Amit Shah and the March of BJP

306 Pages·2019·4.393 MB·English

by  Anirban Ganguly, Shiwanand Dwivedi

AMIT SHAH AND THE
MARCH OF BJP
AMIT SHAH
AND THE
MARCH OF BJP
Anirban Ganguly
Shiwanand Dwivedi
BLOOMSBURY INDIA
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First published in India 2019
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CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Chapter 1 : From the Lamp to the Lotus
Chapter 2 : Rising Through the Ranks
Chapter 3 : Ideology: The Soul
Chapter 4 : The Tradition and Institution of Pravaas and Yatras
Chapter 5 : Shah’s Pravaas: Expanding the Footprints
Chapter 6 : The Journey: From 10 to 10 Crores
Chapter 7 : Reaching out to Every Booth
Chapter 8 : The Culture of Samvad
Chapter 9 : Modernising While Retaining the Essence
Chapter 10 : Read and Reflect
Chapter 11 : Shah’s ‘Mission UP’
Chapter 12 : At the Peak of Success
Chapter 13 : The Bridge
Chapter 14 : 2019 and Challenges
Endnotes
Amit Shah’s Quotes
Selected Videos Links with QR Codes
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
FOREWORD
I
n public life continuously for the last four decades, Amit Shah has risen
today to become the national president of the world’s largest political
party. He also comes forth as the principle troubleshooter of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi who has successfully run a full majority government for the
last five years. Everyone knows the Amit Shah of national politics, but there
is perhaps hardly anyone who can definitively claim that they know
everything about him.
Starting from the early years of his political career to being elected
member of the Rajya Sabha (Upper House) in 2017, Shah has never lost an
election; it reflects his electoral and organisational acumen and tenacity. Over
the years, he has also emerged as a master in contesting elections and in
making others contest as well. Amit Shah’s unique capacity for strategising
elections is well recognised, but few know that electoral politics is only one
dimension of his personality.
Shah is also among those few leaders who like to break the status-quo and
to reject outdated methods of doing things. He has always come across as
quick to devise and to adopt new ways, displaying phenomenal organisational
abilities and an adept at crisis management. Amit Shah’s life cannot be bound
in a single tome, but one can certainly get an insight into a number of
unknown dimensions of his life from this book.
The first thing that one perhaps needs to learn from Amit Shah is how to
convert challenges into opportunities. He resolutely converted a very difficult
phase in his life into one that became a life-transforming period. There was a
time when, as we know, Shah faced police cases, had to leave Gujarat as an
exile on the order of the court and was compelled to live a cloistered
existence in Delhi. On the one hand, he was separated from his family, on the
other, he had to stay put in a new city, with people he did not know,
constantly doing the rounds of courts and unable to talk freely over the
phone, apprehensive that his calls were being monitored. Anyone else in his
shoes would have given up in despair and may have left politics altogether,
but not Shah. I have seen him face several crisis situations. Not only did Shah
work on each case with his lawyers meticulously, but he himself went into
details of each one of them and like an adroit lawyer planned every move. In
these trying times, one never saw him fatigued and worried, instead, he
always exuded a quiet confidence.
The most interesting aspect of Amit Shah’s life during this phase of trial
and tribulations was that he converted the compulsion of having to live in
Delhi in exile into an occasion for strengthening the various dimensions of
his life. Anyone who has the ability to convert a crisis into an opportunity and
does not fear struggle can never be defeated. Amit Shah repeatedly
demonstrated this indomitable ability.
Initially, the Delhi-based ‘Lutyen’s caucus’ saw Amit Shah as merely
Narendra Modi’s man Friday. They saw Shah as the key person who could
lead them to Modi. They never really tried to know Shah beyond this. Only
when he performed the historic electoral feat of winning 73 seats for the BJP
from Uttar Pradesh did they want to know him better. Those in the corridors
of power began wondering who he was and where he had come from. All
agreed that had Uttar Pradesh not seen such a result, one would not see a
stable Narendra Modi government at the Centre.
Whenever the ‘Lutyen’s consensus’ perceives someone who can weave
electoral victories from the grass roots and on difficult terrains, their
inquisitiveness increases. Everyone wanted to know someone who knew
Amit Shah. The inquisitiveness increased manifold, once Shah became the
national president of the BJP—everybody now wanted to connect with him.
But there were few who really knew Shah, and Shah himself met very few
people. Even in the national team that he put together to run the party, there
were very few who were widely known faces. Those in the corridors of
power in Delhi often find it difficult to evaluate such a personality and
despite trying their best, they could neither really understand Amit Shah nor
could they get through to him.
In the meanwhile, Shah had already started leaving his imprint on
national politics. Under his organisational leadership, the party began
winning a series of elections. The more he continued to emerge as a strong
and skilful strategist, the greater was the interest in him.
Amit Shah also established himself as a powerful orator and a section of
the national media in Delhi saw in him a leader who could resolutely and
convincingly riposte to their questions. Shah has never cared for criticism and
pays scant attention to advices proffered by the ‘Lutyen’s elite’. He did not
alter his style of functioning and was thus promptly labelled as arrogant. He
was patronisingly advised that since ‘You are president of the party, meet
people, meet party people freely and take everyone along.’ But Shah neither
changed his style of working nor did he alter his way of thinking and went on
to make the BJP the world’s largest party, a record.
Through the media and other mediums, he successfully communicated
with people. From Jammu and Kashmir in the north to Tripura in the
northeast, he ensured the BJP’s victory, while in Goa he outsmarted the
Congress. Ironically, when the BJP formed the government in Goa despite
having fewer seats, it was said by some that Amit Shah resorted to wrong
methods, while in Karnataka, despite being the largest party when the BJP
could not form a government, these same people exclaimed that Amit Shah
failed in forming a government. Shah, of course, is unmoved by such
criticisms. This attitude of his continues to be a mystery to the ‘Delhi class’.
Some may seem to know him but nobody actually does. It is for this, if not
for anything else, that a book on Amit Shah was much required.
Shah has adopted an innovative approach to electioneering. When it
comes to the selection of candidates, he emphasises winnability and pursues
scientific analysis. He has not given space to the culture of recommendations
and nepotism in the selection process. It was a difficult and risk-filled path
for him. But then Shah is known for altering tactics and to face challenges
head-on. To stick to his conviction and to do politics on his terms and in his
way is Shah’s trademark. He knows only too well that there is a great danger
in such an approach since a slight setback leads people to open up fronts
against him. What sets Amit Shah apart from many others is his insistence on
continuing on his chosen path without caring for such eventualities.
For those who know very little about Amit Shah but are interested in
knowing about him, this book will definitely be a helpful source. It will
certainly prove to be a valuable and detailed work which sheds light on his
political life, his political journey and his role in the BJP, from the party’s
early days to its present unfoldment.
—Rajat Sharma
Editor-in-Chief and Chairman, India TV
INTRODUCTION
renewed interest in the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) was perceived to be
A
growing around June 2013 when Narendra Modi was declared the chief of
the party’s election campaign for the 2014 general elections. In the days
and months to come, Modi would weave an impressive and dominant
narrative that would give rise to a strong and compelling emotion for change.
This would eventually grow into a massive wave that would sweep away the
Congress dispensation which had ruled India for a decade from 2004 to 2014.

Since May 2014, worldwide interest both in the Narendra Modi-led
government and the party—BJP—has kept growing. Interestingly, as we have
discussed in the pages of this book, both the government led by Modi and the
party led by Amit Shah have continued in their respective trajectories of
activities, innovation, performance and results and yet have been linked and
coordinated in their functioning.
The party that had systemically initiated, supported, sustained and upheld
the electoral struggle and narrative for India in 2014 did not recede into
complacency after the massive victory. Interestingly and fascinatingly, the
BJP, after its victory in 2014, launched itself on a mission of expansion, of
restructuring and of widening its activities and outreach. It directed itself into
sustained creative political programmes that eventually saw it, by 2018,
forming governments or being part of governments in twenty-one Indian
states that covers 70 per cent of India’s population. Its political narrative
became the dominant one with its political presence becoming pan-Indian.
This phase also saw the BJP decisively break out of the false stereotype of
being a ‘Hindi heartland party’—a stereotype that was imposed on it to suit a
certain political angle and motive.