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Amit Shah's formal leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party might have its days numbered, given the range of resentment now coming forth against him. Archis Mohan reports.
'Arrogance' and 'pride' is how several seniors have come to describe Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah and the group around him.
L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and Shanta Kumar, a quartet now past their political prime, are unlikely to find resonance among an electorate largely of those too young to remember their political exploits. They have, however, in their withering letter to the BJP leadership, tapped into the restiveness in the party.
This older leadership believes the team at the helm at 11, Ashok Road, the national headquarters, is not deserving.
They resent that leaders with, they feel, little experience have been fast-tracked to senior positions.
While, they have not only been marginalised and not paid the respect they believe is their due, for having devoted the best years of their lives to build the BJP.
The BJP is, arguably, the most democratic of mainstream political parties in India's recent political history, in its structures.
And, the party president’s job here is to come across as a believer in consensual decision making in form, if not in content. Shah is considered a big failure in this. Jagat Prakash Nadda and Om Mathur, both more adept, could be replacements.
Shah and his team are known to make seniors, including MPs, wait for hours for an audience.
Two sturdy guards, in addition to gun-toting commandos, stop people from entering Shah's room at the party HQ.
Seniors say this contrasts with how Advani, Joshi and Vajpayee ran the party.
"Theirs was an open house. Anybody could meet them. Now, the office is deserted when Shah is not in town," a veteran said.
And, not only the patriarchs -- even party presidents as Venkaiah Naidu, Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari kept an open house, following a consultative approach.
This sentiment echoes among Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders.
They seethe at Shah and his team's brusque manner. Lack of vinamrata or humility is often cited as the worst of the leadership's ills.
They argue Shah's team in Bihar for the elections, all people from outside, were arrogant in dealing with the state’s leadership.
Local leaders and workers, whether RSS or BJP, were not involved in decision making. Even simple things like the making of hoardings, posters and other election material that should have gone to local leaders and workers was entrusted to people from Gujarat and Maharashtra.
They also question Shah's reputation as a strategist, punctured after the assembly polls in both Delhi and Bihar.
He, they say, delivered the Uttar Pradesh victory in the Lok Sabha and the subsequent assembly poll triumphs on the back of the Modi wave and hard work by the RSS pracharaks and swayamsevaks.
They are convinced the effort to paint RSS chief Mohanrao Bhagwat as villain of the Bihar loss for his comments on a review of reservation policy was engineered by Shah and his team.
Then, there is the younger lot, many picked and groomed by Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Gadkari and Arun Jaitley.
These men and women, apart from those who have already made it to the council of ministers, are the more soothing faces of the BJP, and not the set of aggressive spokespersons of the party one sees on television these days, whose primary qualification appears to be the ability to shout down the opposition.
A younger leader says the party is mired in an intellectual morass because Shah has surrounded himself with mediocre henchmen, having little political acumen.
These men -- there indeed are not any women of note in Shah's team -- were upstarts, managing the logistics but quick to kowtow to Shah when he came to Delhi, is the criticism.
With no political base of their own or even political acumen, they depend on Shah staying in office. This is primarily why these men will never give Shah and the leadership any bad news.
As in Bihar. Shah, it seems, will have to go but the question is when and how. His presidential term ends in January. The prime minister is likely to look for a suitable opportunity to ease out Shah, possibly inducting him into the Union Cabinet.
However, this is not a challenge to Modi’s position. The PM remains the party’s sole match-winner. If anybody can win 2019 for the BJP, it is Modi. Rajnath, Venkaiah, Jaitley, Swaraj and all others recognise that and will back him to the hilt.
But, if the events of the past few days suggest anything, a more consultative approach with his party -- and with its allies, as well as the opposition -- would increase the PM’s stature, not lessen it.
