No 'Vande' chant, no head gear: Why PM Modi's Srinagar rally was different

Sonia Gandhi got an unexpected birthday gift from Narendra Modi. She woke up to headlines like “ Modest crowds, high hopes” about his latest rally. The words “Modi rally” and “modest crowds” go so rarely together it must have warmed the Congress president’s heart for minute as she sipped her morning tea. Of course, this rally was in Srinagar and the fact that Modi would address a rally in the heart of that city would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. It’s all about location, location, location. As the New York Times’ Gardiner Harris says what would have been “unremarkable, even mundane” anywhere else in India was “something of a stunner” in Srinagar. But when you are as bedraggled as the Congress these days there is no straw too slim to be grasped. The speech said Congress leader Saifuddin Soz was “highly unimpressive” and “disjointed” and he downsized the rally from the BJP’s 1 lakh target to his own estimate of “at the most 2500”. [caption id=“attachment_1840713” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Modi in Srinagar. PTI[/caption] Actually the rally was a curious beast. At one level Modi went out of his way to make it as “normal” as possible. His speech sounded like a modestly tweaked variant of his stump speech around the country. He refused to talk about Pakistan. Not surprisingly there was not a hint of Article 370 in the speech, not even a coded reference. He stuck to his national theme of sab ka saath, sab ka vikaas. He talked about himself in the third person. He sold them a bit of the Gujarat dream aka you too can be like Gujarat. He got to recycle his ma-beta sarkar diatribe but as the baap-beta and baap-beti sarkar. He even, true to form, made one claim that was questionable. He boasted he was the first PM to be holding a meeting in the Sher-i-Kashmir arena since 1983 whereas Sankarshan Thakur points out Manmohan Singh had come there (to the adjacent ground) in 2004 and Atal Behari Vajpayee a year earlier. Sounds like a Modi-rally following the standard script? But if you looked carefully Srinagar was actually like no other Modi rally and not just because he skipped some local flavour headgear. Size matters Modi rallies are always about size. It always has to be a jan samudra so the television camera can pan out to a sea of people, clambering up poles for a view of The Man. It needs giant traffic snarls that will tie a city in knots. Even when it’s outside the city in a town like Gauriganj in Amethi it has to back up traffic on a two lane highway for hours ensuring brisk business for wandering kheera-sellers. This one too had huge police bandobast but more of it was spent keeping people away from the rally than getting them there. As Sameer Yasir reports in Firstpost “many residents of Srinagar were asked to stay indoors. There was a complete shutdown in most parts of the city.” Shops were closed. Rally attendees needed a special pass. Modi came to talk to the people but because of his arrival many of those people were forced to stay at home. The Sounds of Silence The other trademark of a Modi rally is the noise. If the crowd is a jansamudra the audience noise is a tsunami. It leaves your ears ringing.The warm-up speakers fire up the crowd getting them into slogan-chanting fervour. When Modi finally arrives he is like a Baptist preacher doing call and response with his congregation. “Kahoon?” he queries. “Kahiye” the crowd chortles back. But this was, by Modi standards, a polite if muted crowd. The Hindu’s Zahid Rafiq says “Before Mr. Modi arrived at the venue, several local BJP leaders tried hard to cheer the crowd and get them to shout pro-India and pro-BJP slogans.” But Modi’s claim that he had come to share the Valley’s pain got merely a “gentle ripple of applause” reports Sankarshan Thakur of The Telegraph. Marching out of step Modi’s foray into Srinagar should have annoyed those who want independence for Kashmir. But the strongman actually ended up annoying a most unlikely constituency - the army. Ajai Shukla writes in the Business Standard that the military brass felt seriously snubbed by the PM’s brag about how under him “for the first time in 30 years, the army admitted its mistake.” Social media usually tomtoms the success of Modi’s rally but in this case a furious WhatsApp message whizzed through army networks, writes Shukla, blaming new tight operational restraints for the deaths of eight soldiers in a militant strike near Uri. There’s a kind of gush A Modi rally is always a surreal visual spectacle as hundreds show up in the Modi face masks and we have the real Modi addressing hundreds of his own masks, mirroring his words back to him. There are Obama’s Hope style t-shirts. There are often ululating women holding thalis with diyas and flowers putting tikas on the heads of rally guests. For extra effect sometimes foreigners are lined up like Bollywood extras on a side-stage listening attentively to a speech delivered mostly in Hindi. While there were some Modi masks visible in the photographs from the rally, there was little of that post-rally fanboy gush in evidence. Even in Kathmandu at the SAARC summit, television reporters had said the only leader that mattered was Modi and dragged delirious fans out in front of the camera. Here instead of Modi-as-the-Messiah quotes most of the interviewees just said they if they voted it would be for development not for the government of India. Bringing down the house Modi did not try his trademark rising crescendo Vande chant which could have backfired if the crowd didn’t Mataram back with equal gusto. Discretion was clearly the better part of valour in how he chose to end this rally as reported by The Telegraph’s Sankarshan Thakur.

“(U)nlike the Samba rally he addressed down in the Jammu region this morning, there was no Jai Bharat Mata ki cry to close proceedings, not even a Jai Hind. Bahut bahut dhanyavaad is what Modi said to end his first and last effort in Kashmir this campaign.”

In the end as the New York Times reports the biggest news about the Srinagar rally was that it happened and it happened without incident. For the party faithful however that is enough to be chalked up to the magic of Narendra Modi.