The man of the year, not just the man of the month: Amit Shah

On August 5 this year, the country’s atmosphere was rife with anticipation. Scores of columns of Army and paramilitary forces had been moving into Kashmir for the past one week. Major opposition leaders had been put under house arrest in the Valley. Nobody, however, had any inkling of what New Delhi wanted to do. But, everybody knew something big was planned.

But everybody was stunned when Union Home Minister Amit Shah moved a bill in Parliament to abrogate most sections of Article 370 and to scrap Article 35A of the Constitution giving special status and powers to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, as soon as the House resumed work on that Monday. The bill also bifurcated the state into two Union Territories - Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir.

The unthinkable had been done. The Opposition as well as people of Jammu and Kashmir had never imagined that in a span of 12 hours such a contentious and potentially volatile bill would not only be brought in Rajya Sabha but passed as well. That too, when the ruling NDA didn’t have majority in the Upper House of Parliament. Congress leaders trooped into the well of the House protesting against what they called mockery of the Constitution and parliamentary practices. Peoples Democratic Party members tried to tear copies of the Constitution and were asked to leave the House. Tradition of circulation of bill copies to MPs at least two days in advance was done away with. They received the copies only after the Bill has been moved.

But, they couldn’t do much as opposition unity disintegrated as barring the Congress, the DMK and a few others, no party dared oppose the move touted as re-integrating India.

It was seen as the handiwork of one person - the rotund Amit Shah who enjoys complete trust of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He had assumed charge barely two and half months ago. This was his first stint at the Centre. Yet, he demonstrated tremendous Machiavellian tactics to outsmart everyone. In one crackling swoop, Shah cemented not just his place as Second-in-Command in the Modi government but also earned the epithet of BJP’s Chanakya.

The Valley has been under siege ever since. All political leaders are still under house arrest. Security personnel dot every lane and bylane of the Valley. International organisations slammed the Modi government for human rights violations but Shah remained undeterred. Hardly had the dust settled on Kashmir that Shah brought in another contentious legislation — Citizenship (Amendment) Act — seeking to provide citizenship to the persecuted non-Muslim minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

This is the first legislation in the country to be enacted on religious basis. It violates Article 15 and 16 of the Constitution which provide for social equality and religious freedom. Yet, the BJP brought the legislation and got it passed by both Houses of Parliament with a little help from some non-NDA parties. Shah rammed the Bill through Parliament, hectoring and bullying, dismissing whatever opposition came his way.

This put the entire country on fire. University and college students across the country hit the roads in peaceful demonstrations against CAA and NRC. But, Shah’s police was more brutal than the British cops under the Raj. They beat up students, ransacked hostels and libraries and even fired at them, killing over two dozen persons during past one week.

Could Shah have bitten more than he could chew this time? He had not bargained for the Hindus to join the CAA protests. He, for once, undermined the secular nature of the country. But no one should be complacent. People knowing the Shah-Modi duo’s chemistry claim that Shah would return to the issues of CAA, NRC, may be after the Delhi Assembly elections are held in the next few months.

Appearance not deceptive

Shah’s gestures and speech betray mannerisms of a street bully. His speech delivery style — right hand on his waist and fingers on his left wagging at the opposition doesn’t behove a person holding possibly the most important position in the government, next to the PM.

Going by his appearance, wry smiles, glares at the Opposition, barking orders at fellow party leaders and bureaucrats, some of his own cabinet colleagues mock him in his back saying he could any day get the chief villain’s role in a South Indian film.

Shah is aware of his reputation. And he seems to rather enjoy it for it helps retain his aura of a stern, no-nonsense master. His terror prevails within the party and the government. He might have started his career as a stock-broker and a small time industrialist, yet at his mentor Modi’s insistence, he has read history, religion and mythology extensively, especially during his incarceration and exile from Gujarat, in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case. By his own admission, he read Lokmanya Tilak’s Gita Rahasya and Dayanand Saraswati’s Satyarth Prakash, which forms the core of Arya Samaj philosophy, during this time. One of his old colleagues from Ahmedabad says he has mastered Adi Shankara’s works. Only a few know Hindu philosophy better than Amit Shah, he claims.

Master of Lies and Half-truths

Had Congress not divided the country on religious lines in 1947, we would not have to bring in this legislation,” he shouted. Shah has often been clever with his words and cunning with his arguments, peddling half-truths and plain lies as facts.

The facts are that the parties which were rooting for the Two-Nation Theory were the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League whereas the Congress was opposed to the concept. But the widespread Noakhali riots in October-November 1946, in which over 5,000 Hindus were killed, forced it to rethink and Congress leaders ultimately accepted Partition. But then Amit Shah is an ace historian and theologist.

Shah did it again when he quoted Pakistan’s Census figures to claim that Hindu population in Pakistan had dwindled from 24 per cent in 1947 to 4 per cent in 2019 because of persecution. It again is a half-truth. Hindus indeed were 24 per cent in areas which went to Pakistan in 1947. But then Pakistan had two parts - East and West - and Hindus were both in Bengal and Punjab. Millions of them migrated to India post-Partition and the movement continued for many years. According to readily available Pakistan Census figures, Hindus comprised just 2.8 per cent of West Pakistan’s population in 1961 which over the years has grown to 4 per cent. In fact, Hindus have been part of Pakistan’s parliament, bureaucracy and one of them had even served as Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

This belies his claim of large-scale persecution of Hindus in Pakistan. Some of them might have crossed over to India over the years but they have been living in abject penury and filthy conditions in India.

“If the BJP was so concerned about Hindu refugees from Pakistan, instead of making them a political tool, it should have provided them with better jobs and respectable living conditions in BJP-ruled states like Uttar Pradesh”, says Samajwadi Party leader from the state, PN Tiwari.

More than Atal-Advani combination

Political pundits have, however, been baffled by Shah’s meteoric rise in NDA-2, often eclipsing his mentor Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it by design that Modi wants to nurture Shah as his possible successor or is he playing a statesman a la Atal Behari Vajpayee while making Shah do all the dirty work for him, a role performed with aplomb by Lal Krishna Advani for Vajpayee ?

In case, risky moves like abrogation of Article 370 or CAA-NRC come a cropper, Modi will blame Shah for them but if they succeed, he himself would take all the credit. In fact the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Countries and the European Union have already blamed Shah for CAA, threatening to ban his entry.

In view of the country-wide outrage and global criticism, at BJP’s Delhi rally last Sunday, Modi announced there would be no NRC anywhere in the country. “During last five years, there has been no talk anywhere in the government of a country-wide NRC. It’s a canard being spread by the Opposition. You should not believe it”, he told the people.

He also denied presence of detention centres in the country. On both counts, he was wrong. Shah has repeatedly been announcing that CAA will be followed by a country-wide NRC to identify ghuspethiye (infiltrators) in the country. MoS (Home) Nityanand Rai and Krishna Reddy on different occasions have informed Parliament that the government was constructing detention centres in Assam to house the illegal immigrants and that over 1,000 persons caught without documents had already been sent to such shelters.

The PM, being head of the state, can’t be wrong. That meant falsifying Shah’s claims on NRC. But, those knowing Shah claim that he would take the blame sportingly. He has done that in his entire career whether it was the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter or the 2002 riots. Shah never let the heat reach Modi.

“The PM needed to contain the damage and diffuse the situation, by dousing the raging fires of anti-CAA agitations. That’s why he might have slipped in ‘No-NRC’ chant. But NRC is inevitable. It can’t be cancelled. It just has been postponed for now. How else will we identify the infiltrators,” claimed a senior BJP leader after the rally.

Shah doesn’t take a single step without Modi’s approval. They have been together for past 40 years. They complement each other. Modi is the planner and Shah executes those plans. They joined RSS almost at the same time in the early 80s.

Later when they moved to the BJP together, they together decimated senior BJP leaders like Kashiram Rana, Keshubhai Patel, Shankar Sinh Vaghela and Suresh Mehta. When, the BJP, on the insistence of then state general secretary (organision) Sanjay Joshi, asked Modi not to enter Gujarat, Shah acted as his eyes and ears in Gujarat. And when Modi returned to Gandhinagar as Chief Minister, Shah occupied the coveted Home Ministry.

Rise and the Strategy

Earlier, when the Congress was ruling Gujarat and had formidable influence in rural areas, cooperatives and sports bodies, the BJP decided to challenge the Congress hold over rural Gujarat. They worked on a simple calculation — that for every elected village pradhan, there was almost an equally powerful and resourceful leader who failed to win. Shah approached defeated pradhans and “inducted” them into the BJP. Soon, there was a network of 8,000 pradhan challengers working for the BJP, Shah recalls. It is this very template Shah deployed to win 73 out if 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 General Election and the 2017 Assembly elections. This was unbelievable since the party had lost badly two years earlier, in the 2012 Assembly elections.

During the Vajpayee-Advani era, the BJP was coy in going all-out with its Hindutva plank for fear of antagonising allies and due to its perceived limited electoral appeal, but under Modi-Shah duo, the party has worn its Hindutva ideology on its sleeves like a badge of honour. Amit Shah believes that Hindutva combined with BJP’s hardcore nationalism agenda, though panned as shrill and divisive by its critics, gives the BJP a distinct identity, and is a winning electoral strategy. He also believes that the allies would keep coming as long as the party is delivering in the polls.

Amit Shah is also known to match his limitless political ambition with thorough homework. When it realised in 2015 that the BJP and allies were no match for the joint forces of Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar in Bihar, the party worked at winning over the JD(U) president, who finally broke his short alliance with Prasad in 2017 and joined hands with the former ally.

Shah believes that Panna Pramukh and Booth Management strategies are keys to electoral success. He is also a firm believer in the adage that too much freedom destroys democracy — especially within the party. During the 2014 campaign he crushed dissent in UP with an iron hand. “Will you withdraw or shall I throw you out of the party,” was his refrain.

Bull in the China shop

Ruthless. Machiavellian. Authoritarian. Many adjectives are used to describe Amit Shah. But none of them fully capture the persona. His party colleagues, often in awe of him and also fearful of him, describe Shah as the sharpest political mind of his generation.

Apart from a razor sharp understanding of caste and electoral dynamics, what sets Shah apart from his peers is his burning desire to win. From completely disregarding local leaders and their egos, to using the RSS network to keep an eye on his own candidates, to propping up proxies, Shah believes all is fair in war and elections and is willing to do whatever it takes to end up on the winning side.

Shah is the master of the election control room. He believes that an efficient control room is as necessary to win an election as booth-level workers. During the 2014 elections, he used to sit for long hours with dozens of young workers poring over desktop screens, analysing reports from each constituency, dividing seats into the smallest of units and preparing action plans down to every one of them.

From winning elections — ever increasing margin of victory in his own seat Sarkhej, is a testimony — to being a bull in China shop that is the Government of India, Shah has undergone quite a transformation. Triple Talaq Ban, abrogation of Article 370 and CAA have been done in six months. They are just the glimpses of his agenda. He still has four and a half years of his tenure left. And issues like nation-wide NRC, construction of Ram Janmabhoomi Temple, Naional Population Policy are still on his radar. He is just waiting for the cauldron to cool down a bit, before putting it on the fire again.