The Swaraj Aura

LATE ON A windy April afternoon, at a temple in a New Delhi locality, a bunch of women and a few men start gathering. One woman takes a tabla, while some others pick up some microphones, as they start singing kirtans. Bansuri Swaraj, their new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Lok Sabha candidate, is expected to arrive any moment. A while later, Swaraj—wearing a maroon chanderi sa­ree with a golden border—breezes in chanting “Jai Shri Ram”. The singing stops. “After 500 years, this is the first Ram Navami when our Ram Lalla is in the Ram Mandir,” she says.

She then briefly pauses for an elderly woman to take her seat, before con­tinuing. “I have decided not to ask anything from God. But I want to ask some­thing from you. I seek your blessings for victory and to be able to complete the task that I am here to do.” She is then welcomed with glittery scarlet odhnis (scarfs). A young woman from the crowd complains that once a candidate wins, they are never accessible to the common people in the constituency.

“I assure you that I will be accessible,” says Bansuri, before starting to sing a Ram bhajan while holding the microphone, as others chime in. Later, she shows no hurry, posing for photographs with anyone who wants them, lending a pa­tient ear to those who have something to say, and promises to be back to have tea with them soon. She has to get to her next public interaction.

Sitting in the back seat of her car, ready to take questions, Bansuri speaks of her childhood, her parents, her career and how she entered politics. She could barely count till hundred, she says, when she had uttered her first political slogan as a child—“kamal ke phoolon se bhar do peti, jeetegi Ambala ki beti (fill the box with lotus flowers, the winner will be Ambala’s daughter).” That was for her mother Sushma Swaraj— veteran BJP leader, Union minister and the first-ever chief minister of Delhi—when she contested the Ambala Assembly elec­tion in 1987. Bansuri completed her studies and started practising as a lawyer. Neither then, nor later, had she ever imagined that she will be following in her mother’s footsteps in politics.

“It was not on the horizon. I was happy being a law­yer.” Nearly four years after her mother’s death, she got a call saying BJP was expanding its legal cell. She joined the party as co-convener of the legal cell. Later, she was made secretary of the Delhi BJP. But, the big break came on March 2 this year, which was both unforeseen and challenging. Bansuri was watching news on television along with her father that evening, when her name was announced as the BJP candidate from the high-profile New Delhi seat.

“I did not say anything. I looked at my father and tried to touch his feet but he said daughters aren’t supposed to do that and wished me luck. I went to my mother’s portrait and then to pay obeisance before the idols of gods in our house,” she recalls. That night, she was to attend a post-dinner talk on ‘UCC: Ne­cessity for Gender Justice, Equality and Fraternity’, organised at JNU by ABVP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) student wing. Bansuri wanted to ensure that she kept her promise to be there. It was after all in ABVP as a student that she had experienced her first stint in politics. That night in JNU turned out to be her first political speech, just hours after having been named as a candi­date for the Lok Sabha election. For her, it was like life having come full circle.

At 40, life has also taken a new turn for her. Like her mother in her silver-tongued oratory, in her gait, or in the way she wears a saree, Bansuri has stepped into the rough and tumble of her first elec­tion with ease. Describing Sushma Swaraj as the architect of her personality, she says she has imbibed her values, hard work and ethics. “Not the one I am wearing today, but I do wear my mother’s sarees quite often,” she says, smiling.

What would have been her mother’s words of advice for her? Without batting an eyelid, Bansuri replies, “She would have just asked me to be fearless and unstop­pable. Do everything that I had to do and leave the rest in Krishna’s hands. That’s exactly how she was.” Bansuri is trying to hold on to that counsel. She mingles with people, getting off the dais, speaking and interacting, and making herself one among them. And, she seems to be enjoying it all in her hometown.

“If you have called me your beti, then you cannot let me go empty-handed. I promise that if I win, as an MP, I will be among you to address your problems. I will never let you down,” she says addressing a small public meeting at Bhagat Singh Park in the Sant Nagar area, after visiting a gurdwara nearby. Showered with rose petals, she greets her hosts before getting off the dais. Wearing casual black shoes, she crosses the red carpet, step­ping beyond it onto the muddy ground, as she appeals for votes to make Narendra Modi the prime minister for a third term, while reeling out the Union government’s social welfare schemes, poli­cies over the last 10 years and promises kept. Walking between rows of chairs, she puts the mic in front of the audience, asking them to complete the slogan “ab ki baar?”, and they respond, “Modi sarkar”.

“I have been told that my mother got a post office built here,” she says. In a place which has refugees from Bangladesh and Pakistan, while narrating stories of Partition she has heard from her grandfather, she says that a promise from 1947 has been met in 2024 in the form of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which grants Indian citizenship to religious minorities— Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians—from neighbouring Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

She brings in a sprinkling of Punjabi, describing herself as a Delhi girl, as she speaks mostly in flawless Hindi, articulate like her mother, who had even picked up Kannada and had given a speech in the language after being pitted against Congress leader Sonia Gandhi in Karnataka’s Bellary in the 1999 General Elec­tion. Though Swaraj lost the election in the Congress bastion, it became one of her most unforgettable electoral battles.

Bansuri faces a formidable opponent in Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) Somnath Bharti, a lawyer like her, but who, unlike her, has already won three polls in the Delhi Assembly elections, from the Malviya Nagar seat, in New Delhi. “I am like a horse wearing blinkers. I am only concentrating on my campaign. It has been a very positive one and I have not said a single word which is derogatory against my opponent,” she says. Bansuri has her reasons not to be ruffled by Bharti’s candidature. Even in 2019, a year before Kejriwal won a second term, BJP had won all seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi. BJP’s Meenakshi Lekhi, also a lawyer, had won a second consecutive term, with a margin of over 2.5 lakh votes, defeating Congress’ Ajay Maken, while AAP’s Brijesh Goyal came third. This time, Congress and AAP are contesting jointly as part of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc. In a bid to avert chances of any anti-in­cumbency against its MPs, BJP has replaced six of the seven sitting MPs for the upcoming polls, with actor-turned-politician Manoj Tiwari being the only one retained to con­test again from the North East Delhi seat.

Like all BJP candidates, Bansuri, too, is banking on the Modi report card. “It is stellar. He is the epitome of fulfilment of promises. Whatever was enunciated in the manifesto earlier, each and every promise has been fulfilled, she says citing the abrogation of Article 370, bringing in CAA, building the Ram temple, 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament and state Assemblies as some examples.

Describing BJP’s “Sankalp Patra” for the next five years as futur­istic and progressive, she says, “At its core, the mantra is to perform, reform and transform. There are some revolutionary pledges that have been enunciated, like infrastructure development, not just in physical terms but also those regarding digital and social infrastruc­ture. With the “Drone Didi” scheme, we are making a tectonic shift in the thinking of people, encouraging a social transformation by empowering women in rural India. We are talking about not just women empowerment but of women-led development.”

Asked what she, as an individual, plans to bring to the table, as she contests the election with Modi as the face of the party and the legacy of her mother, Bansuri says she would like to be the em­blem of youth-led and women-centric development. “If I become a member of Parliament, the first thing would be accessibility, to be available to my constituents. The second will be innova­tive out-of-the-box thinking for problem-solving. I am not afraid of exploring legal avenues for problem-solving.” Taking on the Arvind Kejriwal government for “denying” Delhiites the Ayush­man Bharat scheme, a health insurance cover of ₹5 lakh for its beneficiaries, she says that the scheme will be extended to every­one above 70 years of age, irrespective of their economic strata. She adds that if elected, she will do everything in her power to ensure that the scheme is extended to the people of Delhi, even if it means filing a case in court.

Like her mother Sushma Swaraj in her silver-tongued oratory, in her gait, or in the way she wears a saree, Bansuri has stepped into the rough and tumble of her first election with ease

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On the political fallout of Kejriwal being put behind bars in the Delhi liquor policy case, Bansuri said that the courts have held the arrest to be legal and so the people are not buying the AAP’s narrative of “fake sympathy”. “The people of Delhi are very smart. They know that they have been cheated. For a ₹100 crore kickback, the people have been deprived of over ₹2,000 crore. We may be po­litical opponents, but the courts of this country are independent. Kejriwal’s petition was not a bail application. It was actually a peti­tion filed to say that his arrest was illegal, which means that his plea needed the court to go into every aspect of the investigation and every piece of evidence. In a bail hearing, the courts don’t go into the merits of a case. The high court has said Kejriwal was involved in his personal capacity as convener of AAP in receiving kickbacks.”

Besides Kejriwal, his former deputy Manish Sisodia is also in jail in the alleged liquor scam. All the New Delhi Assembly constituen­cies— Karol Bagh, Patel Nagar, Moti Nagar, Delhi Cantonment, Ra­jinder Nagar, New Delhi, Kasturba Nagar, Malviya Nagar, RK Puram and Greater Kailash— are currently represented by AAP MLAs.

“Bansuri Swaraj has a good chance of winning. Who else is there? The AAP leaders are all being put in jail. Who will ad­dress our concerns?” says Varun, a property dealer, who was sitting amidst the crowd at her public meeting in Sant Nagar. However, a businessman in Karol Bagh, who did not wish to be named, disagreed, stating that he was not concerned with who the candidates are, but was happy with the work done by AAP in education, particularly in government schools, and in the health sector through mohalla clinics.

“She went to every shop in Khan Market when she came here a month ago. She has been coming here since her childhood. Ev­eryone here knows her,” says Harish Goyal, who runs a provision store in the area. Complaining about woes of traders over taxes, he, however, sees no alternative to BJP at the Centre. Stopping by at a pet shop in Khan Market, where she buys stuff for her Labrador “Laddoo”, Bansuri seeks votes for “Laddoo’s mother”.

Sources in Bansuri’s campaign team say she has started with small public meetings and will hit the trail in a bigger way as the May 25 elections in Delhi get closer. Her candidature is bound to bring BJP under attack over nepotism, a charge the party has used to target the opposition, particularly Congress. Bansuri, however, has countered the allegation saying she is in politics not because of her mother, but her own association with ABVP. “I joined ABVP in 2001. I got a chance to serve the party for a decade as a lawyer. This is my 17th year of practising law. I have been running my own chamber for a decade.”

What is the biggest challenge before her in her first electoral battle? She laughs and replies, “Sleep deprivation. My day begins at 7AM and I sleep at 2AM.” On a more serious note, she adds that there are no challenges, but just hard work and not thinking about the results. As it gets dark, Bansuri still has more on her schedule—a media interview and a late-night public meeting.

(For more pictures click here)

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Amita Shah