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On the occasion of the Narendra Modi government completing one year in office, Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com speaks to BJP president Amit Shah who is yin to Modi’s yang. Don’t miss it!
In the last 18 months, Amit Shah, 50, has proved that when it comes to national politics he is ferociously focused, shamelessly flexible to achieve his goals, and doesn’t believe in the hypocrisy that’s needed sometimes to keep everyone happy.
He is a man who wants to stretch the 24 hours in a day to 48.
In flat 18 months a regional leader has gone national, in what is an extraordinary political journey since becoming president of the Bharatiya Janata Party on July 9, 2014.
Amit Shah's ascension within the party was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s biggest gamble, and since then Shah has had a good run. He has travelled to all the states of India, and has met all the officer-bearers of his party in states and Union territories. After completing his Bharat Darshan he has fallen in love with India, once more.
He says about his new-found love for India, “Aapna desh jevo bijo desh nathi (there is no country like India).”
Amit Shah is a restless soul who makes others run around till the work is done. He is shrewd in his choices, which makes him an able and desirable No. 2 to Modi. He has a gambler’s instinct in selecting and promoting leaders in districts and state headquarters, and in the last one year has empowered some five dozen new leaders within his party all over India.
With Amitbhai as party head and Modi leading India, a new brand of politics has started, one that is aggressive, fast-paced and a brazen manifestation of electoral success. Shah-Modi's politics does not wait for tomorrow, their whole idea is to fill political spaces of all kinds right here, right now.
Only the land bill has put a speed-breaker to their 24x7 politics.
Amitbhai's political hobby is to seek new ideas and set goals. “Hu toh kaam ne shodhva jau evo mans chu (I am always searching for more and more responsibilities)”. He is ruthless in introducing a new line of political thinking. He believes that in politics no alliance is permanent like a marriage. There is no emotional bonding, it has to be a practical setting which needs to be reviewed from time to time. Ask the Shiv Sena and Akali Dal what that means.
In the last 11 months he has put together a database of 10 crore-plus Indians interested in the BJP, and claims that more than one-seventh of Indian voters have become BJP members through that wonder instrument called a mobile phone.
In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections the BJP won 282 seats and nearly 17.16 crore votes, with a 31 per cent vote share. Now, till April 2015, Shah and his highly motivated team, through their dedicated hard work, have enrolled 10.43 crore Indians as members – a number that is almost equal to the votes the Congress won in the last election. The Congress had won 10.7 crore votes, with a 19.3 pc vote share.
No wonder, less than a year after coming to power, the BJP claims to be the planet’s biggest political party in terms of membership.
Shah’s maddening drive to boost his party’s numbers is a matter for IIMs to study. How the mobile phone penetration in rural India has fired Modi-Shah’s imagination is there for all to see. The BJP’s membership drive, however controversial and questionable, was done systematically and will help Modi in 2019 when he goes back to the people to show off his and his government’s achievements.
In fact, the Modi-Shah duo is any day more mythical than the Trimurti that Arun Shourie talked about, of Modi-Shah-Jaitley who he said control the government and the party.
Shah is a backroom politician with a complete grasp of grassroots politics. He has a dangerous instinct to play with risky political ideas that can change the national discourse, but at the same time he is alert enough 24x7 to read the national mood correctly.
From May 2014 till now, like Modi, Amit Shah too has put in great effort to grow as a national leader. The success or failure of their strategy in Jammu and Kashmir and in growing the economy will take them to the next level. One will have to wait till then to judge if their shrewdness in statecraft is mere delusion or for real.
When Amitbhai was a regional leader in Gujarat he was not even made a cabinet member but now Modi’s Cabinet members queue up with awe at his residence on New Delhi’s Akbar Road. In Gandhinagar, he served as a deputy to Chief Minister Modi, in the home department and otherwise.
The BJP’s 2014 electoral success in Uttar Pradesh, when it won a humongous 71 seats out of 80, has changed Shah’s place in contemporary politics.
Shah, who arrived in New Delhi with the baggage of court cases trailing him, is fully aware of the extent of their sensitivity. His standard argument was that the cases against him were a result of the Congress’s communal politics. He chose to respond to all legal charges against him with real-time, hard political success.
His electoral strike rate since becoming party president is an impressive 3:1. Under the leadership of Modi and the management of Shah, the BJP has won Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand assembly elections, and lost disgracefully in Delhi.
Amitbhai is an outsider in New Delhi, like his mentor Modi. He dislikes going to South Delhi parties and scrupulously keeps off Lutyens Delhi’s incestuous social whirl. He continues to mostly fly economy class, and prefers, no, insists on eating his dinner with wife Sonal.
He now resides at 11 Akbar Road, but is practically on the move all the time. While in New Delhi he attends the 11 Ashok Road party office regularly. These days he speaks in Hindi even in Gujarat to establish that he has outgrown his days as a regional leader. He is putting in a feverish effort to develop a national image for himself. Like Modi, he sets his own terms all the time.
People close to him claim that in the last 11 months he has sharpened his man-management skills; he has slowed down a bit on his saffron dreams and is ready to change his sharp focus from the middle class to include sensitivity for the poor, too.
However, in the long run, it is unlikely that he will slow down on the saffron goals. But slight changes are already visible in his politics, like his growing penchant for OBC politics. He factors them into his political planning a lot, even though he will touch the feet of Brahmin scholars and social leaders elder to him every time he meets them. The beef ban and other similar actions are his brainchild, but he remains unapologetic.
So, there should be no confusion that Amitbhai is and will remain an RSS boy faithful to Nagpur. He will tweak his Hindutva ideals only to the extent to allow the development agenda to remain in focus.
He is not at all easy to work with if you are not the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mould or not well entrenched in “people’s politics played in an ethnic way." And if he puts his trust in you, there is limitless protection that Shah provides to his men. His preference is for people who are grassroots workers, who believe in all things desi and who are not building their political career inside TV studios. He abhors Indian intellectuals who are influenced by Western thought. Jaitley can be swayed by them, Modi can be impressed by them, but Amitbhai dislikes them. No two ways about it.
His approach to the media is questionable. In the last 11 months he has yet to develop a healthy system of interaction with the media at large.
In the last one year, as Shah was busy registering members for the BJP, his intervention in governance had been limited to participating in debates on nationalism, issues related to Hindutva, and rural development which includes policy matters like the land bill. Shah believes these are issues dear to his heart.
Shah differs from Modi and Jaitley in some ways in dealing with bureaucrats. As a political entity he wants to always be on top of the situation while dealing with sarkari babus.
Shah’s sense of power is raw and intense. He has tasted political success most times in his three decades old career. While making decisions he behaves as if he is born to rule, but at the same time he remains aloof enough to go back to his family leaving behind everything. However, whether his sense of detachment is real or not, is yet to be tested. At the national level, many of his decisions are untested because he and his party are facing good times.
If in government Modi is influenced by Jaitley’s wisdom, then in party matters Modi and Shah are always on a hotline if and when needed. Shah, of course, accepts Modi’s dominance over all matters, but Modi has taken care to give room to Shah to drive the party in a direction that will ultimately prove beneficial to Modi.
Behind closed doors, sometimes, Modi is less stubborn than Shah, but in public both play well in tandem to serve their common agenda, which is to keep a tight control over the levers of power in the party and in government.
There is no doubt that Shah is in top form but the future is precarious. Shah will soon be surrounded by tough challenges along with the slowly creeping anti-incumbency faced by his government. In UP Shah scored brilliantly because he was selling Modi’s well-crafted image to an aspirational electorate, but as the dreams are tested everyday on the hard ground of reality the people’s disenchantment has begun.
Amitbhai will have to be ready for critical introspection from all sides if his party loses the Bihar election due later this year. Two Gujaratis at the helm of affair in both the party and government will then become a bone of contention. The over-confident style of running the party and over-enthusiasm for a development model to appease the middle class, accepted by the government and the party, will then come under scrutiny.
The knives will be out for him in the party and the media if Amitbhai doesn’t win Bihar for Modi. Luckily for him the odds are favouring the BJP in Bihar, with the grand merger of socialist parties unlikely any time soon.
Believe it or not, almost every other day Shah thinks of the Modi brand and how to sell it again in 2019.
Amitbhai believes in astrology, and his supporters claim his stars favour him. He is set to leave his imprint in India’s saffronised politics. The RSS cannot ask for more at this point in time when Amitbhai credits all his success to his Sangh background.
In an exclusive and first interview on the one year of Narendra Modi government, AmitShah spoke in his characteristic style to Sheela Bhatt/Rediff.com.
A straight-shooter, he dares you with the way he favours the land bill and arrogantly tells the media to talk to Harsimrat Kaur, Union minister for food processing, when asked to comment on Rahul Gandhi's new avatar.
NOW READ PART I: 'Not an inch of acquired land will go to industrialists'
PART 2: 'We have added nishtha, sincerity of purpose, to governance'