The matter rested there for a while with Singh taking his time and also exploring Patna as a compromise choice for Modi because Bihar was equally important. But Shah is intrinsically opposed to such compromises-possibly one of the key attributes that endears him to Modi. He had arrived at his decision after a detailed analysis-the only way BJP could transcend the complex matrix of caste and religion in Uttar Pradesh was by creating and then continuously reinforcing a Modi wave.
With the prime ministerial candidate on his side, Shah came back with a reminder, followed it up with more reminders and then, finally took it as a given and asked the next question: So, from where does adhyakhshji (the president) want to contest? In a matter of a few weeks, the issue had turned on its head and now Singh was hurrying to finalise his constituency. There were nervous moments too, when suggestions were made that Singh contest from Jharkhand. His camp moved quickly and firmed up Lucknow to claim Atal Bihari Vajpayee's legacy.
Modi trusts Shah's judgement and admires the steadfast manner in which he goes about getting things done once he has given clearance. After he delivered Uttar Pradesh to his boss, with the BJP-Apna Dal combine winning a record 73 of the 80 seats there, the way for Shah's elevation was clear. Modi pushed his candidature through, quelling opposition from within the party and some RSS quarters on the grounds that both the PM and party president could not hail from Gujarat and there are fake encounter killing cases pending against Shah. Modi's retort: is there a more competent candidate available to deliver the states that BJP needs to win?
Amit Shah with Narendra Modi after his appointment as BJP chief, in Delhi.
At 49, Shah is the youngest-ever BJP president. His advent is likely to see the party leadership getting younger in the coming days. Modi, say insiders, clearly thinks that the party needs to deepen its connect with young voters and consolidate recent gains. But a younger organisation is only a part of what it means to have Shah as the new BJP president. The import of his appointment is threefold. One, he is Modi's closest aide and his elevation completes the Prime Minister's grip over the party, bringing an end to the domination of the Delhi coterie that refused to step down despite failing to deliver in two Lok Sabha elections (2004 and 2009). Secondly, his elevation makes way for clearing up the organisation of older leaders who are no longer considered useful. And more importantly, in Uttar Pradesh, Shah demonstrated the ability to fulfil Modi's command while taking RSS along. He carried along Modi's management style and tapped into the Sangh's organisational abilities, to which he added a meticulous use of technology.
Two days before Shah was announced as BJP president on July 9, senior RSS Pracharaks Ram Madhav, also 49, and Shiv Prakash, in his early 50s, too joined the party. While Prakash, a kshetra pracharak, had worked with Shah in western Uttar Pradesh, Madhav has been the media face of RSS as its spokesperson for a decade now. From the day he joined BJP, he has been by Shah's side. Even though Madhav has not been given any specific role yet, he has been part of every meeting that Shah has held with party office-bearers until now. These include initial discussions with BJP units of four states-Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra-that go to polls in the next six months.
Shah's target is to ensure BJP forms the government in at least three of these states. The party also wants to build on the unprecedented gains in Assam, West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Says Uttar Pradesh BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai: "Shah is a man of not just vision but firm resolution and immediate execution. We've already had a crucial meeting with him on the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, which are scheduled for 2017. On our next visit, we will look at the criteria for ticket distribution."
With Shah taking orders directly from Modi, it is unlikely that the party and the Government will be pulling in different directions. BJP has already formed a policy facilitation group under General Secretary P. Muralidhar Rao, 48, to monitor the Government's policy compliance with the manifesto and other key promises made during the Lok Sabha campaign.
However, some leaders also have concerns, which they voice in hushed tones these days. "He takes orders directly from Modi and then passes them on to the people he trusts. Transparency could suffer. The party leadership will be replaced by a smaller coterie in the name of efficiency," says a BJP general secretary.
THE TECH EDGE
A closer look at Shah's winning strategy in Uttar Pradesh shows that he will rely immensely on technology to re-energise the party system. He transformed the party's Lucknow office, had a war room set up to plan for the battle ahead and an IT cell to tap potential voters using social media, particularly first-time voters. "India added nearly 110 million voters in the last General Election and BJP and RSS went into it believing that these new voters would be game-changers," says Sunil Bansal, 44, who was loaned by RSS to assist the BJP-managed war room of Shah in Lucknow. BJP had set up a call centre as part of its war room. It served a dual purpose. Party sympathisers and supporters could give a missed call on the call centre number to know about BJP programmes. The call centre workers were able to convert more than 20,000 of these callers into active volunteers of the party. Already, the word is out is that new IT systems are being looked at to aid better electoral planning from the headquarters. Shah's message, according to insiders, is that the party worker must find easier ways to communicate with the leadership than wait for hours before the houses and office of leaders to be heard. Insiders say the new BJP president wants technological solutions that organise the leader-worker interaction in a way that the urgent can be segregated from the not-so-immediate.
For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, he had cell phones provided to booth workers; those manning the call centre in Lucknow would call up these workers daily and submit a report every evening to Bansal. He, in turn, would give a constituency-wise daily report to Shah. "This helped charging up the workers and allowed us to address problems faster," adds Bansal.
After the Uttar Pradesh poll success, those from RSS who had assisted Shah have been brought into the party. Bansal was inducted into BJP three weeks before Shah became president.
He is now general secretary (organisation) of the Uttar Pradesh unit. RSS Joint General Secretary Krishna Gopal, who coordinated with Shah in Uttar Pradesh, is now set to replace Suresh Soni as the Sangh's pointperson to liaison with the party. Gopal and Shah worked closely with each other. While Shah relied on a number of RSS functionaries to act as 'paalaks' (care-takers) for different constituencies, Gopal ensured that BJP had the complete support of the RSS's frontal organisations and cadres where its base had been eroded over the years. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had held a three-day meeting of the RSS zonal in-charges in Varanasi in February to oversee the planning and coordination between BJP and the Sangh.
The party is also set to get new faces with Shah planning to bring in young talent from states like Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka for the future. Given that General Secretaries Ananth Kumar, Thawar Chand Gehlot and Dharmendra Pradhan are now part of the Government, Shah has opportunity to build his own team of general secretaries. J.P. Nadda, another general secretary, is expected to join the ministry in the next expansion. The BJP parliamentary board, too, will have vacancies-Kumar and Gehlot are likely to be dropped and Madhav inducted into the highest decision-making body.
JOURNEY FROM NOWHERE
A clear signal of Shah's increasing clout in the party comes from the way in which the party brass was in attendance at this son Jay's engagement on July 13 at Ahmedabad's YMCA club.
The celebrations saw over 20 ministers of the Modi ministry from Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari to RSS leaders Soni and Madhav. Shah's journey from a junior RSS and BJP worker who even pasted BJP posters in his initial days on barren city walls to the pinnacle of political glory today is best illustrated by the contrast between the July 13 function and Shah's own pre-wedding dinner about 27 years ago in Ahmedabad's Naranpura area. According to Ratibhai Patel, 78, an RSS worker who gave Shah his first lessons in the organisation, only 150 guests attended Shah's dinner and the leftover sweets had to be distributed among his neighbours. On July 13, over 1,500 guests were in attendance. A senior cabinet minister even remarked on the side that there were more BJP leaders from Uttar Pradesh and Delhi at the function than those from Gujarat, where Shah started his political journey.
Shah isn't Modi's man alone. He enjoys respect in RSS and its allied organisations for his ideological commitment and sensitivity towards grassroots workers. Bharatbhai Bhatt, 58, another RSS functionary who worked with Shah in the local unit of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), recalls how the unit started a number of innovative public programmes at Shah's behest-a book bank for poor students, singing patriotic songs in schools and running a vocational employment bureau for needy students so that they could work part-time to cover their expenses. Says Bhatt, now a primary school principal, "There was one quality that set him apart. Courage. On his suggestion, we started a picketing programme against black marketeers at cinema theatres, catch them and hand them over to police. Amitbhai himself took the lead in this."
It was perhaps this courage that brought him closer to Modi when he refused to turn approver against the then Gujarat chief minister in the fake encounter killing cases. "Just one statement against Modi at that time could have put the current Prime Minister's political career in jeopardy," reveals a party leader. A court order in 2010 releasing him on bail after three months of jail but asking him to stay out of Gujarat for almost two years "so that Shah didn't tamper with the evidence in the case" came as a blessing in disguise. Shah used the banishment to build contacts with top party leaders in Delhi; he even rented a house last year in Jangpura Extension on the periphery of Lutyens' Delhi.
Modi first spotted Shah as a pracharak in 1985 at an RSS meet in Ahmedabad and took a liking for him after a few meetings. Shah was one of Modi's strategists when the latter clashed with bete noire Shankarsinh Vaghela in 1995, which had resulted in Modi being banished from Gujarat to Delhi as BJP national secretary. The banning of Modi resulted in many of his followers in Gujarat deserting him for other leaders. When Keshubhai Patel started distancing himself from Modi on becoming chief minister for the second time in 1998, Shah, who was an MLA then, stood by Modi and became his backroom boy in the fight. He also played a role in creating an atmosphere for Modi to step in as chief minister in October 2001 replacing Patel.
Shah got his first big chance in December 2002 when Modi made him the minister of state for home, transport and law. The fake encounters during his tenure were used by his opponents to defame him and two of these had him entangled-those of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsi Prajapati. His arrest in Sohrabuddin encounter case turned out to be his worst period. The upshot of it was that it burnished his credentials as a Hindu hardliner. Shah remains an accused out on bail in both the cases which have now been clubbed together by the Supreme Court. He was recently exempted by a lower court in Mumbai which is hearing the case from personal appearance in court.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley at Amit Shah's son Jay's engagement ceremony in Ahmedabad.
Shah's administrative acumen is borne out by his achievements. He turned around the loss-making Gujarat State Finance Corporation in 16 months flat after taking over as chairman in 1995. Three years later, he repeated the feat as chairman of Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank, taking the balance sheet from losses of Rs.40 crore to a profit of Rs.20 crore in one year. As transport minister, he brought the lossmaking Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation back in black.
Soon after his elevation to the top job, a close Modi aide reportedly told Shah: "Are you able to fathom what you have achieved at such a young age? Even Modiji could never become the party president." Shah replied, "I know it very well. I have to prove myself in the 18 months that are left of my term," referring to the fact that he has come in as a mid-term replacement for Rajnath Singh. Modi's expectations from the new BJP president will be sky-high given Shah's administrative and organisational track record. And Shah has only half a term to prove himself to his boss. At least to begin with.
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