Meet the outspoken maverick who could lead India

Nitin Gadkari leans back into his sofa and takes a hard-earned slurp of his tea. India’s roads minister, one of its most popular and controversial cabinet members, has just done his 72nd rally in 13 days of campaigning for a state election in his native Maharashtra. He began the day in Mumbai, in the west, and ended it 430 miles (690km) eastwards in his hometown of Nagpur. It was a brutal schedule, more suited to his earlier years, he admits. But at 67, he knows a thing or two about endurance in Indian politics.

When he became the youngest ever leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2009, he was hailed as a rising star, only to be ousted four years later because of a tax scandal. Later cleared of wrongdoing, he rebuilt his reputation as a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, overseeing a huge expansion of India’s highways. Then he was suddenly removed from the BJP’s parliamentary board, its top decision-making body, in 2022 amid rumours of tensions with the prime minister.

Now he is one of the candidates to succeed Mr Modi. And his chances may have just improved with American prosecutors’ allegations against Gautam Adani, Mr Modi’s closest business ally. Even before those charges became public on November 20th, Mr Gadkari had raised his profile with several controversial public remarks in recent weeks. Some of those were widely seen as oblique criticism of Mr Modi. And in an interview with The Economist on November 18th, Mr Gadkari strikes a markedly different tone from that of the prime minister, who cultivates an image of semi-divine infallibility.

“No one is perfect and no one can claim that he is perfect,” says Mr Gadkari. The BJP lost its parliamentary majority in this year’s general election in part because the opposition promoted the idea (falsely, in his view) that Mr Modi wanted to change India’s secular constitution. But the BJP erred, too. It needed to communicate better and focus on development, not identity. “We need to establish a good atmosphere between the parties and between people who have different types of ideology.”

He also doubles down on his assertion, made in September, that “the biggest test of democracy is that the king tolerates the strongest opinion against him.” That was widely seen as referring to Mr Modi. “I’m not talking about any person or leader,” Mr Gadkari says, when asked about the remark. Still, he adds that tolerance and respect are integral to India’s political system. “It doesn’t mean that we are enemies if we are in opposition,” he says. “That is the culture of our democracy.”

Those and other remarks seem to distance him from Mr Modi’s Muslim-bashing campaign speeches and demonisation of India’s opposition. They also echo the leadership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu-nationalist group from which the BJP emerged. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, recently made plain his frustration with Mr Modi’s divisive oratory and aversion to advice or criticism.

Mr Modi’s position is not immediately under threat. Aged 74, he seems in good health and BJP officials have denied that the party’s rules require retirement at 75 (although it has ousted some veterans that way). Nor is Mr Gadkari the only potential successor. Opinion polls suggest that the frontrunner is Amit Shah, who is home minister, the BJP’s electoral strategist and Mr Modi’s confidant. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, usually ranks in second place, with Mr Gadkari third.

But Mr Modi’s successor will be decided by the upper ranks of the BJP and RSS, not by opinion polls. And many of them do not trust Mr Adityanath, who hails from a rival Hindu-nationalist group. He is also highly controversial among foreign governments and secular-minded Indians because of his own record of Islamophobic remarks and policies. Mr Shah, meanwhile, is so closely tied to Mr Modi (and has so many enemies) that he could well be sidelined as soon as the prime minister retires.

Both Mr Modi and Mr Shah have also been tainted by the general-election result. And on top of the Adani scandal, they face allegations that Indian officials were involved in the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada and the attempted murder of another in America (India denies all the Canadian allegations but is co-operating with the American investigation).

Mr Gadkari is untarnished by such problems. He is seen by foreign officials as the BJP’s moderate face and by business leaders as a champion of public-private partnerships in infrastructure. He is liked by some opposition leaders, which helps in coalition building. And his popularity in Maharashtra, including among Muslims, has helped the BJP keep control of Nagpur (whose national parliament seat he has held since 2014) and to win, with its allies, the recent state election there.

His other strength is his relationship with the RSS, which is headquartered in Nagpur. He joined it in the 1970s. Although married, which is forbidden for most full-time RSS workers, he still describes himself as a volunteer. “The RSS is my life’s conviction,” he says. It handpicked him as BJP leader in 2009, an appointment of which he is clearly still proud. It was, he says, “a big thing for me” that conveyed “tremendous respect and regard”. That support has not been unwavering: the RSS backed his removal from the post in 2013 (albeit reluctantly) and from the party’s parliamentary board in 2022. In the latter case, it was reported to have shared Mr Modi’s frustration with Mr Gadkari’s outspokenness and more moderate politics.

Since the election, however, Mr Gadkari appears to have found favour again as the RSS recalibrates its own political message. And he has done so without changing his maverick ways. In July he wrote a (widely leaked) letter to India’s finance minister asking her to lift a tax on insurance. In September he alleged that an opposition leader offered to make him prime minister if he defected before the election.

Asked if he wants the top job one day, Mr Gadkari gives the quintessential politician’s response. “I’m here, happy, I’m doing my work. I don’t have any aspiration or ambition to become prime minister,” he says. And if he was asked by his own party? “No one is going to ask me, so no question arises,” he says with a chuckle. Endurance is not the only key to Indian politics. A bit of media savvy helps, too. ■

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