AMIT SHAH

 Amit Shah and the March of BJP by Anirban Ganguly and Shiwanand Dwivedi ; Published by  Bloomsbury; Pages: 296; Price: Rs 399/-                               

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 Anirban Ganguly  is the Director of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation (SPMRF), the think tank of  BJP. He is the National Co-In-Charge of the Library and Documentation Department of the BJP and member of the Policy Research Department of the party. He has extensively worked in the areas of public policy, political research and ideological issues. He has several books to his credit.

Shivanand Swivedy is a Senior Research Fellow at SPMRF and author of two books—Parivartan Ke Ore—a review of the first two and half years of Modi—the other Naye Bharat Ke Ore—a review of five years of Modi government.

India’s  newly appointed Union Home Minister, Amit Shah has progressed  from pasting party posters to emerging as the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The book, under review,    traverses the high and low of  Shah’s journey .

 Shah was the moving spirit behind  Advani’s  famous ‘Rath Yatra’  aimed at  mobilising a strong support for  reconstruction of the Ram Temple as also the less chequered  forty-seven days’ Ekta Yatra’ led by  Dr Murli Manohar Joshi.  The third  Yatra—the  Tiranga Yatra, celebrated  and commemorated the Quit India Movement and  forgotten heroes of our  freedom struggle. This Three-in One effort has been covered thoroughly by the two authors.

Slowly but steadily and surely  Shah’s  fortune bloomed and threw up a truly dynamic leader.

Shah earned the sobriquet  ‘ BJP’s Chanakya ’ or ‘Modi’s Hanuman’; Hindi press called him “Shahenshah”--- but he earned highest marks for  transforming  crisis into opportunity  both  for the party and himself.

Shah has dominated India's fast-paced and complex political stage since 2014 and  has altered its electoral map by leading the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to successive historic victories post the May 2014 general elections.

Three aspects of  Shah are highlighted. Intellectual and ideological replenishment through study, the need to look upon the party not as a mere machine for elections but rather a mission for societal, national and political transformation and finally to work for the wide-ranging efforts under the Narendra Modi led BJP dispensation—proving Shah is a Master of Realpolitik.

 ‘Shah’s Pravaas: Expanding the Footprints’ is an account of the physical dimensions of the problem. Shah covered more than 7,90,000 kms between August 2014 and September 2018 undertaking major outreach programmes in this duration of forty-nine months. The average distance covered by him during this period was about 519 kilometres a day.

 Shah’s present rests on his politically illustrious but publicly tarnished past. The biggest stain on his collar is of being accused of having orchestrated the extrajudicial killings in Gujarat when he was the Home Minister under  Narendra Modi .

The real Amit Shah-the once booth-worker and, the master strategist who has pushed the BJP to an organisational pinnacle and yet talks of scaling peaks, a man who is unhesitant in his stand on nationalism and on anything which concerns India's national interest-----has remained in the shadows, self-effaced, away from the limelight.
The story of how he expanded the BJP into a pan-India party and the convergence of organisational science and ideology that has made the BJP a unique and formidable political entity is a story that needs to be told. The book narrates the personal and political journey of Amit Shah, captures the ideological world that shaped him and gives an account of the party that he is leading and shaping today. It is for the first time that his story is being told-an authentic, no-holds-barred portrayal of one of the most influential leaders of our times. 

Shah’s residence in New Delhi is adorned by portraits of two formidable personalities. Shah declared, “Anyone who aspires to understand and to govern India must read Chanakya and Savarkar, there is no alternative to these two epochal personalities”.
The book offers an insight into the early days of the BJP President and how his ideology was shaped by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s ideological mentor. It focuses in large part on Shah’s emphasis on outreach through extensive travel.

It also explores in great detail the planning that went into expanding the BJP’s footprint in states such as Kerala and West Bengal where the BJP had an almost negligible support base.

The book, which traces the rise of Shah in 14 chapters, gives nuggets of information about his personal life: how he makes it a point to listen to his granddaughter Rudri’s laughter over the phone at the end of the day, for instance, or his love of cricket and chess. It also sketches his early days as a foot soldier of the BJP, starting at the age of 13 in the campaign team of Maniben Patel (Sardar Patel’s daughter) during the Lok Sabha polls of 1977.

The period between 2010 and 2012 has been described as the “most challenging years” for Shah, who was imprisoned in 2010 after being accused of having orchestrated the extrajudicial killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kauser Bi . He was cleared of all charges  by a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) special court , which found the case to be “politically motivated”.

The book also offers a glimpse of how Shah planned and executed the party’s stellar performance in the electorally crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, which elects 80 of the 543 members of Parliament, in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The BJP won 71 seats in UP, which carried it to a majority on its own in Parliament .

 “Amidst all the euphoria and praise, one question that was repeatedly asked was how did Amit Shah so accurately analyse the situation in UP and feel its pulse just within a year? In fact, without wasting a single minute, Shah had visited almost all fifty-two districts as soon as he had taken over the reins in UP, travelling for 142 days at a stretch. Travelling about 93,000 kms, Shah drew up a detailed contact and communication campaign for booth workers across all the Lok Sabha seats in the state,” the authors write in the chapter titled Mission UP .

Amit Shah’s arrival in UP in 2013, as national general secretary proved providential and turned the hope of forming a government in Delhi by winning UP into a reality. However, it was also true that Amit Shah’s knowledge about UP in the initial days, before this, was akin to the knowledge that leaders of Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu would perhaps have of the politics of a state like Kashmir. He was practically unaware of UP’s political parties, its society and the role and behaviour of castes in the state’s complex political arena. For Amit Shah, the expert in micromanaging elections, UP was a tough challenge. The party and its workers in the state, faced with continuous defeat and organisational failure had turned despondent. Shah had a few niggling questions when he surveyed the scene in the state. Why was the party in such a condition in the state? The more he tried to free himself from the question, the more did the matter seize him. Trying to alter the situation in the state would be like trying to erect walls on a foundation of sand, but despite this Shah was determined to work for a massive turnaround for the party in the state. He took up the challenge head on.

 An important contribution of  Shah lay in collecting the documents relating to the Party and making it available on public domain. The BJP  Library is one of the finest and no political party can boast of such a fine line up of research and scholarly material. And  Shah was one of the first to understand the importance of "Big Data" in planning for the National Elections. BJP has one of the most sophisticated data centres in which  material on all the main Lok Sabha constituencies is available at the click of a mouse.

The creation of this data base was due to the concerted efforts of computer savvy men and women who worked as volunteers for years on end. Shah is now the Home Minister. He won from the Gandhinagar seat. What will be his main thrust ?. He will be ruthless in the pursuit of Indian political objective and hence he will be in Machiavelli's sense a Prophet Armed. He will be tough on naxalite violence and will not hesitate to use his immense political capital to strengthen the BJP in parts of India where it is weak. As far as terrorist violence is concerned, there will be tough measures without too much thought for collateral damage. Being honest to the core, Amit Shah can afford to be ruthless---and  ruthless action is required in Kerala, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

A large part of Shah’s success was the insipid and colourless leadership of the Congress party by Rahul Gandhi. A parvenu bereft of intellectual attainments all that he did was to hurl abuse at Modi and Shah. His speeches were laced with rhetoric and sarcasm, and failed to articulate his vision of India as opposed to the one espoused by Modi and Shah.

The book under review makes good reading.

   P.P.Ramachandran.

15/09/2019.