2024: The Election That Surprised India
By Rajdeep Sardesai
HarperCollins, Rs 799.00, 560 pages

It has been barely four months since the elections results were announced, and Rajdeep Sardesai’s book on them is out, which is not surprising for journalists working with tight deadlines. With this, the veteran news anchor completes his trilogy that began with ‘2014: The Election That Changed India’ and ‘2019: How Modi Won India’. The three books put together offer a unique glimpse of governance and electioneering in the “Modi era”.

Unlike a majority of the news TV personalities, Sardesai had been doing field reporting for long before the advent of 24x7 broadcast journalism. He has covered elections during the print age, the electronic age and now the digital age. After covering three or four elections, many veterans develop a been-there-done-that attitude, but Sardesai remains as excited about the election coverage as he must have been in the late 1980s. He has also seen from the close quarters the uncertainties and coalition compulsions of the nineties. With the years of experience he has, he has been able to discern trends and patterns in the apparent chaos. Typical of his reporting background, his analysis is always to the point. Notably, it remains informed by the same values. In the latest book, Sardesai remains as frank and forthright as ever.

This book seeks to explain why the verdict was a surprise. It, therefore, begins not a few weeks before the announcement of the election schedule, but from where the previous book left off. In other words, it presents a brief history of Modi’s second term – including the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis and the farmer protests. Running parallel to these events is the narrative of Rahul Gandhi’s “Mohabbat ki Dukan”. The author comments upon the role of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and other central agencies. The state-level battles of those five years are also analysed in detail.

The book is structured around a set of questions. They are:

* Why did pollsters and pundits get the 2024 election forecasts so badly wrong?

* Why was the mainstream media narrative so one-sided?

* Why did the ‘char sau paar’ drumbeat for the Modi-led BJP not work on the ground?

* How did a Rahul Gandhi-led Congress stage a comeback?

* What changed so dramatically in the last five years?

* How does Team Modi-Shah operate?

* Was it really a free and fair election?

* What role did the enforcement agencies play?

* How did the battle for the states turn?

* Who really won and lost the 2024 election?

The answers were, well, blowing in the wind; some were obvious and others elusive. The author’s answers come from a variety of sources: some from insiders, some from his own analysis and some will be inferred by the reader.

As a chronicle of the five busy years and the dramatic elections at the end of them, the narrative here is unputdownable. Not everyone will agree with everything in it, which of course is the beauty of democracy. The book also captures the magic and the magnitude of elections in the world’s largest democracy.

PS: A bonus feature, as it were, is a chapter titled ‘Democracy Zinda Hai: Stories of Hope’. It includes brief biographical sketches of some unusual and some young candidates who were elected to the Lok Sabha this time. They are:  Kishori Lal Sharma, Dr C N Manjunath, Chandrashekhar Azad, Sanjna Jatav, Rajkumar Roat, Iqra Hasan, Geniben Thakor, Sheikh Abdul “Engineer” Rashid, Bimol Akoijam, and Awadhesh Pasi. Their backgrounds are different and so are their dreams, but taken together they add to the diversity and the potential of India’s politics.