Claiming the throne: Why Modi's open ambition is his biggest asset

Nitish Kumar has dared to utter the P-word. Sort of.

Asked if he was joining the race for PM, Kumar said according to The Times of India “I am qualified”. And then he asked a presumably rhetorical question. “What do I lack (to be PM)?”

Now that the election date has been announced it’s as if some tacit embargo on voicing prime ministerial ambitions has been lifted. Until this point, everyone had been happy to play coy.

Mamata Banerjee opened her appearance on Newslaundry’s Candidate 2014 forum at the Townhall in Kolkata by saying “Please don’t consider me as a candidate. You can ask me the question just as a simple person and citizen of this country.” Mamata probably feels her prime ministerial ambitions are better served coming from Anna Hazare and Mahasweta Devi’s lips rather than her own.

But there can be something like too much modesty. In a relentless 24x7 news cycle it’s meant that these leaders have pretty much ceded the national space to Narendra Modi. He has de facto become the only person running openly and aggressively for the top job. The rest sound like they are waiting around the sidelines for the electoral arithmetic to work out in their favour. PM by consensus rather than by design.

Nitish Kumar took a jab at Modi when he said unlike those “roaming around for the post” he actually had experience in Parliament. But what Kumar might be belatedly realising, and at his own cost, is that Modi by “roaming around” the country has actually been steadily building a national status for himself while the likes of Kumar, Mamata and Jayalalithaa remain merely powerful regional chieftains in the eyes of ordinary Indians. Mamata’s stance on sharing of river waters with Bangladesh or Jayalalithaa’s hasty decision to try and release the convicted in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case might go down well on home turf but only reinforce their regional boss image to the rest of India.

Modi, on the other hand, endlessly talks up his record in Gujarat but he has been slowly but surely trying to become much more than just the Chief Minister of Gujarat. Luckily for him, his opponents have pretty much presented him with an open field.

When Modi came to Kolkata for his big rally, his party had no delusions of grandeur about the fact that they are not the front-runner or even the second-runner in the state. But the rally at the Brigade Parade Ground was about showcasing Modi, not the BJP. And the message was clear – a vote for the BJP candidate for Lok Sabha in Bengal, no matter who he or she is, is really a vote for Narendra Modi in Delhi.

It’s a message the other parties need to absorb. Rahul Gandhi is doing the Congress no favours when he says demurely, “My becoming PM or not becoming PM does not matter.”

We can relate to this self-effacing humility because it’s such an Indian trait and we have been raised with a middle class horror about the classroom show-off. But this is not the old socialist India. In the new India just as it is okay to be rich, it’s also okay to be nakedly ambitious. And before you can articulate why you are the best person for the job, you have to first admit to wanting it.

Rahul’s lack of ambition has made him what Arun Jaitley calls snidely “the Congress Party’s ‘candidate in purdah’.” But it has effectively meant the Congress looks leaderless and rudderless as it meanders into the election.

The compulsions of coalition politics, of course, makes hasty declarations of prime ministerial ambitions tricky. If a Mamata declares herself the PM candidate can she make coalition overtures to a Jayalalithaa as is being rumoured in the media now that the Jayalalithaa-Left Front Third Front seems to be falling apart? But the lack of clarity and diffidence is playing into Modi’s court.

As the only candidate who appears to be seriously running out in the open Modi can now set his own rules. He is running a US-style presidential campaign in an Indian-style parliamentary system. But in the US all presidential candidates are forced to subject themselves to high-profile prime time interviews as a way of setting themselves apart from the rest of the pack. Modi does not have to do that because the “rest of the pack” is missing in action – either waiting in backrooms like a Jayalalithaa or on default auto-pilot like Rahul Gandhi.

So Narendra Modi can decide not to show up for Newslaundry’s Candidate 2014 series because in the end he calculates he can afford not to. 24x7 media will still obsessively trail him around the country and his countless speeches will give the illusion of a prime time conversation. But it’s one way. His way. He wants to become prime minister without having to take any unscripted questions. And with Rahul Gandhi opting out of Newslaundry’s Candidate 2014 as well, it puts the very title of the forums into question. Candidate for what?

Even Arvind Kejriwal in his appearance for the forum said nothing about his prime ministerial ambitions. The man is trying to beard the “lion of Gujarat” in his own den but he has not committed to even running for the Lok Sabha himself. “How can I consider myself a PM candidate? I am an ordinary man. In our party we don’t discuss Chief Ministerial or Prime Ministerial candidates,” Kejriwal told reporters in January as if there was something vaguely sordid about such discussion.

It is true that in a parliamentary system, it’s technically about the party not the politician. But it’s also true that in a parliamentary system like the UK, there’s never a doubt as to who is the prime ministerial aspirant for a major party going into the polls. Polls today, for better or for worse, are about personalities. Even Mamata understands that. In 2011, as an MP, she was not even a contender in the West Bengal state elections. But there was no doubt in the minds of anyone walking into the polling booth, that no matter who the Trinamool candidate was on the ballot, it was really a vote for Mamata. Now Modi is trying to do a Mamata.

Others might complain our parliamentary system is being subverted into a presidential one but that’s just the way it is and the leaders of all parties with national ambitions need to wake up and smell the coffee. Otherwise we head into elections 2014 with only two things we know for sure. Narendra Modi wants the top job. And Manmohan Singh does not.