Can Amit Shah’s manoeuvres take the BJP to the emphatic 350-plus-seats victory in 2019 it believes is par for the course?
AT A MEETING OF THE party’s accounts committee in Bhopal, BJP president Amit Shah makes a point. “From now on,” he says, looking around, “the party’s day-to-day expenses will be met through cheque donations.” There’s polite laughter all around. Most of the people in the room think it’s a joke and await a punchline. There is none. Shah, 54, is dead serious. The smiles evaporate. “Stop taking donations in cash,” he says.
Shah is on the move. Since April this year, he has embarked on a vistrit prawas (extended campaign), spending 85 of 115 days outside the national capital crisscrossing the countryside, visiting 22 states, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Gujarat to Assam. In the past 37 months, he has become the BJP’s most travelled president, having taken around 350 trips to states, covering 750 km a day. He takes mostly commercial flights—private jets are a strict no-no except during electioneering when time is of the essence. He skips hotels to stay in state government guest houses or party offices.
The nine months between the Uttar Pradesh elections in March and the Gujarat elections in December 2017 will be the longest break without elections. December onwards, it is going to be a non-stop electoral push for the BJP—protecting their bastion in Gujarat in December, going on the offensive against the last major Congress citadel, Karnataka, next March, and on the defensive in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in December 2018.
Shah is making the most of this nine-month hiatus to whip the party into shape. His nationwide tours are in the manner of a military commander visiting his field formations, not only to instil confidence in partymen, but to assess the ground situation as well. Predictably, his encounters leave a trail of hotly discussed anecdotes in their wake.
At a meeting of BJP unit morchas and heads of various cells in Kolkata this September, Shah was incensed to find positions in the morchas and cells unfilled. His diktat: “Fill the posts soon. If you can’t, say goodbye to your positions.”
At his next pit stop in Jharkhand capital Ranchi, at a closed-door meeting with party office-bearers and ministers, he derided anti-incumbency as “a term coined by hopeless people”. “If the nation has to change, then we have to rule for 60, even 100, years. So, workers of this party should have no time to rest. Those who want to rest should leave the party.”
This is much more than an astonishing vision for political parties which don’t look beyond the five-year election horizon. It is the clearest articulation of the flip side to Shah’s 2014 ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ coinage: a ‘BJP-yukt Bharat’. Shah is planning not just the Congress’s electoral obliteration. He wants to ensure the BJP can be an effective replacement.
The closest metaphor currently for his BJP 2.0 mission is the party’s partially-completed national headquarters, a gleaming seven-storeyed red sandstone-and-glass structure on 6, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, in central Delhi. Shah has not hidden his disdain for the existing party office on 11, Ashoka Road, a Lutyens’ bungalow flanked by a warren of ad hoc single-storeyed structures.
Hard-hatted workers swarm around the under-construction HQ whose foundation stone Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid last January. The building, a Shah brainchild, is to be inaugurated on December 25 this year, the 93rd birthday of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A building fronted by a sweeping staircase, multi-level underground car parking, wi-fi, a digital library, green lawns and an atrium, 6, DDU Marg will be among the largest HQs for any Delhibased party and the nerve centre of its connect with an army of workers right down to the booth level. Shah will strategise the BJP’s 2019 election charge from here.
BIGGER IS BETTER
The BJP has been on a bull run since the former stockbroker-turned-politician took over as party president in August 2014. Barring two early defeats in Delhi and Bihar in 2015, the BJP has formed nine state governments in a row, six on its own. In his three-year tenure, Shah has doubled the number of states in the party’s kitty to 18 and the party has won nine of the 15 elections it has contested. The party has never had the kind of pan-India presence that it has now.
Shah claims to have expanded the BJP’s membership to over 110 million this year from the 32.5 million he inherited in 2014, making BJP the world’s largest political party. He acknowledges “the popularity and performance of Narendra Modi as prime minister, coupled with the organisation’s ability to convert this strength into votes” (see interview: ‘The emerging BJP will be invincible’) as the principal factor for the party’s onward march. Asked whether the new party will simply be an electoral machine that might overwhelm the BJP’s ideological moorings, Shah replies: “The emerging BJP will be ajeya (invincible) in electoral politics. It is not a machine, but a mission for the nation’s development.”
The Modi-Shah electoral juggernaut poses an existential challenge to the Opposition. “We have to understand we are up against Mr Modi, Mr Shah,” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh told PTI in August. “They think differently, they act differently, and if we are not flexible in our approach, frankly, we will become irrelevant.”
Shah’s political hunger is insatiable and not only because of the food diplomacy he has pio-
neered on his state visits this year. He has sat cross-legged in the home of a Dalit or tribal family in every state and also had lunch or dinner with a leading citizen.
Each trip is marked by an average of six crucial closeddoor meetings where partymen can speak to him freely. He meets hundreds of party workers, from state and district office-bearers, elected MPs and MLAs to former MPS and MLAs, district party presidents, heads of public sector undertakings, civic body heads, vistaraks, chief ministers and ministers of states. Each of his three days is also broken into 15-18 sessions where he also meets the press, addresses public meetings and meets intellectuals.
Shah is clearly keen to avoid what one senior party leader says was the BJP’s undoing in the 2004 elections: “The entire party went into government… there was no one to fight elections.” He is equally conscious of other areas the BJP faltered in. The party’s explosive growth from two seats in 1984 to 85 in 1989 and finally 182 in 1999 was based on emotive issues like the Ram temple agitation. This growth was clearly unsustainable and never brought in the numbers for it to form a government on its own because the party had no reach in south India. That jinx was broken in May 2014 when the BJP got a simple 282-seat majority, the first in its 34-year history. Shah’s challenge is to create a pan-Indian party that will deliver every time. A party that is large yet nimble. Traditional yet modern. Managing these contradictions could be a tough task and Shah’s recipe for success, revealed during his whirlwind tours, is this: the party will be strengthened from the grassroots up; its catchment area will be expanded even if it means roping in leaders from other parties; an army of
trained, ideologically motivated and socialmedia savvy party workers will be fielded; new leaders will be groomed even as the party harps on its pro-poor agenda.
Shah’s interaction with BJP workers across the country offers an insight into the BJP’s 2019 campaign pitch. The party may be committed to the Ram temple and even cow protection, but the overtly Hindutva issues have been replaced by a distinctly socialist garibi hatao pitch. Shah only talks about the Modi government’s probity, transparency, inner party democracy and pro-poor approach. “It’s a government of the poor,” Shah tells workers. “Schemes like Mudra, Ujjwala, Jan Dhan and Stand-up India have opened a new chapter in poverty elimination.”
Significantly, even in closed-door meetings, Shah steers clear of contentious issues such as Article 370 and the uniform civil code. Those can wait as they have to be achieved within the constitutional framework, he reasons. For now, only development and poverty elimination are front and centre.
The focus for the upcoming state elections will be Modi’s image, his four pro-poor schemes as well as his crusade against corruption. In states like Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh where the Congress is in power, the party will raise the issue of corruption. Where the BJP is in power, the plank would be woven around achievements of the state government. The fulcrum of the strategy will be contrasting Modi’s image to the regional leaders. “The NDA’s corruption-free governance will be a major issue even in state elections and our state electoral machinery has been made aware of it,” says BJP general secretary, organisation, Ram Lal.
Shah’s three-day tours omit any mention of caste and focus only on Modi’s pro-poor measures as well as his image as a development icon. In the backroom, though, Shah and his team are drawing up state-specific caste strategies in consultation with local leaders—between Rajputs and Jats in Rajasthan, Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka, and Patels and other castes in Gujarat where the party fears a backlash over the Patel reservation stir.
The rise in prices due to overtaxation could affect his plans. The hotel industry is unhappy with the increase in tax following implementation of the Goods & Services Tax (GST) and so is the vast handicrafts industry.
His challenge has grown in the past one month after the nation’s growth rate in the last quarter dipped below six per cent. BJP’s social media warriors appear slightly on the defensive for the first time on the economic front. Shah, however, is confident that it is a passing phase as two major decisions like demonetisation and GST are bound to cause some temporary convulsions.
He believes the Rs 400 crore worth of loans the government has provided to 70 million medium-level entrepreneurs has created ample self-employment which will take care of the loss of jobs in some niche areas. “You can’t analyse the job scenario without taking into account self-employment in which our government has broken all past records”, says Amit Malviya, convenor of the party’s IT department and a former investment banker .
Shah has set his targets for 2019. ‘Mission 350’, the plan to get as many Lok Sabha seats in 2019 was the buzz at the national executive of the party in New Delhi on September 24 and 25. The ‘Mission 120’ strategy outlined last year aims for that many Lok Sabha seats from Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and the Northeast.
THE NEW BJP
When Shah steps out of his 11, Akbar Road, residence on the days he is in Delhi, his gaze meets three sepia-toned paintings of personalities, only one of whom is from the Sangh. Chanakya, the political philosopher who laid the foundations of the Mauryan empire in the 4th century BC; Adi Shankaracharya, the philosopher who led the renaissance of Hinduism in the 8th century; and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who birthed the Hindutva ideology that forms the core of the BJP and its parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The troika are Shah’s guiding lights as he attempts to infuse their lessons of religion, statecraft and ideology into rebuilding the party.
Developing Gen Next leaders is one of Shah’s biggest priorities and also his greatest motivational hook—he repeatedly emphasises how the BJP is the only national party where a booth level worker can aspire to be party president. The UP polls saw the development of a new crop of new-generation leaders in the state BJP. Shah swam against the tide to back Yogi Adityanath for CM. Party sources say Shah has identified around 270 leaders, all under age 40, as future leaders. He holds these names close
to his chest. He wants the list to grow beyond 400 names.
Shah frequently brainstorms with key state office-bearers and breaks each state down region by region. A key leader from each state makes a detailed SWOT analysis based on queries Shah sends. At the end of this 90-minute meeting, Shah assesses what changes need to be introduced.
He conducts these open forums with great authority as well as openness. The slightest deviation is sternly dealt with while all genuine grievances are given an ear. Against pending work, like the appointment of office-bearers in party organisations, he sets deadlines with the consent of the appointing authorities and then holds out the threat of action in case of non-compliance. This approach on the one hand helps bring discipline back into the party and on the other provides a platform for genuine grievance redressal.
The grassroots rebuild of the party was among the 10 projects Shah started when he took over as party president. Phase 1 was to build offices in all 670 party districts. In 2014, only 114 district units had their own offices. Today, 30 new district offices have been readied and work on 388 is on. There are projects for making libraries in each state and district headquarter, with books on governance, Indian history, the state or district and the Constitution. A team comprising Arvind Menon, the party in-charge for departments and projects, and IT department convenor Malviya accompanies Shah during his state tours to take stock of progress in various projects.
A key electoral strategy for 2019 is the fielding of an army of 375,000 vistaraks, part-time volunteers who will donate 15 days of their time for booth-strengthening for the party till the general elections. A separate force of 4,000 vistaraks has been assigned to specific assembly segments across the country since May this year to boost the party’s prospects ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
Shah has introduced assignment-based training for treasurers, party spokespersons and elected representatives of local elected bodies. “The present scale and speed of training is simply unprecedented,” says Muralidhar Rao, national party general secretary. As many as 1 million workers at various levels have been trained by the party in Shah’s new political work culture on specific tasks. The three-tier training structure—24 hour organisational training for mandal (block)-level workers under which 7,500 camps have been held in one-and-a-half years; two-day camps for district level workers and three-day ones for statelevel party workers. According to R. Balashankar, member of the training committee, the curriculum includes lessons on ideology, party history and goals, economic policy, media relations and party-government coordination. What’s more, Shah is keen his party workers are mobile and connected. He calls for a show of hands at a meeting to know how many of the 139 party vistaraks have smartphones and motorcycles. He then directs local party leaders to make good on the shortfall.
Shah’s plan is to train the party in such a manner that threats like the mahagathbandhan or anti-incumbency cease to matter, particularly against the onslaught of his unique booth management strategy. The growth due to his smart alliances is remarkable.
As many as 44 parties supported Ramnath Kovind in the presidential election, thanks to the skills of Modi and Shah. Earlier, 33
SHAH’S GRAND ELECTORAL STRATEGY MAY WELL RUN UP AGAINST THE SLUGGISH ECONOMIC GROWTH, THE JOBS CRISIS AND DEMONETISATION
parties attended an NDA meeting under Shah’s leadership. As he put it, “If you follow this mantra, then you have no one to fear but your destiny. You are home with a handsome margin irrespective of any mahagathbandhan or anti-incumbency.”
Soon after he took over, Shah floated 19 new departments, assigned them a work charter and set targets. Such work was being done earlier too but only when the need arose or by small cells with no clear-cut direction or targets. Now there are departments for election management and for coordination with the Election Commission. There is a separate department for handling social media, which has dramatically improved the BJP’s outreach. Then there are departments for party coordination with the central government and for policy research. The party’s Swachh Bharat department, for instance, urges party workers to take part in cleanliness drives.
“Amitbhai has given a new ideological thrust to the BJP. If the PM is aiming for a new India, Amitbhai is looking at a new BJP to match his vision,” says general secretary Bhupendra Yadav. “The transformation being brought about by him is all-encompassing, from improvement in party functioning and transparency to qualitative development of the party and creating a permanent infrastructure.”
BOOTH MANAGEMENT
The one political stratagem he has learned from Modi and deployed to deadly effect is a unique booth management strategy. The smallest unit of the BJP’s electoral machine, a booth covers around 1,000 voters. Shah was able to accurately forecast results in all seven phases of the UP elections earlier this year due to the booth-level feedback that flowed in from party workers on the ground. Now, he is fine-tuning the strategy. At closed-door meetings on his recent Madhya Pradesh tour, he told party workers to enlist 1.2 million (apart from the existing 58 lakh) members and ensure of them each casts their vote with two family members.
As BJP national general secretary Anil Jain says, “The benefits have been evident as in Manipur where the party’s vote share rose from three to 33 per cent.” Shah now wants all the committees to engage with booth voters on a regular basis.
MANY A SLIP
Shah’s grand electoral strategy is not without its vulnerabilities. The key imponderables causing worry within the party are the sluggish economic growth, the crisis in jobs and the impact of demonetisation and GST on the unorganised sector. The lateral entry of defectors from other political parties has fuelled discontent within the BJP. A section of the party’s senior leadership feels alienated. “The BJP’s victories are a result of Shah’s strategy and ability to convert support for Prime Minister Modi into votes. But he has to create a system where veterans are consulted,” says Janardan Mishra, 78, a senior UP BJP leader and former Vajpayee aide. A Shah aide dismisses the criticism outright. “There is bound to be ill feeling among veterans when new leadership is being created,” he says.
Meanwhile, despite three years as party president, Shah has not been able to appoint a full team of office-bearers. This has forced him to continue with the existing office-bearers even if their performance is not up to the standard he would like.
A party observer, who does not want to be identified, says Shah’s near-term target of 120 new Lok Sabha seats for the 2019 elections seems difficult. State units like West Bengal are gripped by infighting, failing to take advantage of what the BJP feels is Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s unabashed minority appeasement. Nor has the BJP been able to do much in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Shah has to wield the axe, throw the deadwood out and get in new talent if he is to get results. If the winning streak falters, there will be no one else to blame. And Shah, more than anyone else, knows that.
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