Prime Minister Narendra Modi is never tired of telling Indians how decades of Congress rule had ruined India, how he had inherited a miserably corrupt and broken system and what the magnitude of restoring it back to health would be.
His favourite imagery is that of turning around a multi-wagon freight train.
The task, no doubt, was colossal and there was much sympathy for the prime minister. When Modi, in his first speech from the ramparts of Delhi’s historical Red Fort on August 15, 2014, talked about how Indians had to change the way they treated the girl child or the importance of ending open defecation, there was admiration for the prime minister’s brutal frankness.
On October 2 that same year, Modi launched the by-now famous ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ (Clean India mission) which enthused everyone from kindergarten children to wizened old men.
Though Indians knew these, and many such programmes, would take time to impact, they were also in a hurry to witness actual change on ground. Modi himself is partly to blame for this because he had succeeded in rekindling the aspirational temper of the nation.
Perhaps the one initiative that should have made immediate and tangible impression was ‘Swachh Bharat’. While several main urban centres have witnessed some improvement, the situation in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as well as rural India is still pathetic. The prime example of this is the prime minister’s own constituency of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.
Recently I had the occasion to visit the city that is said to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world. The scene was unbelievable! It was a dust bowl of unimaginable proportions. Rotting garbage was strewn all over, dead rats and flea-ridden dogs were everywhere, dodging stray cattle was the main object of driving or even walking, stench from human and animal excreta was so overpowering that after a few minutes your senses are dulled into believing there is no smell. Not a single building boasted a fresh coat of paint, the majority of them did not even have plastered walls. Toilets? What are roads for, seems to be the counter-question.
It’s not as if there is no developmental work taking place. A 15km long four-lane flyover is being built to connect the brand new international airport. The driver of the three-wheeler scooter-rickshaw I was riding dismissed it with legitimate derision. “How many people in Varanasi use the airport,” he asked. “These are for the VVIPs and the rich foreign tourists. Our lot remains the same.”
The prime minister has been hard at work on several fronts, many of them of great substance and game-changing importance. But, if after four years of being in the highest office in the land, this is the state of affairs with the prime minister’s own constituency in the implementation of one of his pet programmes, you can well imagine what the rest of Uttar Pradesh and much of the so-called Hindi belt could be.
As The Indian Express said in an editorial comment, “parts of wester Uttar Pradesh have road with lunar surfaces, suitable for Mars rovers.”
And to think that voters in Varanasi gave Modi victory by the largest margin in the 2014 elections! It was the hope that things would change, and change fast, that must have moved them to opt so overwhelmingly for the man from far away Gujarat.
Which brings us to Gorakhpur, the other major power base of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the adopted home town of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Voters in Gorakhpur had also given a massive 310,000-plus majority for Adityanath when they chose him to the Lok Sabha in 2014.
But when the BJP registered a landslide victory in last year’ s assembly elections, the party asked Adityanath to take over the reins of the state government. Instead of contesting another election, Adityanath decided to get selected to the upper house of the bicameral state assembly.
That, in fact, only heightened the expectations of citizens of Gorakhpur. They genuinely thought they had elected the state chief minister. And, in turn, expected immediate change to their woebegone lives. Instead what do they get? The death of nearly 300 children in just one month due to encephalitis in just the city’s government-run medical college hospital.
Of course Adityanath could not be directly faulted for the deaths which had been happening in larger numbers in the previous years. But that was no excuse. What the voter expected was an end to such deaths. And since that did not happen, the public knew they had to do something to send the right message, which they did in no uncertain terms in the recent by-election to fill the Lok Sabha seat vacated by Adityanath.
From a lead of 310,000 votes four years ago, the BJP’s Upendra Shukla was reduced to a sorry loser by close to 22,000 votes.
The BJP wants to explain the defeat in terms of the unexpected coming together of two sworn enemies—the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party to put up a joint candidate. But had Modi and Adityanath put their minds together and focused on the development of Gorakhpur, the result would have been different. Instead, they spent their energies on banning beef and cow slaughter which resulted in social and economic chaos, not to mention the untimely deaths of several innocent Muslim men who allegedly either ate beef or transported cows even for legitimate and lawful purposes.
Modi can address all the rallies he wants and BJP chief Amit Shah can turn his party into the strongest electoral machine in India’s history. But if actual progress does not happen on ground, and happen fast, voters have shown time and again they can be very angry and, at the same time, will be the one having the last laugh.

An unlikely friend for CBI in Karti’s case    
Karti Chidambaram, son of former finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram and the alleged supreme power broker during the Congress-led regime of prime minister Manmohan Singh, has been cooling his heels in Delhi’s Tihar jail for some time now. All his father’s famous legal prowess and the battery of high-profile lawyers who rose to his defence could not save Karti.
The Congress Party, which went ballistic when Karti was picked up from Chennai airport on February 28, seems to have gone into a shell after the court extended his police custody twice and then sent him to judicial custody till March 24. Congress spokespersons suddenly find themselves tongue-tied, perhaps sensing Karti’s is a losing case and there was no point defending someone in that spot because, if eventually he is convicted, some of that mud could stick on the party too.
Interestingly, the Central Bureau of Investigation and the enforcement directorate are not the only ones charging Karti with influence-peddling.
Andimuthu Raja, telecom minister in the Manmohan Singh government under whose watch the controversial allegations of favouritism in allocation of spectrum took place, has also revealed that Karti was the man-about-town who could be seen in the corridors of power in the national capital. In his book, ‘2G Saga Unfolds’ released weeks before Karti was arrested, Raja says the power-broking son of the powerful minister had approached him with a recommendation on behalf of a leading telecom service provider.
Raja does not reveal the name of the service provider nor does he say what transpired at their meeting. But he mentions he had agreed to meet the businessman because the recommendation came from the son of a senior colleague. The short point being, Karti’s feigning innocence may not wash with everyone.