The general's rare setback

Amit Shah, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would smile whenever he interacted with reporters from Delhi this past fortnight. It was quite unlike the gruff monosyllabic Shah, immersed in election preparedness for the Bihar Assembly polls, which journalists would encounter during their rare meetings with the 51-year-old after the debacle in Delhi in February 2015.

This Shah was chatty and willing to ask journalists, particularly those from Bihar, their assessment of the ongoing five-phase elections. There was a hint that he has led his party to put in immense hard work in the past two months and it was now up to destiny. Few Delhi-based journalists had seen this fatalist side to Shah.

For, in April 2014, days after the first phase of the Lok Sabha elections in which 10 seats of western Uttar Pradesh went to polls, Shah had told reporters that the BJP would win around 60 of the 80-seats in the state and, more startlingly, that while he considered the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) a bigger threat than Samajwadi Party, Mayawati's party might not get a single seat. When results came, the National Democratic Alliance won 73 and the BSP couldn't win any.

There were fewer who sneered when in subsequent months Shah claimed, weeks before the results were out, that the BJP was on course to forming its first ever governments in Haryana and Jharkhand and that the Maharashtra Assembly results would be "surprising". All of it, against heavy odds, came true.

However, in 2015, the losses in Delhi and Bihar have dented Shah's image as a strategist. The latest election might even have marked the end of the 'Modi wave'.

According to a long-time detractor of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shah is unlikely to be removed as BJP president until such time that he enjoys Modi's "blessings".

The detractor is being unkind. Shah is a popular party president. He has rewarded younger leaders who have shown willingness for parakram, or exploits in the field, rather than doing parikrama, or circumambulate Delhi-based leaders. For the past two months, Shah has put in 20-hour workdays and visited remote villages to meet party workers manning each of the 62,000 polling booths.

This was also the first Assembly polls the BJP contested so many seats as the lead party of an alliance in Bihar, which with 17 per cent Muslims, has been difficult electoral terrain for the party. What Shah has accomplished is to put it on the state's electoral map and this might bear fruit in the years to come, particularly in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.