Chai pe charcha: Team behind Modi wave who made it all happen

Inside a government office on Gandhinagar’s Infocity campus where a group of young, highly educated graduates from some of India’s most reputed institutes was working 24x7 for the nation’s cause, I spoke to four of them who had quit high-paying jobs to support the 2014 election campaign. They were glad they were part of the making of history – even a cynic would have been inspired to hear them speak. 

“We were not very happy with what we were doing in our corporate jobs. We wanted to do something more. So we came together,” starts off (Gaurav) Bhatele, who — along with his friends — is a member of what has now attained a cult status among election managers, a group named Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAG). It is a not-for-profit NGO launched by Modi’s Man Friday and former UN health official, 35-year-old Prashant Kishor. 

By the time CAG began to support the Modi campaign, it didn’t have the burden of having to hold forth on the Gujarati leader’s innocence over the riots — instead, having been exonerated by courts, Modi and his team had begun to talk of a witch-hunt by the Congress-led coalition using the federal probe agency. 

At an All India Congress Committee meeting in January 2014, senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar made a preposterous comment on Modi — that the BJP leader would never become the prime minister but could sell tea at an AICC meet. In the same month, Samajwadi Party’s Naresh Agarwal acerbically hinted that a person who once sold tea could not have a national perspective. Agarwal said: “If you make a constable the superintendent of police, he can never have a superintendent’s approach but will only have that of a constable,” referring to Modi’s prime ministerial ambitions. 

And so, the now legendary "Chai pe Charcha" campaign (chat over tea) was launched as an effort at ensuring poetic justice and to counter the insinuations by the rival politicians. Common Indian folk would get an opportunity to chat directly with Modi and convey their problems through video conferencing across thousands of street-side tea stalls all over India — from the metros to the villages and everywhere in between. It was BJP’s coup de main.

Reprinted with the publisher’s permission.