The Crown Prince, the Gladiator and the Hope: Battle for Change

Introduction

Before I embark on my journey through Elections 2014 with you, I would like to quote from Anatole Kaletsky’s Capitalism 4.0 : The Birth of a New Economy : ‘The great insight of Adam Smith was that greed, euphemistically described as self-interest, is the creative force that constantly drives humanity to improve the material world. Greed is what gives impetus to the arrow of progress – and this is true not only of economics … In politics, Machiavelli described the accumulation of worldly glory as the motivating principle that drives leaders to undertake great enterprises and do great things on behalf of their fellow citizens and not just themselves.’

In the end, if the media is to be believed, the elections in May 2014 boiled down to one individual. An individual whose sole motivating principle was the accumulation of ‘worldly glory’. In effect, that seemed to have been the underlying theme of the elections which have been described variously as historic and game-changing. This individual was none other than the current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. Modi had undertaken the ‘great enterprise’ to arrive striding like a colossus on the pavements of Rajpath leading to the South Block. Those who know him and have had a chance to interact with him can vouch for his inner drive, his passion to leave his mark on the political landscape of India and, to his credit, he has never hidden his ambition. He firmly believed that he was destined to do great things.

In a country like ours where ambition is generally trashed, he was quite brazen about it. His biographers have written that even when he was a ‘nobody’, a mere swayamsevak, a party worker, an office-bearer of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in a remote corner of Gujarat, he dreamed of rewriting the destiny of India. Perhaps, he was preparing for this glory long before anyone had even given him a thought. In the history of independent India, no other leader was so prepared for this great enterprise as he was, not even the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the obvious choice of millions of Indians as the first prime minister from a galaxy of leaders. There was so much political talent available that any leader could have easily skippered the boat of India, but Nehru was the obvious choice as he was the most charismatic and the most popular. It was incidental that Gandhiji was fond of him. After him, Lal Bahadur Shastri assumed the mantle of leading the nation although he would have been happier to work under any prime minister. He was too humble a man to harbour any prime ministerial aspirations.

After Shastri’s demise, Indira Gandhi was chosen by the Congress party to spearhead the party and lead the country. She was not the popular choice by any means. In fact, at one time, she was seriously considering settling down in England to lead a quiet life, but destiny willed otherwise and Shastriji’s sudden death gave her an opportunity to show that she was as Machiavellian as the protagonist of the book, The Prince. Though when she became the prime minister she wasn’t as much a rookie as was her son, Rajiv Gandhi, two decades later, there is no denying that both were the products of historical accidents.

Morarji Desai was the first occupant of the chair of the prime minister who had the ambition and had also done his homework for the job which he had been seeking since Nehru’s time. Morarjibhai, as he was popularly called, was the claimant for the top post after Nehru’s death. But those were different times and, in an old world dominated by the left and socialists, it was impossible to think of India’s prime minister as being an advocate of market economy. He challenged Mrs Gandhi and fought the elections but lost badly. Is it a cosmic coincidence that, like Modi, Morarjibhai also hailed from Gujarat? Eventually, he did go on to fulfil his ambition when Mrs Gandhi was toppled by democratic means in 1977.

Charan Singh was another one who yearned for that seat and was taken unawares when he unexpectedly achieved his goal, as was the case with Chandra Shekhar. Although both gentlemen were bright politicians with great confidence and political savvy, they lacked patience and perseverance. Their burning desire and unbridled ambition became fatal flaws which tripped their claims to greatness.

V.P. Singh had the acumen and the stature. He earned his charisma and popularity and worked to prepare himself well. However, his problem was that he was too clever by half and lacked the required organizational backing. He exposed himself too soon and instantly lost the goodwill of his friends and people at large. He is the tragic figure of Indian politics. Having given a decisive turn to Indian politics he ought to have continued for a longer tenure, but this was not to be.

Destiny was too kind to Narasimha Rao. His ascendance to the top post was pure fluke. After him, Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral could also be clubbed in the category of prime ministers by fluke.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee had waited a long time and he richly deserved the post. Although Vajpayee had the understanding and political richness to lead a nation as diverse as India, he failed to plan ahead. Even his fiercest opponent cannot say that he ever wore his ambition on his sleeve. With his simplicity and gentle demeanour, he seemed a misfit in his party. Although he may well have been preparing for the job and expected it to eventually come to him, he was canny enough to convey the impression that he simply accepted the responsibility as it came to him, not going out of his way to make any special preparations.

Manmohan Singh, like Narasimha Rao, was simply lucky. He was in the right place at the right time and in the right company. I always call him the miracle man of Indian politics. He was the unlikeliest person to be the prime minster but he occupied the chair the longest after Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

The question that comes to mind is how long will Modi – a man leading the first majority government in India in three decades – last in his chair? Those who know him will vouch that Modi likes nothing more than proving everyone, friends and foes alike, wrong as he has done in the past. He loves the element of surprise and plays it mind-bogglingly well. Modi is not the stereotypical Indian politician. He is the first twenty-first-century politician who plans exhaustively, executes to the last mile and micromanages every nuance; he understands the demands and sensibilities of modern India, a new India which is confident; he likes to call a spade a spade and does not suffer from any complex. There is nothing random about Modi.

What a journey he has traversed! In 2001, when he was sent to Gujarat, nobody had thought that he would one day end up as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) man of destiny. It was the time of Vajpayee and Advani. Modi was one of the many BJP leaders and chief ministers. He waited for his opportunities and exploited them to the hilt.

The 2002 Gujarat riots could have sunk the fate of many hardened politicians, but Modi used them to his advantage, turned it into an issue of Gujarati nationalism and emerged as the torch-bearer of the majority community. Sonia called him the ‘merchant of death’. He was labelled a ‘mass murderer’, a ‘fanatic’ and a ‘fascist’, but all this eventually worked to his benefit and earned him strong political dividends.

After the 2007 Gujarat elections, he realized the limits of his image as a Hindu icon. He carefully changed tack and shrewdly mixed Hindutva with development. It was around this time that the speculation about his ambition to become the prime minister gained currency. ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ showcased him as a man driven by the idea of development. Several top businessmen were paraded before the media singing paeans to Modi. He was hailed as the new messiah of development, a no-nonsense man, a man who meant business and incorruptible to boot. Those who happened to interact with Gujarat’s senior bureaucrats at that time can tell many tales about how businessmen were gently nudged to praise Modi. Many top industrialists were heard saying that Modi had the potential to lead the country. These murmurs gradually grew louder around the parliamentary elections in 2009. L.K. Advani, his mentor, was the choice of the RSS and the BJP as the prime ministerial candidate, but leaders like Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie openly advocated Modi’s potential as PM.

In the 2009 parliamentary elections, Modi kept his ambition well hidden. He knew that the middle class was happy with Manmohan Singh. The economy was doing well despite a setback in 2008. A generational shift was to happen in his own party when the senior leaders of the party floundered in the 2009 elections and it was felt that they were too old to lead; Nitin Gadkari was brought in as party president. He was a greenhorn in Delhi politics but was the blue-eyed boy of the RSS. Arun Jaitley was given charge of the Rajya Sabha and Sushma Swaraj was made the leader in the Lok Sabha. The new generation formally took over from Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. Now the search for the top leader began. There were many likely candidates, but Modi was miles ahead of the rest in terms of his accomplishments.

His victory in the 2012 Gujarat assembly elections sealed the issue. He became the only BJP leader who had won a state thrice in a row. The only thing that needed validation was whether he had the charisma and draw outside Gujarat as well. He took his first step at the party’s meet in Goa in June 2013. Despite serious objections from Advani and his group, he was crowned the chief of the campaign committee for the parliamentary elections. His alliance with party president Rajnath Singh and the then chief minister of Goa and present defence minister, Manohar Parrikar, proved too formidable for the other aspirants to overcome. His popularity in his own party was breaking all barriers. His anointment as the top gun was a mere formality in the month of September.

Modi heralded his arrival on the national scene with his speech in SRCC, Sri Ram College of Commerce, in Delhi, on 6 February 2013. He followed it up with an address to women entrepreneurs in FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) in Kolkata on 9 April 2013. Then came an address in Fergusson College, Pune, in July 2013. His team ensured that the events were broadcast live by all TV news channels. The rest, as they say, is history. From that point, his every sortie was covered live by news channels. He created headlines. Discussions and debates in TV studios ensued. He monopolized the news and the views until Arvind Kejriwal and his team upset his applecart by winning twenty-eight seats in the assembly elections in Delhi in December 2013.

The way Modi’s team captured the media space is legendary. No other politician was covered so thoroughly, so persistently and so overwhelmingly. He took over all the prime space available and was seen beaming down from billboards at every strategic location across India. Money was never a constraint. His team always used the best available vehicle of communication and transportation. However, he saved his best for the social media. He was both the king and the consumer. I don’t know whether he has read Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, which is all about the Internet world and software, about how new technology is creating waves, reaching new frontiers, capturing mind space, disrupting old worlds and shaping new ones, but he perfected the art of utilizing the new technology in making new stakeholders and collaborators in democracy. Long before Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp became a rage, Friedman had written: ‘[This force gave] newfound power [to] individuals and communities to send up, out and around their own products and ideas, often for free, rather than just passively downloading them from commercial enterprises or traditional hierarchies [thereby] reshaping the flow of creativity, innovation, political mobilization, and information gathering and dissemination.’¹ In conclusion he said that the communication technology has made ‘audiences into participants’. Modi used this principle during the 2014 elections in India. He turned mass audience into participants and this was the main reason for the massive surge in voter turnout.

The use of technology is not new for the BJP. The party has always been a pioneer in this respect. I remember Pramod Mahajan, BJP’s powerful leader, who was the first amongst politicians to flaunt mobile phones. It was because of his initiative that the latest technology was used massively during the 2004 elections. For the first time, India saw the usage of bulk SMS and recorded phone calls from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, soliciting the votes of the common people directly from them. However, the way Modi and his team used technology to discredit their opponents and spread their messages was frighteningly devastating, thorough and ruthless.

None of this would have been possible without the sustained use of a massive infrastructure and voluminous manpower. According to one source in Modi’s team, he had begun planning for this campaign four years ago and had begun assembling his team since then. The best brains and latest technologies were hired. He supervised every minute detail. This required an enormous amount of money, and Modi did not hesitate to ally himself with the most powerful, albeit controversial, corporate houses for funds. He ignored all innuendoes and criticism. He was out for the kill and willing to pay any price. Victory was the only goal he had in mind and that he would brook no compromises.

His principal opponent, Rahul Gandhi, did not realize the power and reach of technology and media and lagged miles behind. Fareed Zakaria writes in his book, The Post American World: ‘… revolution in information technology … now brings us news from around the world instantly, vividly, and continuously.’ He adds: ‘The immediacy of the images and intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every weather disturbance is the storm of the decade. Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS.’ Rahul and his team should have paid heed to this from the moment TV channels began hounding the Manmohan Singh government on issues of corruption. He failed to do so, and Modi capitalized in a big way on this negligence. Thanks to TV channels, every scam was blown out of proportion and, instead of dealing with the mounting crises and criticisms, Congress leaders were busy shooting the messenger.

Rahul failed to realize the power of marketing and brand-making as well. He relied solely on the traditional brand-building tools of his inherited legacy. An aggressive Modi sneered at Rahul’s silver spoon and sold the idea that unlike the heir apparent, he (Modi) was the man for the moment – decisive and a man of action. He also marketed himself as the man who had turned Gujarat into a developed state and could therefore repeat this miracle at the Centre. He neither mentioned Hindutva throughout his campaign nor showed any inclination to endorse it openly, knowing fully well that although the middle class was disillusioned with Congress’s misrule, lack of leadership and policy paralysis, Hindutva could not be sold as an answer. Instead of Hindutva, he sold the idea of nationalism.

According to Zakaria: ‘As economic fortunes rise, so does nationalism. This is understandable. Imagine that you lived in a country that had been poor and unstable for centuries. And then, finally, things turn and your nation is on the rise. You would be proud and anxious to be seen. This desire for recognition and respect is surging throughout the world. It may seem paradoxical that globalization and economic modernization are breeding political nationalism.’²

From 2004, India’s GDP (gross domestic product) grew at a fair clip of 9 per cent per annum and India became the second fastest- growing economy in the world after China. People around the world speculated that India would soon emerge as a global superpower, but suddenly India’s economy got a rude shock when the growth process slowed. People began losing their jobs and unemployment rose; companies started going bust; revenues shrank. It looked like India’s growth story was a bubble that was about to burst prematurely. A generation’s dream seemed to be shattering and aspirations were turning into nightmares. The leaders, however, seemed aloof, distracted, clueless and paralysed. Society felt adrift and leaderless. New technology created a common ‘shared perception’ of helplessness and despair. A virtual community rebelled in the digital world and leaders of the virtual world galvanized people in the real world which finally translated its anger into votes. They went on to punish those who let them down, let their nation down.

Modi is the first twenty-first-century politician because unlike his predecessors he used technology to an extent not seen before, exploited the power of the electronic media to build a consensus in his favour, relied heavily on marketing strategies and, during the elections, sold himself as a product that was reliable, bankable and time-tested. Unlike earlier, twenty-first-century India does not thrive in chaos. It, in fact, shuns chaos. Modi was best prepared for the elections. He was ready for all eventualities, his every move was carefully weighed and every decision was supported by hard facts and empirical data. If he had the feedback that something was not working, he immediately discarded it, like the famous ‘chai pe charcha’, an idea that was initially deemed revolutionary, but which he abandoned after responses from the first three cities were not encouraging.

In contrast, Rahul Gandhi was most ill-prepared. He was the defender. He had the government machinery at his disposal but he never looked at ease with the responsibility. He was always at war with himself. He could not decide when he had to defend and when he had to attack. His sister Priyanka was more clear-headed. As she walked into Amethi she effortlessly stole the limelight from her brother. She was unsparing of Modi and responded to his jibes with the same vigour. When Modi said she was like her daughter, she reacted sharply by saying that nobody could replace her father. Modi did not know how to react. It is true that Rahul had the most difficult task in the history of his party. He had to defend a government which was dubbed the most corrupt since Independence and which had lost all credibility in the eyes of people. Media was enamoured of Modi. Its hostility towards Rahul Gandhi was starkly evident. Social media had torn him as well as his party apart. He was called Pappu, a simpleton, good for nothing. But his undoing was that when Modi was moving like a gladiator, he was behaving like a crown prince.

To win this battle Rahul Gandhi had to show twice the willpower that Modi displayed. But he hardly had the will to engage him in any fight. His biggest problem was not that he was not suited to counter the most lethal of the warriors he faced; his problem was that he did not seem to be in a battle of life and death. He lacked the killer instinct. He had already conceded defeat.

It is this temperament of Rahul Gandhi which made Modi appear visionary and eventually gave his electoral victory the sheen of grandeur. Rahul Gandhi did not quite realize the importance of this epic battle. This battle was not simply a battle for the survival of a government, it was a battle to save the values so dear to his great-grandfather, which were the reason for the existence of this country; it was to save all that had been earned from the freedom struggle.

History is witness to the fact that the RSS has opposed everything for which Mahatma Gandhi and his followers stood. The RSS never took part in the freedom movement. They hated Gandhi and his ideals – the same Gandhi whom the RSS and Modi now swear by. This was the battle for which RSS had been preparing since 1925. In Modi, they had their most battle-hardened general. However, the Congress’s approach to the BJP blitz was desultory as the party seemed to have lost its sense of history over a period of time. It is no longer a party which remembers that it has a cherished past. Modi used every tool he could find to uproot the very foundation of that Nehruvian consensus. He very aggressively adopted Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

The resurrection of Patel on the eve of the election was no coincidence. In fact, it was part of a bigger game plan to dwarf Nehru and show him as a villain to the new Internet-savvy generation, as the reason for everything that is wrong with the country. The idea was to attack the very root of the Congress party’s existence. In the history of Indian elections no other prime ministerial candidate has ever led such a personalized and vitriolic assault on his/her opponent. Modi taunted Sonia’s illness, called Rahul names. He broke the unwritten convention which decreed that top leaders avoid campaigning against each other in their respective constituencies by doing so in Amethi in the last days of electioneering. It is true that Modi converted this electoral battle into a presidential one but it was not new experience for the Indian voters. Many decades ago, Indira Gandhi gave a clarion call in 1971 when she said, ‘They say Indira hatao, I say, Garibi hatao.’ (The opposition says ‘remove Indira’, I say ‘remove poverty’). That election was virtually a referendum on Indira Gandhi.

I don’t agree with the thesis that it was a clever move by Modi to ask voters to vote for him instead of his party or candidates and that is what got a landslide victory for the party. This country has always given a decisive mandate if it made up its mind to teach a lesson to its rulers. In 1977, the anti-Congress wave was so intense that both Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay lost their mandates. Similarly, history repeated itself in 1980 when the people of India decided to reinstate Indira Gandhi. And again in 1984 and 1989. This election was a verdict for change. This was a verdict to teach the Congress a lesson. Modi was the only national alternative. It is to his credit that he shrewdly exploited the situation to his advantage. It seemed as if the pitch was made for batting against an opposition with a weak bowling attack, but the batsman still had to score runs. Modi was credited for the fact that he did not play a rash shot and had the patience to stay on until the end.

Yes, the Manmohan Singh government was the most corrupt government, at least in public perception, but his government had a lot more to sell and market to the viewers and voters if they knew how to. In fact, this government should go down in history as the one which was in the real sense a welfare government despite having been accused of promoting crony capitalism. Manmohan Singh should be credited for dealing with the basics of a civilized society:

It was the Manmohan Singh government that brought in the legislation for Right to Information (RTI) that created a movement against corruption at the grass-roots level, leading to the Anna movement which, tragically, began the process of the fall of the UPA government.

It was the Manmohan Singh government that brought the Right to Education, Kapil Sibal’s dream project as the human resource development minister. Under this law it was mandatory to send every child to school.

It was the Manmohan Singh government that brought legislation for the Food Security Bill which was to ensure that nobody would sleep on an empty stomach. This was perhaps the most ambitious welfare project launched by any government since Independence. The opposition created a huge fuss and corporate houses and economists raised a hue and cry that a 1.25-lakh-crore-rupee subsidy would prove to be the nemesis for the growing economy at a time when it was facing global recession.

It was the Manmohan Singh government which should be credited for the employment guarantee scheme originally called NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) which was later renamed MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). This scheme guarantees 100 days of employment per year at a minimum wage to the rural poor. Manmohan Singh’s success in the 2009 elections and Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy’s return to power in Andhra Pradesh was in large part due to this scheme. This also helped in slowing down migration from rural Bihar and UP to other parts of the country.

It was his government that brought the much needed Land Acquisition Bill to stop the rampant land grabbing by the land mafia in the name of industrialization and urbanization. His government made it incumbent on the officials to take the approval of 70–80 per cent of the landowners before being able to acquire any land.

All these measures are fundamental to a transparent democracy responsible for the welfare of the people. That a government which seemed to be committed and tried to provide the basic needs of the society like food, education, land, employment and transparency in governance was thrown out with such a decisive mandate speaks volumes about the ineptness of those who had the responsibility to lead the campaign and communicate with the people. Modi’s success lay in his mastery over the art of communication. He was direct and simple. He succeeded in establishing a connection with the masses.

Rahul and his team had everything at their disposal, including an entire government to serve him, but his inability to communicate with the people, his failure to market the government’s initiative to uplift the lives of the common man proved to be the major undoing of his election campaign. Let us not forget that despite a major global economic crisis and slowing down of our own economy, the Manmohan Singh government managed to carry the GDP growth to over 4 per cent, and even during the worst crisis India was the second fastest-growing economy in the world after China.

In my opinion, Rahul was ridden by guilt of the serious corruption charges against his party colleagues. It created a moral crisis within him and in the party. They lost their self-confidence and were left with no moral courage to counter Modi with their government’s achievements. It required an exceptional talent to showcase the good work done by his government. It required astute leadership to turn the focus away from corruption like Modi did in his earlier years to turn attention away from riots to development; Rahul had everything but leadership during these elections. Modi and his team’s brazenness, on the other hand, sold the moderate success of Gujarat’s economic development as if it was a stellar growth model.

These elections also proved to be the undoing of a hope which created the original handicap for Rahul and his team. I am talking about Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which, rather daringly, decided to contest more than 400 seats across India and ended up with only four seats, losing the deposits in most of the constituencies. This hope was so enormous that the only time when Modi and his team got nervous and seemed unsure of the grand target which they had set for themselves, was when Arvind and his team won twenty-eight seats in Delhi and stopped the BJP’s march in the capital. It was on 8 December 2013 that an unprecedented optimism was created in Indian political circles. It was dubbed by some, including The Times of India, a revolution. It was a mind-blowing phenomenon, a never-heard-of situation. A party that had no history in politics or resources or infrastructure had broken new boundaries, broken the myth that politics is the game of moneyed men, manipulative men and musclemen, that it is beyond the reach of a common man, the aam aadmi.

AAP was just a year-old entity. It had the bandwidth of a few kilometres of Delhi but its impact was felt across the nation. Overnight, AAP and Arvind Kejriwal won over many talented people. A strong feeling everywhere was that they had done the unthinkable and they could be the new beacon of hope for the new India, the aspirational India, the confident India; an India, sick and tired of traditional politics, was craving clean politics and a corruption-free society. For more than a month, only AAP and Arvind were on the front page of all newspapers and occupied all TV headlines. Arvind had upstaged Modi from the news and media spaces. Before this, it had been Modi everywhere. His juggernaut had seemed unstoppable. Ever since Modi had jumped onto the Lok Sabha election wagon he had had a smooth run but now there was a serious roadblock. The general perception was that if AAP was to contest elections it could easily win fifty to sixty Lok Sabha seats which could have dashed the dream of a man who had been planning for so long. This had Modi worried.

Up until then nobody seemed to have an idea as to how many seats the BJP would win. The general calculation was that the Modi-led BJP might get around 230 seats, and with the help of his old allies, Modi could manage to get to the PM’s seat. However, if the AAP were to win fifty seats, it would be impossible for the BJP to cross the 200 mark and in that scenario, in a coalition era, a consensus around Modi would be impossible. Modi would be left with no option but to leave the ground for someone more acceptable as prime minister.

As luck would have it, Arvind scored a self-goal and resigned from the post of chief minister. Modi was too sharp to miss the opportunity posed by this resignation; he unleashed his entire machinery to prove that Arvind was a ‘bhagoda’, a deserter, who shirked his responsibility, a man who could not be trusted with serious governance, a non-performer. He was branded good only for agitations, lacking the mettle, fibre and steel to rule, administer and make decisions. Modi was cunning enough to connect with the masses, especially with the middle class. He succeeded in conveying the message that Arvind might be a good human being but to run a country as vast and as diverse as India one needs to be visionary, strong and be able to face any situation and stand firm in the face of any adversity.

Before Arvind’s resignation, the AAP was considered to be a viable alternative to run the country despite not having an all-India organization. However, with his impulsive decision to abdicate, people had reconciled to Modi being the only agent of change. The AAP committed another fatal error when Arvind decided to contest against Modi from Varanasi. His resignation proved to be too costly and dashed the common man’s hopes. Now people were left with only one choice and that was Modi and the BJP. In the larger public perception, Arvind stood for the change they had craved for the last three years. The writing on the wall was stark and clear. The AAP’s leadership had failed to read that. Finally, despite the tremendous goodwill it once enjoyed, AAP lost all seven seats in its own bastion, Delhi. I was also one of those who contested from Delhi and I came second to Harsh Vardhan in Chandni Chowk.

It’s such a quirk of fate that when I conceived this book in the month of August 2013, I was a working journalist with twenty-two years of experience and was the managing editor of IBN7 – a TV channel of great repute. But by the time I finished the book, I was fully submerged into politics. I had crossed over from the field of reporting to the to-be-reported-about. I was an active member of the Aam Aadmi Party. Initially I was designated as the national spokesperson and special invitee on day-to-day matters to its highest decision-making body, the Political Affairs Committee (the PAC). Later, after the elections, I was given the responsibility of the Delhi unit of the party.