Unable to make the cut

Sandeep Dikshit

This is the time of the year when journalists concentrated in urban centres fan out in the countryside to smell the ‘chunav ki hawa.’ Many of them are lone rangers but several tend to band together because of shoe-string budgets. No such consideration assails Ruchir Sharma and his merry band who have adopted the pejorative ‘limousine liberals’ for their style and élan during their forays in the hinterlands of India over a time period of an impressive 27 years.

They naturally stumble into situations far removed from their posh lives. For instance the perennially under-construction highways — vikas as we generally call this contractor-fuelled frenzy of concretising anything in sight — let their six-door Volvos down or cause missed appointments.

This is not just a well-heeled bunch but well connected as well. While we ordinary pen-pushers hover at the fringes of VVIP rallies and get invited into their restricted-entry tents and abodes only if the newspaper carries weight in that region, the ‘limousine liberals manage to net a darshan every time they sail out, even if it is with a dour Narendra Modi (not yet the PM then) or an outright rude Amit Shah (not yet BJP chief then).

Or be subjected to three dinners on the same night in rolling, manicured lawns of Patna. No marks for guessing who the hosts were — the three most powerful men in town, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Yadav and Ravi Shankar Prasad. 

Or a Mayawati still in her night gown, excusing herself to “do my Colgate”, which is a rare insight into the value system of a leading Dalit politician, unaware of the invidious role of consumer goods branding on our everyday lives.

In Tamil Nadu for the 2006 state polls, the liberals headed straight for a meeting with J. Jayalalithaa, followed by another with M. Karunandihi and then drive down to Madurai to the well-appointed home of a textile magnet. All through the book the reader doesn’t get to know who voted for whom and why.

Ruchir Sharma would have netted more VVIPs for his book if it had not been for spotty mobile phones (missed Sonia) and bumpy roads (missed Gehlot). 

The useful portions are the ones that can help you plan your stay in Bharat. For instance, the Best Western near Moradabad that we scribes can only ogle at from the highway on our way to cheap hill resorts of Kaladhungi and Almora. Or where not to stay: Hotel Kishen in Bettiah and The Manor in Kashipur. Or that one of the best gastronomic servings are available at Rajasthan’s Chokhi Dhani.

Since this is a work that compresses three decades of travel, it is not all vacuous. Data crunching and hi-tech election war rooms were not a Prashant Kishore-Narendra Modi enterprise. Pramod Mahajan and Sudhanshu Mittal were neck-deep in the scientific use of data for the Rajasthan elections 16 years back, found Sharma. It is another matter that the BJP won and the limousine liberals got it completely wrong. 

The ephemerality of alliances is served up time and again; the most striking being the Lalu-Congress alliance of 2005 barely eight months after they had contested separately.

And then there are bell-weather constituencies that for some reason always side with the winning side. So for the next Rajasthan Assembly elections, take a closer look at Tonk. And night-stay can be at the ultra-uber Umaid Bhawan Palace hotel to wash away the grime that usually accumulates during visits to such places.

Naturally, Sharma was smitten by Priyanka Gandhi who in the years past would take a break from her crème de la crème hangouts to spend a few days at mama’s constituency. She is painted as articulate, charismatic, candid, quite a weapon, utterly genuine and an exuberant teenager all in the space of breathless para-long three sentences.

There is hardly any embarrassment at the splurging of public funds in the hinterlands to entertain this band. District magistrates lay out lavish spreads just because, we are told, the husband of a friend of a cousin at school was the incumbent. 

With this book, Ruchir Sharma has accomplished his purpose of being a regular at TV chat shows on elections. The reader, though, will rue the lack of insight despite the abundance of resources at his group’s disposal. Or maybe the worthlessness was because of that.