Indian Politicians Scramble for Electoral Benefits From Flood Relief Work

Raminder Pal Singh/European Pressphoto Agency Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, addressing a rally at Madhopur, in Punjab, on June 23.

NEW DELHI â€" A week after floods began to ravage the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand on June 16, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, an ambitious and controversial politician seeking to topple the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance coalition in New Delhi, visited the disaster-struck state with a team of bureaucrats experienced in disaster management to help evacuate stranded pilgrims. A newspaper reported that he helped rescue 15,000 Gujarati pilgrims. A friend quipped, “How could he get so many on a single plane?”

Even if it’s not clear exactly how many pilgrims were transported thanks to Mr. Modi, we know for certain that at least one person was definitely evacuated in a hurry: Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party’s vice president, who was having a birthday party somewhere in Europe when the Uttarakhand floods struck.

What was the hurry? The next parliamentary elections that will determine who runs the next national government can be held anytime until May 2014. Some argue that the parties propping up the current administration, like the left-of-center Samajwadi Party in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, may contrive to withdraw support and let the government fall, timing it for national elections this winter. However, that likelihood has decreased! after the United Progressive Alliance supported its former ally in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, in getting its chief’s daughter, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, elected to Parliament’s upper house on June 27.

What is certain is that India is gripped with political uncertainty. And in that uncertainty, Mr. Modi has been proactive because his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) does not have a political program to take into the national elections.

The B.J.P. used to propagate its conservative ideology of “cultural nationalism,” but the mere mention of that ideology now sounds sinister given Mr. Modi’s reputation of religious intolerance - the United States has refused to give him a visa after the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, and the Janata Dal (United) Party of Bihar, which has a significant Muslim electorate, parted wayswith the B.J.P. to protest Mr. Modi’s promotion in the party hierarchy.

What is more important, however, is that Mr. Modi cannot exploit the Congress Party’s otherwise crippling Achilles’ heel: corruption. Though the United Progressive Alliance has been mired in one mind-boggling graft scandal after another since 2010, the anticorruption crusade of 2011 that drew massive middle-class crowds was led by a Gandhian-looking social activist named Anna Hazare. He forced the governing coalition to discuss in Parliament measures for transparency in government and the creation of an anticorruption watchdog. It was his issue; it can never become the B.J.P.’s.

In India, it’s been seen that when a political party moves first on an issue, that party is forever linked in the public mind to that same cause â€" even if they never robustly take up the issue again. So anticorruption cannot be synonymous with the B.J.P., the way affirmative action for backward castes has not been synonymous wi! th the Co! ngress â€" even though the Congress has legislated affirmative action for backward castes in higher education.

Indian voters associate affirmative action with left-of-center parties like the Samajwadi Party (whose progenitor, the undivided Janata Dal, in 1990 implemented the B.P. Mandal Commission’s report on affirmative action for “other backward castes”). Similarly, not even Mr. Hazare’s lieutenant Arvind Kejriwal has been able to use anti-corruption as a crowd pulling issue for his fledgling Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s party), because the the protests against corruption are linked in the Indian mind to Mr. Hazare alone.

So to benefit from the Congress’s utter electoral vulnerability, Mr. Modi and the B.J.P. have been projecting the Gujarat strongman as Mr. Efficiency. Mr. Modi has been at it for a while, emphasizing governance and development, collecting testimonies of his ability to defeat red tape from India’s top industrialists.

Most famously, he immediately invited Tta Motors to set up its manufacturing plant in Gujarat for the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, when West Bengal developed cold feet after severe popular protests. And now, after becoming B.J.P.’s electoral campaign chief, the Uttarakhand floods provided Mr. Modi with another chance to show leadership, courage and administrative acumen.

European Pressphoto Agency Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, left, with son Rahul Gandhi and Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit, right, flagging off trucks carrying relief mate! rial for ! the Uttarakhand flood victims in New Delhi on June 24.

Oddly, no one jumped at that chance before Mr. Modi; afterwards, everyone wanted to be on the flood relief bandwagon. There was Mr. Gandhi, who cut short his own party for the larger Party. There was Uttarakhand’s chief minister, Vijay Bahuguna, who thought it was an auspicious time to launch his second son, Prayag Bahuguna, in politics by involving him in flood relief. Then there were rival legislators from Andhra Pradesh, a state that is as connected to Uttarakhand as Texas is to Vermont, who came to blows in full public view at the local airport over who would escort rescued pilgrims back home. In India, every high-casualty tragedy has in it the seeds of low-brow comedy.

Will the flood relief help Mr. Modi’s plan to become prime minister? He certainly has the first-mover advantage. It has underlined his burning ambition â€" which has a take-no-prisoners character to it, as more than a few Gujaratis will attest â€" which may utimately be to his benefit. Such ambition certainly contrasts with the reluctance of Mr. Gandhi to take the reins of power, even though they have been handed to him on a silver platter. The scion’s late arrival and his absence of determination give the impression that a visit to Uttarakhand had been suggested to him by his advisors and that his heart was really not in it.

Yet Mr. Modi cannot do much with his ambition and energy unless he can get a critical mass of voters, the majority of whom are poor. He has never been described as pro-poor. And though he has an opinion on everything, he has kept mum over the United Progressive Alliance’s recent decision to double the prices of natural gas, a decision derided by experts as blatantly allowing a dominant private sector player to substantially increase its profits and the bills the Indian consumer pays. To be fair, though Mr. Gandhi postures as an advocate for the poor, his on-the-record admiration for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reveals an! unabashe! d pro-business mindset; he’s also kept mum on the much-jeered natural gas price rise.

In the race for that critical mass of votes, Mr. Modi appears to have already won over the urban middle class: witness banners put up by the local assemblyman in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz that, in Marathi, lauded “Rambo” (the Congress party’s term of derision for Modi after his Uttarakhand evacuation claim) for rescuing 15,000 people. For the middle-class, even the mud slung on Modi turns to gold.

Mr. Gandhi’s party has kept wooing the rural poor through policy measures like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which ensures 100 days of paid work for everyone in the countryside, or the upcoming Food Security Bill, which will guarantee a minimum amount of food grain per family at subsidized prices. Still, it faces an uphill climb in the next national elections against the regional parties.

The only constituency that might be up for grabs â€" and this differs from state to state, city to ciy, town to town â€" is the urban poor. Though the urban poor are disgusted with the governing coalition, the B.J.P. speaks a language alien to them. The B.J.P. never speaks of regularizing slums, or providing running water or electricity to resettled slum dwellers, which are the real issues for the urban poor; instead, the B.J.P. speaks of abstract things like the Indian Constitution’s Article 370 (which defines Kashmir’s relationship to India), a matter that even middle-class voters find difficult to understand.

A significant portion of the urban poor â€" India’s Muslims â€" will never vote for Mr. Modi. For the rest, he has to push his Mr. Efficiency agenda, because in a rapidly transforming India, the urban poor are keenly aware of their rights, have access to information and see a vista of opportunity opening up. Mr. Modi is hoping that they want a leader who means business, so
he flew up to Uttarakhand and displayed his administrative prowess.

It remains to be seen whethe! r or not ! his tactics will work in a country like India, where national tragedies are seen as business opportunities â€" as in Uttarakhand, where starving and thirsty pilgrims were charged 300 rupees, or $5, for a 33-cent bottle of water, and 180 rupees, or $3, for a roti. What can’t be denied is that when Mr. Modi acts, Mr. Gandhi reacts. And that can never bode well for an incumbent party.

Aditya Sinha is the former Editor-in-Chief of Daily News and Analysis and The New Indian Express.