from an arranged marriage
in favor of years of ascetic wandering; a new biography, distributed to
journalists by the B.J.P., said he was turned away from three
monasteries, finally returning to full-time work for the R.S.S.
In
a rare television interview broadcast last week, Mr. Modi credited the
organization with shaping him. “I got the inspiration to live for the
nation from the R.S.S.,” he said. “It inculcated discipline into me. I
learned to live for others, and not for myself. I owe it all to the
R.S.S.”
Mr.
Modi did not become famous for several decades after that, until he had
risen through the ranks of the B.J.P. to become chief minister of his
home state, Gujarat.
By
then, his ideological background had been thoroughly eclipsed by his
international reputation as an effective manager. Corporate executives
gushed about their experience in Gujarat, saying that Mr. Modi had
increased efficiency by taking a tough approach with bureaucrats who
worked under him. He asked judges to work extra hours to plow through a
backlog of court cases, and put many state activities online, reducing
corruption.
Rajeev
Jyoti, managing director of Bombardier, a Canada-based aerospace and
transportation company, recalled approaching Mr. Modi’s office in 2007,
after winning a contract to produce subway cars. Eighteen months later,
the factory was built and operating, Mr. Jyoti said in an interview. “It
was incredible,” he said, “and it was a world record within
Bombardier.”
One
big event stained Mr. Modi’s reputation. Months after he took control
of Gujarat, in 2002, Hindu-Muslim riots erupted in the state, killing more than 1,000 people,
most of them Muslims. The violence was set off after a Muslim crowd
attacked a train car carrying Hindu activists. The car caught fire, and
59 people burned to death inside, though a central government
investigation found that the fire was an accident.
Police
responded slowly, witnesses said, as unspeakable violence unfolded over
several days. At one point, a Hindu mob armed with stones, iron rods
and homemade bombs surrounded a walled compound where Muslim families
had taken refuge. The compound’s owner, Ehsan Jafri, a former member of
Parliament, spent hours making frantic calls to high-ranking officials,
begging for police protection, but they arrived late, witnesses said.
Sixty-nine people, including women and children, burned to death with
Mr. Jafri.
For
years, Mr. Modi’s critics have argued that he failed to take steps to
halt the violence, and he has denied any responsibility. In a 2002
interview, he said his only regret about the episode was that he did not
handle the news media better.
Late
last year, an Indian court rejected a petition filed by Mr. Jafri’s
widow seeking Mr. Modi’s prosecution in the riots. Mr. Modi greeted this
decision as a victory, commenting via Twitter that “truth alone
triumphs.”
In
an interview with foreign journalists last week, Arun Jaitley, a senior
B.J.P. leader, ruled out the idea that Mr. Modi would apologize,
calling the persistent questioning “a fake campaign.”
“Those
asking for an apology wanted the apology to be an act of confession,”
Mr. Jaitley said. “If he has actually committed a mistake, why should he
apologize? He should have been prosecuted and punished.”
The
question of who Mr. Modi really is — the steady-handed corporate leader
or the Hindu-nationalist preacher — has been woven through this
election season, as he took his place before throngs of men chanting his
name.
Though
his campaign has focused on job creation and development, his speeches
have been scrutinized for religious content, and the B.J.P.’s manifesto,
released on Monday, was immediately examined for sops to the far right.
Prominent analysts have concluded that he has largely chosen to depart from the tenets of Hindu nationalism, either as a matter of political pragmatism or because his ideas have changed.
Shekhar
Gupta, the editor of The Indian Express, a daily newspaper, said the
shift actually began many years ago, when Mr. Modi first saw “a chance
for himself on the national stage.”
“I
sometimes joke that I’ve never seen a human being resemble his mask
more than Mr. Modi,” Mr. Gupta said. “The fact is that he will give you
many new versions of that mask. The Mr. Modi you see today sounds very
different — he looks the same, but he sounds very different from the way
he sounded in 2007.”
Mr.
Gupta said that if the B.J.P. wins, the next few years will see a
“calmer, more catholic Mr. Modi.” The reasons, he said, are purely
practical.
“He
wants to be in power for a long time,” he said. “He is young by Indian
standards, and that is not going to work with a purely polarizing
agenda. What works in Gujarat doesn’t work in India.”
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