

Have you ever made up your mind about someone based on the way the way their bathroom looked, their bed was mussed or their table was organized?



Over the weekend, if you were really looking, there was a lot you’d have been able to tell from two offices in New Delhi representing competing ideas of power and politics.

Both situated in the Delhi that the British architect Edwin Lutyens designed, both just a street away from each other, but claiming entirely separate worlds. 11 Ashoka Road – the office of the BJP, now ‘victory sthal’ – and 24 Akbar Road – the Congress party office, now land of the walking dead.

The way both spaces looked each time the regime changed – in 2004 and then on May 16, 2014, tell the story of who the respective claimants really are. But I am getting ahead of myself.

To tell you what I saw and how it nails the story of 2014, I must take you back to the last time these two spaces saw a regime change – 2004. The media had it all wrong, geared up as it was for a BJP victory. Back in 2004, even the Congress party had believed every word the media had trotted out in the run-up to that election and were all prepared to lose.

On May 13, 2004, by 9:30am, when the leads started to trickle in and the Congress party, along with its allies, managed to get 275 seats, office bearers scattered in a hundred different directions, hobbled by twin, opposing needs – one for speed and the other for the dignified appearance of having believed in themselves all along.

By noon a massive inflatable white hand – the party symbol – was successfully erected in the front lawn of 24 Akbar Road, right in front of the party poster of Rajiv Gandhi. Big and important party spokespersons made sure they got there, to be engulfed by one TV camera after another. “Ma’am, please, you have to speak to us,” I pleaded with an indifferent Ambika Soni on the Congress office lawn. But the channel I represented at the time – Headlines Today, wasn’t the brand name it is now and halfway through the live broadcast she walked out of the camera frame. Onto bigger, better.

That morning the media bosses had sent lesser mortals like me to the Congress party office, not expecting much to happen. But by noon, as the big white hand materialised, so did the divas of TV – from Rajdeep Sardesai to Barkha Dutt. (Times Now wasn’t born then.) Party spokesperson Oscar Fernandes was stuck in a labyrinthine maze of TV cameras. When I finally extricated him painfully towards my own crew, he remarked, “You’ve managed to drag me out of the well of death. Whenever you want an interview in the future, just introduce yourself as the ‘maut ke kooe wali reporter’ and I will respond immediately.”

By this time, the scene outside 24 Akbar Road was loud, incredulous and completely hysterical. There was a sea of humanity jostling with each other to push past the office gate and get a taste of power up close. One man climbed a tree and refused to get down until “Sonia-ji” declared she would become prime minister. When she didn’t, and no one was looking, he quietly scurried down without so much as a word.

At the end of the day, the road outside 24 Akbar Road was littered with the shrapnel of firecrackers, some half lit, and rubber chappals that had slid off so many shuffling feet. And by now, the Congress spokespersons had massaged their faces into the appropriate expression. Less shock. More entitlement. The “we always knew and always ruled and always will…” that stayed with them a full 10 years.

Until this weekend.

Meanwhile, 11 Ashoka Road looked like a tragi-comic cutout. The BJP had been prepped to be the natural heirs to power riding on their huge ‘India Shining’ campaign. The office with its spanking new pre-fab panels and granite-glass accouterments suddenly looked like a derelict shopping mall in a drought-stricken town.

What I failed to notice then – which was in fact the writing on the wall in 2004 – is how India Shining nearly did make it. The Congress party on its own had a mere 145 seats, just seven seats more than the BJP. Only, that time around, the UPA managed to cobble together an alliance that left their rivals behind. The numbers that separated the Congress from the BJP were very, very small. But the BJP was a party in transition. LK Advani was moving into the shadow or being forced into it and the next rung was too busy jousting with each other for the top spot to find a convincing story to entice voters with. The tide was already turning and the last thing India wanted was to be confronted with the self-satisfied expression that the Congress party wore: “We rule because we rule.”

Story continues