Lok Sabha 2024 | From Obscurity to Highway Hero

Under Nitin Gadkari, India has seen more than 30 km of world class highways being built every day.

When Nitin Gadkari announced that he will initiate steps to build India’s first modern expressway where travellers would have to pay a substantial amount as toll, he was greeted with guffaws and sniggers.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

(This is the 16th in a series of insightful reports from the ground, titled The Race From India to Bharat. The author travels all across India as 960 million voters get ready to celebrate the largest festival of democracy in the world: the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. What do ordinary Indians think and feel about the past, present, and future of India? Are they convinced that the old fault lines are healing?)

(Read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here, part seven here, part eight here, part nine here, part 10 here, part 11 here, part 12 here, part 13 here, part 14 here, and part 15 here.)

At a tea stall on the road towards Nagaon in Assam, a group of men discuss how it was "torture" to travel from Guwahati towards Nogaon because of terrible roads. Today, it is a smooth expressway where our taxi glides effortlessly.

Early morning in Coimbatore, the taxi driver Murugan smiles when I ask him how long it will take to reach Kanyakumari – roughly 560 km away. In the event, it takes us a shade more than six and a half hours.

Tired after relentless travelling, writing and eating in dhabas, I crave home-cooked food. I call up the house help and request her to make lunch. I estimated it would take about eight hours to reach home from Lucknow. Thanks to two expressways, the journey is completed in just about six hours.

Across the length and breadth of India, the most talked-about person after Narendra Modi is Nitin Gadkari, the Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, or the Highway Hero of India.

Soon after my car clears the toll plaza after a FASTag blink on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, I stop to grab a vada pav. I had spent two days in Mumbai and had not eaten one. Sacrilege by Mumbai standards. Having eaten at the food court many times in the past, I vaguely remember the face behind the counter.

Since it is afternoon on a Monday, the crowds are thin. The balding man says he has been sitting at the counter for more than 20 years.

Back in 1995, the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance had scripted history by ending the Congress hegemony and winning the Assembly elections in Maharashtra.

A young and enthusiastic BJP leader from Nagpur with a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) background was made surface transport minister of the state with the blessings of the “remote control” Balasaheb Thackeray. Hardly anyone had heard of Nitin Gadkari.

Back then, a journey between Pune and Mumbai would often be a nightmare because of narrow roads and frequent vehicle breakdowns on the picturesque Lonavla-Khandala hilly stretch.

Yet, when Nitin Gadkari announced that he would initiate steps to build India’s first modern expressway where travellers would have to pay a substantial amount as a toll, he was greeted with guffaws and sniggers.

Most “analysts” claimed that building an expressway through the ghats of Khandala was a foolhardy exercise. Many more claimed that no sensible and sane traveller would pay the high toll fees proposed by Gadkari.

Quite a few dubbed him as a maverick, or even a daydreaming lunatic. But the expressway was built and has since been a huge hit with travellers despite numerous accidents.

By the time the Pune-Mumbai expressway was fully operational, Nitin Gadkari was no longer the minister as the alliance had lost the Assembly elections in 1999. He almost slipped back into a kind of obscurity.

At the national level, the man who was being celebrated for building a series of modern highways, including the Golden Quadrilateral, was a retired Major General of the Indian Army called BC Khanduri. The surface transport minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime, Khanduri acquired global fame for building world-class highways in India at a pace that was unheard of. Since then, the BJP has laid claim to being the party that focuses on infrastructure development.

Gadkari was not someone who would be satisfied sinking into obscurity. He remained an active leader and gained a national stature post-2004 as the Vajpayee era came to an end and the LK Advani era never really materialised as the BJP lost two successive Lok Sabha elections in 2004 and 2009.

A confused and seemingly lost BJP elevated Gadkari to the party president position in 2009 perhaps as an effort to revitalise the base with new ideas and energy.

Ironically, the TV channels and anchors, who now worship at the altar of Narendra Modi and treat the BJP with needless reverence, went hammer and tongs after Gadkari in 2010 over allegations of corruption. The “campaign” against Gadkari was ruthless.

But destiny intervened and a series of scams starting with the Commonwealth Games in 2010 forced the media to focus on the shenanigans of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime led by the hapless Dr Manmohan Singh.

Gadkari, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh, and even Shivraj Singh Chouhan were touted as leaders who would replace Advani. Of the lot, Gadkari preferred to focus on his home state Maharashtra. But destiny intervened again – and Narendra Modi became the BJP PM candidate. The BJP won and also won Assembly elections in Maharashtra in 2014.

Devendra Phadnavis, junior to Gadkari, was chosen to be the chief minister. Gadkari was disappointed but focused on infrastructure development.

Under him, India has seen more than 30 km of world-class highways being built every day. Something Indians could not even dream of in the past.

At a small but crowded restaurant serving mainly mutton curry and “Bhakri” (a millet roti) in Nagpur, people say the Maha Vikas Aghadi is putting up a formidable fight. But they smile, wink and say that even some Congress supporters are voting for Gadkari.

(Sutanu Guru is the Executive Director of the CVoter Foundation. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)