MIRZAPUR, MAY 9 (UNI):- BJP Supporters wear the mask of Narendra Modi during his an election campaign rally in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh on Friday . UNI PHOTO-89U<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs he crisscrossed India, Modi rejuvenated the party that had got demoralized over the ten years it had spent out of power. He instilled a sense of direction into leaders and workers as he sold the dream of a better future. His energy and aggressiveness made him look like a decisive leader in a hurry, catching the imagination of an impatient electorate. \u201cIt is amazing how much energy he has,\u201d says Ajay Singh, who was part of the BJP war room, adding that Modi slept for hardly four hours a day. \u201cWe worked 24×7 since January, often going to bed in the early hours of the morning, but it was such fun,\u201d says Ajay Jasra, a corporate communication specialist in the BJP war room. Modi was turned into a brand and deliberately advertised as one. The multiple campaigns surrounding him were high-decibel, relentless and expensive and outshone the Congress\u2019s, which seemed tired in comparison. Ajay Maken, who was in charge of the Congress campaign, admitted to the media that the BJP had outdone his party, while Jairam Ramesh, a former minister, said that the BJP had spent Rs. 5,000 crore on showcasing Modi… Ajay Singh points out, \u201cTactically, we kept money aside for the last two weeks to create a shock-and-awe \u00a0campaign as we saw that the Congress had given up. We unleashed a campaign in Modi\u2019s voice, which said, \u2018Aapka diya gaya vote seedhe mujhe milega (Every vote you cast will directly come to me),\u2019 to create a feeling that Modi was contesting all the BJP seats…\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nA media hungry for TRPs and eyeballs latched onto the Modi campaign, further advancing his cause. The Hindu\u2019s rural affairs editor P Sainath observed: \u201cThat building of a cult around Narendra Modi was a propaganda triumph. But it worked because we are India\u2019s most media-saturated electorate ever… Never before have the media participated in an Indian election to the extent and in the manner they did this time. For weeks, any speech by Modi in any distant district ran live on several channels.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nHe added that some major corporate houses with big media holdings formed \u201ccells\u201d to help advance the Modi campaign. A study by the CMS Media Lab, part of the Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi, found that he hogged over a third of prime time news telecast on five major channels. And that was between 1 March and 30 April. From 1 to 11 May, Modi\u2019s time crossed the 50 percent mark\u2014over six times what Rahul Gandhi got and ten times the share of Kejriwal. Moreover, quite a bit of Kejriwal\u2019s coverage was negative, which was not the case with Modi.<\/span><\/p>\nWith a strong momentum in his favour, Modi gave his campaign a final push in the last lap of the election by taking the fight to the enemy camp and holding a rally in Amethi, the constituency of his principal opponent Rahul Gandhi, in support of BJP candidate Smriti Irani. \u201cThis is my younger sister Smriti Irani. I chose her for Amethi, but not to create fresh problems for the mother and son (Sonia Gandhi and Rahul),\u201d he said on his rival\u2019s turf. He went on to describe Amethi as one of India\u2019s most backward districts because of \u201cforty wasted years\u201d and \u201cthree wasted generations\u201d. The rally Gandhi held in Modi\u2019s constituency of Varanasi just days later seemed like an inadequate response and only reinforced the impression that the Congress vice-president had been on the defensive throughout the election. His sister Priyanka entered the fray to bat for him but it was too late in the day, and her invocation of her martyred father betrayed the feeling that the Congress was running out of options and resorting to old emotive appeals.<\/span><\/p>\nAs the bitterly fought election drew to a close, Modi was all over. Commenting on the unprecedented scale of Modi\u2019s outreach, Kunal Pradhan and Uday Mahurkar of India Today wrote in an article titled Maximum Campaign: \u201cWherever you are in India, whatever your politics, and whomever you did or didn\u2019t vote for, the spectre of Modi hangs over the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. So relentless has been his campaign, so dramatic his delivery, and so ubiquitous his development message, that he has converted a complex parliamentary system into a presidential-style referendum on himself. Over the last nine months, Modi has travelled 3,00,000 km, or seven times the Earth\u2019s equatorial circumference. He has attended 5,187 events, addressed 477 rallies in twenty-five states while sleeping barely five hours a night, and harnessed the Internet and mobile telephony to connect with an estimated 230 million people, or one in every four voters. That\u2019s more people than the population of Brazil and three times the combined annual traffic of the Delhi and Mumbai airports.\u201d Long before the results of the election were out, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.<\/span><\/p>\nBut when the results were finally out, the outcome surpassed everyone\u2019s expectations. On the morning of 16 May 2014, all doubts about a hung parliament were laid to rest as the BJP seemed set to win a clear majority. In the event, the party bagged 282 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha, ten more than needed to form a government on its own. It was the first time since 1984 that a single party had managed to win a simple majo-rity… The Congress was reduced to its worst ever tally of forty-four. No party secured the minimum of fifty-five seats needed for its leader to be officially recognized as the leader of the Opposition. Modi himself handsomely won both the seats he contested\u2014Vadodara by a margin of 5,70,128 votes and Varanasi by 3,36,854 votes. In Amethi, Gandhi managed to win, but only by 1,07,903 votes, down from a margin of 3.70 lakh in 2009.<\/span><\/p>\nCartographers painted India\u2019s map saffron as the BJP won all seats in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi. In Madhya Pradesh, it won twenty-seven of the twenty-nine seats, while in Chhattisgarh it won ten of eleven. With alliance partners, it won a whopping seventy-three of the eighty seats in Uttar Pradesh, forty-two of the forty-eight in Maharashtra and thirty-one of forty in Bihar. The Congress, on the other hand, could in no state cross the double-digit mark. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP\u2019s performance was stellar as two of the seven seats it ceded went to Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and the winners in the other five were all family members of Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose Samajwadi Party was in power in the state. Mayawati\u2019s Bahujan Samaj Party, founded on caste lines with the backward classes as its backbone, was washed out without a single seat…<\/span><\/p>\nThe only states without any BJP presence were Kerala, Sikkim, Manipur and Mizoram, while the only regional leaders who survived Modi\u2019s onslaught were Jayalalithaa, whose party won thirty-seven of thirty-nine seats in Tamil Nadu; Mamata Banerjee, whose Trina-mool Congress got thirty-four of forty-two seats in West Bengal and Naveen Patnaik, whose Biju Janata Dal secured twenty of the twenty-one seats in Odisha. They had all been hostile to Modi in the run-up to the polls, ostensibly in the hope that they would be able to play kingmaker in the event of no alliance emerging victorious, but Modi no more had need for their handsome tallies.<\/span><\/p>\nBut, for its euphoric win, the BJP had the first-past-the-post system of elections to thank, pointed Sainath. Its vote share had been 31 per cent, the lowest for a majority government at the Centre. The difference between the vote shares of the Congress and the BJP was just of twelve percentage points but it translated into a 500 per cent difference in seats.<\/span><\/p>\nIn Tamil Nadu, the DMK got 23.6 per cent of the votes but bagged zero seats. The BJP-led five-party alliance got 18.6 per cent but won two seats. In West Bengal, the Left Front got nearly 30 per cent of the votes and just two seats. The Congress got less than 10 per cent but took four. The Trinamool Congress got 40 per cent of the votes but 80 per cent of the seats.<\/span><\/p>\nOn 16 May 2014, India\u2019s electoral arithmetic showed that a prime minister, who had been in the making for years, decades perhaps, had finally arrived to take charge with a firm mandate. But the quirks of that arithmetic also revealed that he had arrived with a burden of dissension, fears and anxieties which may never cease bearing down on him from time to time.[metaslider id=3782]<\/span><\/p>\n
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