Here's why. In December 2002, Modi crushed the Congress to win a record 126 seats in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly. The man in his party who won by the highest margin of votes, over 158,000, higher than Modi himself, was Amit Anilchandra Shah from Sarkhej, Ahmedabad.
Sarkhej has elected Shah as its MLA in four consecutive elections. He improved his 2002 margin of victory in 2007, winning by 235,000 votes. In an assembly election this order of an electoral margin is pretty damn good.
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Till the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case came back to haunt him, Shah's stars had been in ascendence, largely also because he had a mentor in Narendra Modi. It was generally believed that if Modi moved to New Delhi, it is Shah who would be his successor.
This is not the full story. Few know that Shah owes his rise to some carefully choreographed political moves, especially relating to the delimitation of Gujarat.
Sociologist, Prof Vidyut Joshi has done a masterly analysis of the effects of delimitation on Gujarat. His conclusions are: delimitation strategically changed the social composition of at least 60 seats out of 182. More villages were merged in urban areas leading to 50 per cent of the population of the state becoming urban; the population in some constituencies came down, leading to an imbalance in the size of constituencies; and the size of the population in constituencies on an average, went up to 200,000. The party that knew its organisation - and the state - was best placed to gain from the delimitation.
Shah, even more than Modi, was that man. Not only did he guide the exercise, (Shah was one of the key BJP members in the West Zone committee set up by the Election Commission in 2008 for the delimitation of the constituencies in western states) he did it in a way that neutralised the political challenge the BJP was facing: from the National Congress Party and the Congress, of course, but much more from Keshubhai Patel, Modi's most persistent rival. The delimitation helped Keshubhai but only in Saurashtra. Almost everywhere else, constituencies were redrawn in a way so that they were made more urban and these generally went to Modi's advantage.
This was not Shah's only asset. In Gujarat, currently, there is no one who knows the structure of the co-operative sector in the state better than Amit Shah. The cooperatives helped establish Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra: and they were a mainstay for the Congress in Gujarat. Over the years, Shah helped break this and brought the co-operatives over to the BJP.
Matching the party to the newly delimited constituencies, Shah influenced the restructuring of the organisation in such a way that many of the old guard found themselves out. Gujarat has 18,600 villages. Shah set up election management cells in small clusters of villages and then finally in the villages themselves. So while interviewing prospective candidates, he was able to contradict them decisively and impersonally if they made exaggerated claims of their popularity. Bureaucrats are testimony to this.
Modi had exactly this reason to be grateful to Shah: that Shah freed him from the responsibility of election management.
Now Shah is in UP. One of the first leaders - after the mandatory meeting with workers in Lucknow - he met was Yogi Adityanath from Gorakhpur. Adityanath was the first BJP leader to come out and say openly that Advani is a taller leader than Modi. So, this meeting was aimed both at mending fences and outreach. In Gorakhpur, Shah told workers the BJP was the only party that did not believe in promoting individuals as leaders. He did not even mention that Modi was the party's candidate for prime minister.
Chatter from Lucknow suggests party leaders are not too happy at being told what to do by an "outsider". Shah has a track record of election management - in Gujarat. The jury is still out on what he can do for the party in UP.