Will BJP's co-pilot regime end?

Questions have been raised against the leadership by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. However, a drastic shake-up in the party is unlikely

It was April 2002. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was holding its national executive meeting in Goa. Barely a month had passed since the communal riots in Gujarat and the then prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, said clearly at the meeting that Narendra Modi could not continue as chief minister of Gujarat. He cited the strong views of then Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP), then an ally of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Modi sought and was given permission to speak. "He concluded his speech by saying: 'Nevertheless, as head of the government I take responsibility for what has happened in my state. I am ready to tender my resignation'," wrote BJP veteran L K Advani in his memoir My Country My Life, about that meeting.
 

"The moment Modi said that, the meeting hall reverberated with a thunderous response from the 100-odd members of the party's top decision-making body and special invitees: "Isteefa mat do, isteefa mat do (don't resign, don't resign)" Advani wrote.

"Thus ended the debate inside the party on an issue that had generated deeply divided opinions in Indian society and polity," Advani added.

The BJP said the TDP could not dictate to the BJP whom it should have as its chief minister. Vajpayee's voice was muffled.

Muffled it might have been. But, the national executive of the party discussed and settled an issue that might have festered and created more pressure points for Modi and even Vajpayee.

Cut to the present.

"(Urban Development Minister and former party president) Venkaiah Naidu has said top BJP leaders should discuss the Bihar defeat in the appropriate party forum. What is that forum? The national executive. Just like the Goa meeting, which discussed Godhra and decided to put full faith in Modi, if there had been a national executive meeting after the Maharashtra election, after Delhi, and notice given for one after the Bihar election, no one would have voiced their feelings in public. But, no national executive meeting has been held for a year. No meeting of the Margadarshak Mandal has been held. No meeting of the NDA coordination committee has been held. India faces complex issues. Does the party not think it's necessary to interact with its members, to ask them what line it should take? What option do we have but to go public?" said a senior member.

The Shah factor

Amit Shah took over as party president in July 2014, months after the Modi-led BJP swept to power in the Lok Sabha elections, installing the first single-party majority government after 30 years.

"In the past, when the BJP was in power, consider the kind of party presidents we had: Bangaru Laxman, Kushabhau Thackeray… the party president doesn't have much to do when the party is in power," said an insider who was an important part of the Vajpayee government.

In this case, Shah took over Rajnath Singh's term, who in turn was made president when Nitin Gadkari had to step down from the job following controversy over what are now seen as manufactured corruption charges.

So, in a sense, Shah got a truncated term. If replaced at the end of the year, when the term is to come to an end, he will have had one of the shortest tenures of a BJP president. This has its own implications about the standing of a person the party chooses to lead it, and the way he is treated when the party loses elections.

After he came to power, Modi's reasons for having his man as party president are well known. Shah was appointed general secretary of the BJP and given charge of Uttar Pradesh, ahead of the 2014 elections. The reason was his experience in handling elections in Gujarat. 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, 158,000, higher than Modi himself, was Amit Anilchandra Shah from Sarkhej, Ahmedabad.

This was also because of Shah's work on delimitation of Assembly constituencies in Gujarat and the way he influenced the process, turning more rural constituencies into urban ones. Villages were merged into urban areas, leading to 50 per cent of the population of the state becoming urban.

Shah's understanding of the structure of the cooperative sector in Gujarat also helped. In Maharashtra, it was Sharad Pawar who used the politics of cooperatives to great advantage. In Gujarat, it was the Congress that dominated the cooperatives, until Shah, using his experience in the turnaround of the Ahmedabad District Co-Operative Bank Limited, tore the cooperatives sector from the control of the Congress and brought it to the BJP.

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. The BJP's famed booth-level coordination ensured victory.

When he was put in charge of UP, he tried the same methods. There too, charges were made that he was an outsider and that he had no standing with direct workers who knew the party better than him. When he delivered 71 of the 80 seats in UP in 2014, he could have asked for anything, and no one could have said 'No'.

And, Modi moved heaven and earth to make him party president. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was not happy about this, but could not find any reason to nix the appointment.

Because he was still a relative outsider to the party structure in Delhi, Shah allowed himself to be guided by helpful advisors. Anil Jain was made a national general secretary, although few in the party knew him. Mahesh Giri, who had come to the party barely a month earlier, was appointed secretary. Shrikant Sharma, a relative youngster, was put in charge of Himachal Pradesh, and expected to deal with such senior party leaders as Shanta Kumar and P K Dhumal. These were not people from whom Shah expected a contradictory opinion.

The party's national executive did not exactly sparkle with talent. But it didn't matter. In the afterglow of the Lok Sabha victory, Modi made an important decision: The BJP would shrug off such demanding allies as the Shiv Sena and make a bid for the top job in Maharashtra on its own.

In that election, the BJP fell between two stools and had to go, cap in hand, to the very grouping it had criticised during the campaign. But the BJP managed to get its own chief minister installed for the first time ever. A partial victory? Maybe, but this got Shah a lot of credibility.

Elections in Jharkhand and Haryana, too, led to unqualified successes, although the manner in which M L Khattar was made the CM raised hackles. It was Delhi where everything unravelled. However, Delhi was deemed by the party to be an aberration; it was waved away as deviation amid an avalanche of electoral victory.

Party seniors waited and waited for an analysis of Delhi. It never came. The Jammu & Kashmir elections saw the BJP win handsomely in Jammu. But, the power-sharing formula, with the Peoples Democratic Party, was not proportional and all the ministries with public dealings were given to Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's men without demur. So anxious was the BJP to form a government.

'Reforms' within party

Shah found he had inherited a peculiar legacy when he became president. Every party has 'cells' for target groups of voters and sympathisers. In the BJP, there were nearly 200: Left behind by Rajnath Singh who had obviously thought that decentralisation of responsibility should be the mantra. Like UP governments of yore where party supporters were rewarded with ministership of obscure ministries, there were cells for everything. Shah rationalised this, earning the ire of many, and reorganised the party. He launched a special project to link up all offices of the BJP everywhere in India by a special software, and paid special attention to fostering mechanisms of internal connectivity.

This is not necessarily work that wins you elections. But it does help in toning up the organisation.

Then came Bihar.

"Every electoral victory earlier was dubbed a victory of strategy. Actually, it was a victory of circumstance," said a party leader a day after the Bihar results came out. A straw poll in the BJP suggests the following points of angst:

• There was just too much self-projection by Shah. Everyone acknowledged that Modi continues to be the party's principal vote catcher. But why was Shah dominating in all pictures and posters and not the local leadership? Who knew Shah in Bihar?
  

 

The seat-sharing agreement with the alliance partners was left to the last minute. This cost the BJP heavily and led to a lack of application in selecting candidates.
 

Candidate selection was done arbitrarily and there seemed to be no discerning principle behind it.

"Shah is inaccessible. He is abrasive. He is dismissive even with senior leaders' suggestions. There are people who have never seen him smile," said a leader who has interacted with him.

This is borne out by what leaders like Bhola Singh (MP from Bihar) and Bharat Singh (MP from Ballia) have been saying.

Several leaders predict that the party is on the brink of a similar denouement in the forthcoming round of Assembly elections - in Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Assam. "Four months are left. Discussion on these elections hasn't even begun," said a leader.

So, what is the verdict on Shah? "Another committee" was the succinct, if laconic, answer of a party insider.