At Narendra Modi event, students came to present reform ideas, told to vote out Congress

NEW DELHI: It was an event where people spoke all day. But it was mostly about the one person who sat listening till the end. Because while college students everywhere believe their ideas can change the world, it is unusual for a major politician to sit all day listening to nerdy presentations on traffic and waste water management.


Gujarat Chief Minister and BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi played listener, mentor and motivational speaker to 7,000 college students at an event that never quite managed to shake off the feeling that it was scripted by BJP or its supporters. The major speeches were delivered by BJP leaders Ram Jethmalani, Arun Jaitley, Modi and recent Modi ally Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party.

Meek presentations on judicial reforms were followed by thundering speeches exhorting students to throw out the ‘corrupt Congress government’ and vote BJP.

“Don’t let your backgrounds hold you back. Don’t worry that your parents are rich or poor. You need to believe in yourself, that’s all,” Modi said responding to questions from students in the course of a speech in which he discussed problem solving and how technology was key to many solutions he had implemented in Gujarat.

If the indoor event at New Delhi’s Thyagaraj Stadium was unusual for an Indian political convention and reminiscent more of a US presidential convention with its stadium setting, high-pitch anchoring (by Mandira Bedi) and modern audio visual props, the organisation behind the event is also similarly an unfamiliar beast on the Indian political landscape.

The event organizer, Citizens for Accountable Governance ( CAG) was founded in May. It comprises 60 young full-time workers who have all quit jobs, in some cases at reputable companies such as McKinsey, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and RP Goenka group. The organisation does not discuss its sources of funding. Rishabh Gupta, a 28-year-old IIM Calcutta graduate and formerly a commodities structurer at Deutsche Bank, says that all 60 of the group have been brought together by a desire to do something for the country ahead of the 2014 elections. All of them take an honorarium from the company but Gupta says he has taken a big pay cut to be able to do this work. Gupta says spreading awareness about the issues facing the country ahead of the election is the organisation’s key mission.

It resembles a volunteer political action group but all members work fulltime. The members are all outfitted in dark-blue kurtas but they are fabulously funded. For this event, which was the culmination of a nation-wide contest that ran for three months, 7,000 students were provided train travel and stay at Delhi hotels. Gupta says the group is able to attract funding because all the members used to work in corporations and have contacts that help them get funding.


At least some of the students who attended seemed surprised by the extent of political slant at the mega event. “We were told that big political names will listen to our ideas. But there were only BJP politicians. And they were not talking about the themes that we were presenting on. They were telling us to vote out Congress. It was more like a political rally, which is not what we came for,” said Shivendra Kumar, an engineering student from NIT Kurukshetra.

“We felt like we were puppets at a political comic show. They made us take some strange pledge and all,” said Sumaya, a humanities student from IIT Madras who uses one name. The event itself saw outsize representation from engineering and medical colleges, with few attending from reputed humanities colleges.