It's a racy, honest and at times shocking account of former BJP MP Manvendra Singh's unsuccessful bid to retain the Barmer lok Sabha seat in 2009, says Anuradha Dutt
Campaign Diary
Author: Manvendra Singh
Publisher: Penguin, Rs 499
If you’re in politics, you have to be married to it. Former BJP MP Manvendra Singh, a senior journalist before throwing his hat in the electoral ring over a decade ago, does not quite put it this way in Campaign Diary, his racy account of his early 2009 bid to retain the Barmer lok Sabha seat. But the inference is clear. You have to live politics, breathe politics, dream politics. If it’s not in the genes, it will never grip you. It is presumably in the author’s genes since his father is BJP stalwart Jaswant Singh, and his extended family includes politicians and erstwhile rulers of Rajasthan. What distinguishes this book is its amused approach, with the author, despite being in the thick of things, still managing to be detached about the hurly burly of campaigning in the desert State, with all its rigours, and humorously viewing the entire exercise as more than power play or a money-garnering gambit, as politics is commonly seen.
After having won the Barmer seat with a record margin in 2004, the young MP used his MPlADS (Member of Parliament local Area Development Scheme) funds judiciously to build community halls, provide for water, on other necessary public works. His deep emotive link with his constituency, through kinship and cultural affinity, ensured frequent interactions with people, breaking bread whenever required, and addressing their problems with sincerity. But as someone sagely observed, politics is also a sucker’s game, with the eventual outcome not dependent on inputs in terms of work accomplished. There are always other factors at work: Auguries and oracles, journalistic and political shenanigans, sabotage, religious diktats and intercessions, communal polarisation, feudal biases.
The writer names culprits, wryly touches on sabotage attempts, double-dealing and the rest of the murky manoeuvres that make politics a cloak-and-dagger game. He opts to take a slightly caustic look. Singh’s election re-bid triggers frantic attempts at arm-twisting by local cadre and wheeler-dealers, party hoppers and power brokers, all out to grab a slice of the cake, in the form of vehicles, money and favours. He does not give in. The ubiquitous mobile phones facilitate such pressure tactics. The unsavoury phenomenon of paid news surfaces, with at least one daily blanking out reportage of Singh’s campaigning after he refuses to capitulate to its demands for money. The irony is accentuated by his own background of journalism, before joining politics.
This, in fact, serves him well as a raconteur, for he writes engagingly of the hard grind of electioneering amid intense heat, evoking the desert flavours and survival stratagems with remarkable finesse. The sprawling sandy landscape comes alive, as he visits temples and Sufi dargahs, driving in his Scorpio to remote villages. He addresses meetings and pays respects to local deities, and maulvis and high priests. The monotony of the arid land is broken by desert vegetation, camels and gazelles, some resplendent structures and, above all, colourful attire, vibrant music and dance, and glimpses of astonishing feminine beauty. Safa-tying rituals are part of the ceremonial of politics in the State.
Almost everywhere, a feast awaits him, an obvious pitfall for the health of his digestive tract. For the most part, he sticks to home-cooked food but occasionally succumbs to the lure of delicious desert cuisine. These are vegetarian dishes, derived from hardy trees and plants. The tedium of incessant campaigning is relieved by bouts of good sleep, cooling baths, following English football matches and fleeting family get-togethers. Allusions to his wife, daughter and son, parents and other kin, including the erstwhile Jodhpur royals, indicate close family bonding. Someone’s plea that he should request Congress scion Rahul Gandhi, whom he knows well, not to campaign at a particular place is an amusing interlude.
After all the sweat and grind, he loses to his Congress rival by a margin of over a lakh of votes. The removal of two Assembly constituencies in the delimitation exercise perhaps weighed against him, with over a lakh of BJP supporters being transferred to the Jodhpur constituency. But he had his own rationale for contesting from Barmer: “My problem is that I feel so much a part of the desert, my heart and soul are there in those vast open spaces... The searing heat, and the endless hours on the road take a toll, but the relationships I had built up with people in my constituency were very precious to me. And sleeping on the desert sands under the stars at night is as cleansing an experience as there can be. I was born in Jodhpur, my roots are in Barmer and I have close relatives in Jaisalmer. I couldn’t imagine myself in politics anywhere else.”That says it all.
The reviewer is a political commentator