BackAmit Shah | The party planner
In some ways, the BJP chief's success in expanding the party's footprint across the country holds the key to the passage of critical reforms in Parliament
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New Delhi: With 282 seats in the Lok Sabha—a majority and the highest for any party since the mid-eighties—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won last year’s general election, should no longer be in election mode.
You’d think it was from party president Amit Shah’s schedule.
His office says Shah, who took over as president of the party in July 2014, covers 500km a day and has travelled 160,000km till the end of May.
With only Bihar on the election calendar for the rest of this year, why is the BJP president engaged in such frenetic travel?
Shah’s travel is part of his mission. The BJP’s electoral numbers in Parliament exceed its strength on the ground; and Shah’s task is to bridge this gap.
ASAP.
Based purely on numbers, 282 seats in the Lok Sabha (including 73 out of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh and all 25 seats in Rajasthan) most would not be wrong in assuming that the BJP has arrived. The rapid meltdown of the Congress, hitherto pole of Indian politics, and the disarray among the regional parties of North India only reinforce this perception.
Then, this theory ignores the phenomenon of Narendra Modi; of how this three-time chief minister of Gujarat appealed to the imagination of an aspirational India to generate an electoral wave for the BJP. It overlooks the fact that the BJP’s electoral footprint, unlike the Congress’ at its peak, does not extend to all of India. And Shah’s relentless trudge across India—he is the first BJP president to visit every state in the country, and in less than a year—is nothing but a tacit acknowledgment of the distance the BJP has to traverse if it has to truly supplant the Congress. To be fair to the BJP, the Congress is the country’s oldest political party (it was founded in 1885) and has a national network more impressive than the Indian Railways.
On paper the BJP has its two best people at the helm for this task. Shah’s legendary planning skills in the back office and the natural electoral flair of Modi in the front office, do make them, on paper at least, formidable.
Shah and Modi’s association is 33 years old. The two met when the former was an activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological arm of the BJP, and Modi a pracharak in Ahmedabad. The duo hit it off and gradually evolved a symbiotic partnership and created one of the most enduring bonds in Indian politics.
In an interview to Open magazine published on 11 April 2014, Shah revealed how Modi had initial doubts on whether he should take up the suggestion of the RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras to join the BJP. “(Modi) was initially reluctant," recalled Shah, and then added, “‘How can a square peg fit into a round hole?’ was his worry."
It was in the mid-1990s that the duo took on the responsibility of cementing the BJP’s hold in state politics—in a two-party state, this obviously meant undermining the Congress. The way they went about it revealed Shah’s attention for detail and his emphasis on process.
They began in rural Gujarat. In the first phase they took the battle to the Congress by systematically seeking out vanquished rival leaders at the panchayat level and grooming them. At the same time, Shah-Modi embarked on a mission to dislodge Congress leaders from elected sports bodies—organizations that they realized provided an easy connect and opportunity for patronage with the populace, especially with respect to popular sports such as cricket and chess.
Once successful, they started targeting the political control of cooperatives—which define Gujarat. Shah led by personal example by challenging the Congress hegemony in bank cooperatives; he successfully contested for the post of president of the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (the largest cooperative bank in the country).
According to several people that MintAsia spoke to for the story, the core belief of Shah is that the organization is supreme; he backs this with unshakeable self belief (a five time MLA, he has never lost any election he has contested). This belief and confidence, they say, is why he has been able to conduct himself so efficiently (mostly anonymously to the public) in the back office. It has, of course, helped that the BJP is a cadre-based party.
This is what Shah did in Uttar Pradesh during the campaign for the Lok Sabha polls. Not only did he neutralize the local satraps within the BJP, he also managed to rally the cadres, with the help of the RSS, and revived the party organization in a state where it had gone to seed after the political ascendancy of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party.
The next obvious task is to take the party to its next stage of growth. In the 16th general election, the BJP crossed 200 seats for the first time and also became the first majority government in 30 years. To a large extent, this was achieved due to a favourable constellation of circumstances—something that is unlikely to repeat itself, especially now that the BJP is the incumbent.
Also it is no secret that Modi is looking at more than one term in office. Shah, too, does not conceal this ambition. In an interview, just ahead of the first anniversary of the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, on 26 May, he said, “I am confident that just as the Congress used to be the principal pole of Indian politics, similarly the BJP will now be the principal pole of Indian politics for a long time. The entire politics will revolve around the BJP for a long time."
But to realize this ambition, the BJP, as a party, has to expand its footprint. This is why Shah kicked off a major recruitment drive; it enhanced the BJP’s strength to 110 million (a number which critics have challenged). Alongside, the party is pursuing a plan to create stakeholders by reaching out to local people for funds to build a party office in each district in the country.
Initially the strategy seemed to be to engage in reckless expansion across the country, including challenging established regional leaders such as Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal. In the process, it took its existing footprint for granted and paid a heavy electoral price in the Delhi assembly election—when the start-up Aam Aadmi Party inflicted a humiliating defeat on it by winning 67 out of the 70 seats.
Since then, however, there seems to have been a quiet recalibration of the BJP’s electoral strategy: favouring consolidation instead of reckless expansion. Clearly, the BJP has an eye on Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—the two states account for 120 seats in the Lok Sabha and 47 seats in the Rajya Sabha. While Bihar goes to polls later this year, elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly take place in 2017. A win would not only consolidate its electoral hold over North India, it will also help the BJP address the vexing problem in the Rajya Sabha, where its minority status is leading to a politically embarrassing legislative logjam.
In some ways then, Shah’s success holds the key to reforms. The BJP has disappointed some of its supporters, who expected the party to display the same free-market style of economics it showed glimpses of during its first stint in power (1998-2004) and which made Gujarat a destination for foreign investors. That the party has not been able to do so is partly because of the pragmatism that no Indian government can be anything but inclusive in its policies, and also because it does not have the numbers in the Rajya Sabha to have its way.
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