Rajdeep Sardesai’s book on a watershed general election is audaciously early

It was only a minute or two after he had left the official residence of Narendra Modi that an axe came crashing through Rajdeep Sardesai’s windscreen. A band of sword-wielding Hindu fanatics hauled him and his cameraman onto the road, asked whether they were Muslim and, when they said no, demanded they drop their trousers to prove it. That Sardesai is circumcised made this especially frightening. It also, he says wryly, forced him to review his trust in Mr Modi’s claim that, midway through the 2002 Gujarat riots, his administration was doing all it could to quell them.

The anecdote says a lot about Sardesai. Though best-known as a sharp-suited, rather shouty TV anchor, he is a reporter to his finger-tips, and has colourful stories to prove it. Few journalists have so successfully combined hard slogs across India with the more tedious business of cultivating netas and powerbrokers in Chanakyapuri. More than that, the story of his near-death in Gandhinagar illustrates his rather equivocal journalistic method.

He does not conclude, as many might, that Modi was complicit in the killing going on outside his door. He merely airs that possible explanation, considers the alternatives, and then, after suggesting there is probably a bit of truth to all of them, as is usually the case in Indian politics, he moves on. That deep knowledge and subtle method are well-matched in Sardesai’s splendid first book, an audaciously early history of one of the most momentous events in India’s recent history, the 15th Lok Sabha election.

Whether it has really changed India is, of course, too soon to say. But it was unprecedented. After the BJP’s washout in 2009, there were some who predicted the party was finished — it had no stars, its rath yatra had run out of road. Yet, in 2014, the BJP bagged 282 of its 350-odd contestable seats, to form India’s first non-Congress majority government. In setting out to explain that success, Sardesai starts with the obvious reason: Modi himself.

Having met him first in 1990, and kept up fairly regular communication with him ever since, Sardesai knows the prime minister better than most journalists. That lends force, and much delicious detail, to his portrait of the thrusting pracharak he first met, who laughed often, but never with his eyes. Sardesai also does a good job of balancing out two other manifestations of Modi: the development guru and the Hindu chauvinist. The former, he suggests, was born of a need to escape the blame heaped on the latter; but never quite displaced it. Yet Modi remains, even for Sardesai, an enigmatic figure. What drives him so manically — he addressed 437 rallies in a little over six months? To what does he owe his linguistic flair? What friendships does he have? Sardesai does not say.

What is clear is that the Modi wave, indeed the Modi candidacy, mainly reflected the haplessness of his opponents. I recall hearing the BJP leader speak at a rally in Meerut in 2009. He was brilliant, as usual, full of jokes and edgy bombast. But only a small crowd had gathered to hear him — far fewer than the 100,000 who had turned out to see actor Sanjay Dutt the previous day. But then followed the humiliating demise of the UPA government, in which Sardesai points especially to the giant corruption scams of 2010-11, the bungled response to the two-bit Gandhian Anna Hazare, the evaporation of whatever powers Manmohan Singh had had, and the low-growth, high-inflation economy he ended up presiding over. He also points, in passages that I suspect may have amused him quite a lot to write, to the spectacular ineffectiveness of Rahul Gandhi.

Like most journalists, Sardesai can find something good to say about the most knavish of the netas he mingles with. He is often tickled by and always slightly in awe of them. But he struggles with Rahul, who emerges from these pages as horribly spoilt and either not very clever, or not very good at politics, and in any event not terribly likeable. The image of Congress hacks lining up outside his Tughlaq Lane bungalow, on the princeling’s birthday, year and after year, with cards and cakes that Rahul is never there to receive, is memorably pathetic. The description of Rahul characterising migrant workers from UP as being forced to “go and beg in Mumbai” says everything you need to know about his failure to comprehend the mass aspiration and drive that are building India.

Modi and his campaign team, a hybrid of MBAs and swayamsevaks, did get that. To what extent he will fulfil the vast expectations he has raised remains, however, an open question. Sardesai is too canny to answer it; yet too shrewd not to suggest that the seeds of failure — the fate, let’s be honest, of almost all Indian governments — have already been sown. Modi has made a promising start, tightening up the administration and sowing fear in his ministers. Yet, it is hard to think he can maintain his autocratic grip indefinitely. And the economy is, though growing faster, still desperately weak. Modi will inevitably disappoint — and when he does, it must be hoped that Sardesai is standing by.

The reputation of high-end journalists has taken a bashing in recent years, over the Radia tapes and then allegations — justified, Sardesai suggests — that they rather lost their heads over Modi. But this fine book is a counterpoint to that. Anyone who wants to understand Indian politics, or thinks they do, should read it.

James Astill is political editor, The Economist and author of The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India