Party Boss Amit Shah: Strategist With Missionary Zeal
Amitbhai Anilchandra Shah, now 53, still wears the unspoilt air of a bustling Rashtriya Swayam Sevak(RSS) volunteer from Ahmedabad.
Though actually born in Mumbai, to a prosperous Gujarati Jain family in business, and holding a B.Sc. degree in Biochemistry, Shah gives the impression of humble beginnings and grass root skills.
This, perhaps through his personal discipline, humility, and punctuality,typical of a RSS Swayamsevak (Volunteer). The organisation is legendary for its social service and disaster relief work, done quietly, effectively, via its massive and well organised cadre, but without seeking any publicity.
Shah's demeanour underlines, nearly four years into the Modi Administration at the Centre, that the corrupting influence of power has not gone to his head.
Amit Shah still looks like someone used to carrying a jhola, eating and sleeping on hard floors, getting along with people, and walking from place to place spreading the word.
While this was never quite in householder and father Shah's experience, it is indeed the back story of his boss Narendra Modi. Modi was a long serving RSS Pracharak (Propagator), whom Shah met for the first time in 1982.
Shah now enjoys very necessary Z plus security, one of the biggest houses in the Lutyen's Bungalow Zone, flits about the country at will being the best Party President a political Party could hope for.
Today, people flock to Shah for favours, because he does wield an immense power of patronage.
Amit Shah can make or break most Party hopefuls after pelf, power, or prestige, and even those in Government if he deems it necessary. Being both well-off from birth and grounded in RSS and BJP Party discipline, he is not easily impressed.
Given the complete confidence he also enjoys of Prime Minister Modi, well on his way to becoming the most popular Indian Prime Minister ever, the clout is palpable.
Shah is, on his own bat, both elected President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the Chairperson of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), as of July 2014. He was nominated by current Home Minister Rajnath Singh, his predecessor.
Singh also proposed Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate in 2013, despite objections from LK Advani and his camp followers.
Amit Shah's take-no-prisoners imprint is visible in the more aggressive stance the Modi Government took after an initial period of trying to build consensus with the Opposition.
It is this that many believe was causative in finally delivering the historic GST legislation, and not the soft-pedalling that preceded it.
This uncompromising style is at some variance with those long term stalwarts from the Lutyens Delhi aspects of the top leadership in the Government, who could not however deliver the expected Opposition cooperation.
"Outsider" Amit Shah makes no bones about his dislike for everything the Congress Party stands for, including their consensus building with regional parties based on a nod and wink at mutual corruption.
But even on a personal wicket he has no reason to like them. Shah was arrested in 2010, hurting his chances of succeeding Modi as Gujarat Chief Minister, but catapulting him by default into national politics.
He was accused, using trumped-up charges of being a murderer, and even exiled from Gujarat between 2010 and 2012.
Though Amit Shah was eventually acquitted, the arrest took place at the instigation of the CBI by the UPA Government, led by Congress, then ruling at the Centre.
The long resolution also provided ammunition to those in the BJP who wanted to prevent his rise to the Presidency of the Party at the Centre.
But still, the mantle of such a stature now acquired, and the reckoning it represents, true though it is, and without exagerration, rests lightly on this most successful and accessible of BJP Presidents.
Shah's ready smile to the public seems to say who would have thought that I, even now a mere State MLA on paper, would become the second-most powerful man in India by my fifties, when most Indian politicians are still cutting their milk-teeth?
But there are well founded reasons. Not only does the NDA run a majority of the States of the country in addition to the Centre, even more are likely to fall in shortly and certainly before 2019. And the credit goes to the excellent working partnership between Modi and Shah.
When the BJP President is setting about his job of running the political Party with the biggest membership in the world ( a product of his innovative membership drive), he dispenses with the affability, and would put any hard driving corporate CEO to shame.
There is no tumultous democratic back and forth. Party meetings under Shah are quiet affairs, with everyone straining to absorb what he wants.
His elaborate use of lakhs of RSS cadres at the grassroots for canvassing votes and explaining positions at various electoral contests, has now gone into political campaign history for its effectiveness.
On his part, Shah relentlessly demands, and gets, a high level of hands-on performance at various levels of the Party.
The BJP President, honed his own political skills, first in the student wing of the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which he joined in 1983.
He joined the BJP itself in 1986, and became an Activist for the Youth Wing of the Party (Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha) rising through its ranks with various designations.
But it was in 1995, when Shah and Modi were tasked to work together for the first time, that they developed their bond. They employed innovative disruption strategies, built BJP networks, campaigning to degrade Congress influence.
This was in rural Gujarat at village level, in the powerful cooperatives, their banks, and sport bodies. They infiltrated Congress organisations successfully, and established their partnership and implicit mutual understanding.
Shah became a first-time MLA in 1997, now with a strong benefactor and comrade-in-arms higher up the ladder at all times.
He became amongst the youngest and most powerful state ministers since 2002, featuring in consecutive governments of Gujarat.
Shah today arrives at his electoral strategies and constitutional coups, not only via his much talked about Chanakya-like strategic skills, his vast experience in realpolitik, but also after no-nonsense data-crunching US-style. He makes detailed caste, creed, class, demographic concentration, historical proclivity and future projected political analyses.
He begins this mapping at the Block Level, where Shah once began his political career, right up, and into, Parliament on Raisina Hill, where he is now headed.
There too, Shah is expected to bring his formidable organisational skills to bear. However, speculations on Amit Shah giving up the Party Presidentship and taking up an important Cabinet position instead, are not likely to be proved correct.
Not only has Shah himself ruled it out, his continuance at the helm of the Party apparatus is crucial, at least till the general elections of 2019 are done with.
Instead, in the Rajya Sabha, Shah may be expected to organise consensus on holding simultaneous elections to all the States and the Centre; changing the financial year to follow the Gregorian Calendar, as is already the practice in most of the developed world; and other such pathbreaking reforms, piloting them to enabling legislation.
This has something in common with the political coups Shah engineers with such apparent finesse.
He will show himself, in this great coming work also, that is likely to reduce parliamentary obstruction and chaos greatly, as a canny judge of character, astute at finding the fault lines to crack.
Amit Shah is today, the alter-ego,and probably Prime Minister Narendra Modi's only trusted friend.
This goes back to the days when they both walked the dusty roads together. Such trust and friendship with the personally aloof Prime Minister is unparalleled in the Party or the Government.
But then, both are highly public men, who simultaneously guard their personal privacy zealously.
The Prime Minister is a bachelor, while Shah is a family man, but attitudinally they remain, even at the height of their political careers, dedicated RSS Pracharaks on a mission.
They have meshed seamlessly into an over-achieving reprise of Cervantes' Don Quixote, with Modi tilting at corruption and terrorist driven "windmills", while striving towards an economically, diplomatically and miltarily powerful India.
Shah is cast as his devoted Sancho Panza, smoothing the creases along his electoral path, and creating representational heft for him.
It is a waking dream of India's manifest destiny, and there is nothing fanciful about it as a work in progress.
Along with Ajit Doval, the highly respected National Security Advisor (NSA), to the Modi Government, it is Amitbhai Shah that gives this administration its immense back-room thrust.
August 1st, 2017
Gautam Mukherjee
superb..!!
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