Amethi: Modi proved again that he is the front runner

If opinion polls are right, Narendra Modi could quite feasibly win 50 seats in UP, and ride into 7 Race Course Road on 16 May without scoring a win in Amethi. Perhaps though, the one thing that would please the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate as much as winning the country’s top job would be the defeat of his presumptive rival, Rahul Gandhi, in his family bastion. The probability may not favour the BJP, but Narendra Modi’s killer instinct, so crucial in politics, sense a chance. The last time a Gandhi lost in Amethi was in 1977 when Sanjay Gandhi was trounced in the Janata Party wave. If indeed there is a Modi wave (and we will find out definitively on 16 May), conventional wisdom could be swept away. [caption id=“attachment_1509477” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Narendra Modi. PTI[/caption] Modi’s rally in Amethi, which concluded just minutes before the moratorium on campaigning for the penultimate round of elections was vintage Modi. He brought back centre-stage the raison d’etre of his frontrunner status. He spoke in favour of development and he raged against privilege, packaging himself as the candidate of change. He seemed to snub his chief lieutenant Amit Shah when he stated upfront that he was for the politics of change, not the politics of revenge ("badle ki rajneeti nahi, badlav ki rajneeti"). He then went on to list Amethi’s Bijli, Sadak, Paani and Shauchalya woes and held the Gandhi’s responsible.  He was ready to counter the argument that an MP cannot do much for the constituency if the state government is unwilling. He challenged the Gandhi’s to reveal any letter they had written to the administrations of either Akhilesh Yadav or Mayawati regarding Amethi’s development. How could any of the regional satraps deny the Gandhis, was his rhetorical question, as he switched from attacking their development record to attacking their position of privilege. Modi tore into the arrogance of the Gandhi family. He began with Rajiv Gandhi by narrating the story of the humiliation of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Anjiah by Rahul’s father when he was just a General Secretary of the Congress. He attacked Sonia Gandhi for not giving Narasimha Rao the funeral he deserved, comparing the former Prime Minister to the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was denied a burial in Delhi by the British and instead buried in faraway Rangoon. He criticised her for the manner of the unseemly unseating of Congress President Sitaram Kesri, a backward caste like him. He mocked Rahul for making a “nonsense” of the Cabinet and Prime Minister. The contrast, all the time, was the modest chai wallah who had made it big despite the odds, even as the “Family” deliberately diminished others merely because of the privilege of their birth. If anyone is still looking for reasons to explain why Modi is the front runner in this election, they just need to rewind his Amethi speech. His message is simple: Change. And he rages equally against privilege and underdevelopment that have so comfortably co-existed in the reign of the left-leaning Gandhis. That an allegedly hardline “right-winger” (who according to his critics doesn’t believe in inclusiveness at all) has positioned himself as an anti-thesis to that is a tribute to the remarkable political skills of Narendra Damordas Modi.