Amit Shah and the March of BJP

TV

INTRODUCTION

Arenewed interest in the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) was perceived to be growing around June 2013 when Narendra Modi was declared the chief of the party’s election campaign for the 2014 general elections. In the days and months to come, Modi would weave an impressive and dominant narrative that would give rise to a strong and compelling emotion for change. This would eventually grow into a massive wave that would sweep away the Congress dispensation which had ruled India for a decade from 2004 to 2014.

Since May 2014, worldwide interest both in the Narendra Modi-led government and the party—BJP—has kept growing. Interestingly, as we have discussed in the pages of this book, both the government led by Modi and the party led by Amit Shah have continued in their respective trajectories of activities, innovation, performance and results and yet have been linked and coordinated in their functioning.

The party that had systemically initiated, supported, sustained and upheld the electoral struggle and narrative for India in 2014 did not recede into complacency after the massive victory. Interestingly and fascinatingly, the BJP, after its victory in 2014, launched itself on a mission of expansion, of restructuring and of widening its activities and outreach. It directed itself into sustained creative political programmes that eventually saw it, by 2018, forming governments or being part of governments in twenty-one Indian states that covers 70 per cent of India’s population. Its political narrative became the dominant one with its political presence becoming pan-Indian. This phase also saw the BJP decisively break out of the false stereotype of being a ‘Hindi heartland party’—a stereotype that was imposed on it to suit a certain political angle and motive.

This phase had also been a very creative one for the BJP, seeing as the party achieved many landmarks, some of which actually redefined the manner and dimension of the functioning of political parties while restating their roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis society and polity.

Despite the near constant pressures and exigencies of a continuous cycle of elections, the BJP has, from 2014 to the present, displayed a distinct effort at evolving beyond the matrix and framework of being a mere electoral machine or a political entity which comes to life and takes to action only when elections are round the corner. In this, it has left far behind other political formations—formations which are either family governed, dynasty driven and election-oriented entities with no political creativity and scope for expansion such as Rahul Gandhi-led Congress or those which are increasingly faced with a shrinking membership base, ideological confusion and depleting electoral footprints like the communist parties in India today.

Some of the milestones that have been reached in this phase have had a great impact on the party as a whole. The BJP’s emergence as the largest political party in the world through a unique membership drive, the creative and imaginative countrywide training initiative for workers of the party, the restructuring of the party and imparting it a modernised work ambience and support system, its ideological self-renewal, its nationwide outreach, its various dimensions and layers, its innovative and effective booth outreach programme, enrolling young and dynamic workers from all strata of society and from across the country as Vistaraks, the successful celebrations of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya’s centenary through a series of innovative political initiatives, the streamlining of the party’s functioning into departments and projects, the massive victory in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in March 2017, the inroads and victories across the entire stretch of India's Northeast, the resounding victory in Tripura and the cycle of electoral victories in general across the country, the historic Yatra against political violence in Kerala, the Yatra for the Tricolour and in remembrance of freedom fighters are some of the many milestones that have defined the BJP’s journey from the summer of 2014.

It is a journey which has distinctly energised the party’s overall approach to its own political activities and programmes and has galvanised its rank and file. It has begun to alter mindsets by articulating the contours of a different political discourse. One of the greatest successes of the BJP during this phase has been in its role as the bridge between its government at the centre and in the states and the people at large. A bridge that reads and interprets emotions, aspirations, reactions and hopes of the people and conveys it to its formation in power—the government at the centre—and a conveyor belt which successfully, creatively and continuously disseminates the vision of transformative governance that Narendra Modi has articulated and acted upon in these last four years that he has been in power.

Since 2014, the BJP has presented itself as an organism which is active among people, which is active in itself through its various organs and units and which is proactive in trying to continuously re-invent itself. These have been years packed with creative and result-oriented action, years which have, in a sense, seen the party evolve to a new level. It is only the hard-boiled cynics or the diehard political adversaries who will refuse to see or acknowledge the changes and the leap forward.

As a party, the BJP too has a narrative since the summer of 2014. There is a story to record and recount. With the increasing interest in the BJP and an increasing curiosity in its working, structure, philosophy, electoral and expansion strategies, more and more scholars, commentators, observers and wannabe authors have been focusing on the party and its trajectory since 2014.

The discussion has veered round to how the BJP wins, how the party functions, how its president Amit Shah directs it, how its physical and ideological structures are in the process of receiving fresh doses of energy and direction and how Shah has turned it into a vast and disciplined machine that is winning elections after elections while emerging as the centre of Indian politics. Some of these readings have been shallow, perfunctory and have succeeded to just scratch the surface while lacking any real understanding of the fundamental changes that the party is witnessing today. They have failed to grasp altogether the deeper raison d’être behind the effort to upgrade and impart greater stability to the organs and units of the principal edifice of the party. Some readings have been of a more serious nature; the best narrator of the rise of the BJP during this period is perhaps Shah himself and his programmes that speak for themselves.

However, most of the readings and narratives that have emerged have been based on speculations, surmises and assumptions. The writers or commentators have never had access to actual information, or even if they had they never had access to the deeper details and the full information. At times, when Shah himself spoke of these publicly—which was not often—one could get an idea of the party’s workings, otherwise most of it was speculative. A number of these reading attempted to fit the party and Shah into predetermined moulds and stereotypes, often with an express political and ideological motive and at times out of plain inability to understand the workings of the mind which was driving such a varied change and expansion.

Closely following Shah’s presidency of the BJP for the last four years, we often felt the need to come up with a narrative of these years relying on authentic sources, material and information. The idea was to record the story of these years so that it becomes an authentic source for any future evaluation of the years when the BJP was headed by Shah.

Any present or future reading and evaluation of the BJP will have to base itself on the years 2014 to 2019 and closely examine the party and its trajectory during this crucial phase. It is crucial because it gives us an insight into how the party conducted and drove itself while supporting a full majority government at the centre for the first time in its history. While many narratives have emerged, it was important for one more to emerge, one that would be largely recounted from the inside.

We have had the opportunity of being at the ringside and having an inside view of the organisational transformation, of the many activities that Shah had initiated since taking over. We were closely involved in the activities of some of the departments; we had the occasion to closely monitor Shah’s countrywide tours and sitting through his meetings and also of participating in some election activities. In short, we were within the system and yet on the margins of it and this gave us a view, and at the same time enabled us to step back and step in whenever it was needed to balance our reading and understanding of the process. In fact, it was while closely following extended Vistrit (a countrywide tour undertaken in 2017) and recording and documenting it in great detail that we realised the magnitude of his planning and the detailed and minute attention that he gave to every aspect of the party’s functioning, its details and its result-oriented actions. In this entire effort at an extended samvad that Shah undertook, we realised that the BJP was, once again, passing through a crucial period of its history. It was a period, therefore, which had to be documented.

In our attempt to sketch the trajectory of the BJP in these four crucial years, we were often reminded of the likes of Craig Baxter, the first historian to narrate the rise and growth of the Jana Sangh with a dispassionate and yet sympathetic approach and of those who had helped and assisted him, all our first generation leaders of the party, like the iconic Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya himself, L.K. Advani, J.P. Mathur and K.R. Malkani. Our effort in recording the rise and growth of the BJP in these four years is somewhat similar to what Baxter did over fifty years ago. It is an authentic and yet not a hagiographic reading of Shah’s presidency of the party.

We too were helped and encouraged by a number of leaders of our generations, who understood the importance and centrality of such a narrative, who were supportive, helpful and yet not obtrusive. There were many who did not know that they were being interviewed, while we spoke to them. When we met Shah, either all by ourselves or with others for meetings, we took the opportunity of asking him some probing questions, reminding him of some event or occasion which would often set him talking, with a wealth of information and details pouring into our notebooks. These interactions with Shah were often spontaneous and freewheeling. In the course of writing this book, we heard a large number of his speeches, went through pages of the party resolutions, accessed a plethora of articles on him, read his interviews, scanned his profiles, spoke to those who have closely worked with him and have seen his political evolution over the years and also recorded anecdotes and episodes that would help us put together his narrative.

One of the false and often peddled descriptions that has been imposed on Shah and which was through and through busted in these meetings and interactions was that of his style being corporate and isolated. Shah came across as very earthy and hands-on, someone who has risen through the ranks and, more importantly, has not forgotten his roots and past.

Ever since he took over as president of the BJP in July 2014, Amit Shah’s drive has been directed not only towards winning elections but, more importantly for our narrative, towards the expansion, the overhaul and the restructuring of the party itself. His insistence on ideological renewal, his conviction that the party would have to be imparted a modern working structure, his meticulous emphasis on the need to systematically train and orient its workers and yet retain the original spirit of the party, his emphasis on looking at political work and responsibility as a full time endeavour, his insistence on continuously remaining connected to the grassroots and to have a regular dialogue with workers on the ground are aspects which have lent a new momentum to the party. Above all his insistence on not being complacent is what has continued to drive and give direction to the BJP.

With his decades long grassroots experience in organisation work for the party in Gujarat, with his wide administrative experience in the state, with his sharp electoral-strategic sense, with his minute understanding and grasp of policies and policymaking and its impact on the mood of the people, with his feel of the pulse of the people at large, Shah, we discerned and have argued, has truly succeeded in turning the party into a bridge and an organism with a sense of social responsibility. That in itself has been one of his most distinct successes.

We took it upon ourselves to narrate the story of the BJP since 2014. In narrating this fascinating story, we take upon ourselves the responsibilities of narration, of interpretations and of articulations. The omissions, if any, are solely ours and based on our still evolving understanding of a movement like the BJP. In a sense, no knowledge of a party like the BJP can be definitive or final. The chapters and sections that follow look at the party’s and the movement’s growth and history since 1951—when the journey began with ten members—to its expansion to 11 crore members by 2015, its electoral successes, the method and approach of Amit Shah’s functioning and how he has attempted to restructure and redirect the activities of the party.

The chapters also analyse the various innovative outreach campaigns that have been initiated in the quest for expanding the party and much more. They aim to dissolve the many false narratives of the party. In a sense our narrative is exhaustive as well as authentic, though we do not claim that we are in the know of the entire story. What we have sought to record, document and narrate is the current wave of the BJP’s resurgence, its evolution as a party of governance and its clear emergence as the dominant and most focused pole of Indian politics. Its present reach and standing are a clear result of and a tribute to the struggles of the past and the unrelenting actions of the present.

It is a story that is the key to our understanding of India’s present resurgence and the future shape of her polity.

• CHAPTER 1 •

FROM THE LAMP

TO THE LOTUS

The Symbolism of the Mandate of 2014

The month of May 2014 was undeniably a historic moment in the history of post-independent India. After what seemed to be an unending hiatus, a single political party received a resounding mandate in the general elections. It was a reassuring mandate after a period of prolonged indecisiveness and policy paralysis, and it signalled the arrival of an era of stability in terms of governance and politics.

The BJP led by Narendra Modi bagged 282 seats which gave it a decisive edge. Along with its coalition partners of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), it could form a stable coalition by breaking the vicious cycle of unstable coalition mandates. There was a gruelling election campaign in which the dominant theme veered around issues of livelihood, development and governance, with Narendra Modi emerging as the symbol of a new alternative. Some ‘saw him as a strong leader who would undo the policy paralysis and the sense of drift India had experienced in the final three years of the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance’.¹

Large numbers who ‘wanted purposeful governance of the type that Modi had provided in Gujarat over the past thirteen years’,² as chief minister of the state from 2001 to 2014, made this mandate possible and converted it into a turning point in India’s recent electoral history. An entire generation had grown up without the memory of a full majority government, a decisive leader and a defined programme of governance for the country. The story of Narendra Modi’s rise to the top leadership of his party, his very modest and challenging background, his journey from the margins to the centre and his capacity of articulating an alternate narrative of India in the new century made an impact across vast swathes of India, especially among the youth.

As early as 2011, a certain fatigue and disillusionment with the Congress-led UPA-II dispensation had started setting in. Mega corruption scandals, indecisiveness, a lack of political will when it came to promoting or protecting India’s interests and India’s receding global footprints were giving rise to disenchantment among people. Along with this was also a gradually emerging support in favour of Modi and change. Observers of Indian politics, having noticed this gradual shift, argued for the need to replicate the Gujarat development model in other parts of the country, and of the need for youth power to ensure that this could be made possible and Modi be positioned for a greater ‘pan-Indian role’.³

The mandate of 2014, when it came, symbolised people’s expression of their ‘volcanic capacity to remake the political landscape’⁴ of India. In a sense, May 2014 was a liberating moment for India’s polity, which had faced chronic instability for a while, either because of coalitions and fractured mandates or because of weak political leadership and an unclear demarcation between political power and actual responsibility. Narendra Modi’s mandate was ‘more than a popular mandate, it was a cry from India’s heart, a call for profound change and decisive governance in a country and among a people tired of excuses and exasperated by the old ways’.⁵

A widely read western paper went so far as to argue in its editorial that the electoral verdict of 2014 ‘may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India’. It observed, ‘Narendra Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of a long era in which the structures of power did not differ greatly from those through which Britain ruled the subcontinent. India under the Congress party was in many ways a continuation of the British Raj by other means.’⁶ The editorial spoke of the voice of the people asserting itself, a people who had a vote but often lacked a voice. Modi was seen as an endorsement of that voice; he was ‘a new kind of leader’ from the ‘lower castes’, not a ‘natural English speaker’, without any truck with old power structures and elites.⁷

But more importantly, the verdict was seen as the voice of the people announcing ‘a new kind of India. In the old India, the poor were there to be helped, when the elite remembered to do so or when they needed to seek or, in effect, to buy votes. The middling classes were taken for granted and sometimes snubbed’. This new kind of India was ‘not interested in handouts and refuses to be snubbed’. It wanted the ‘obstacles it sees as impeding its aspirations swept away’ and it has, quite clearly, ‘discarded the deference it displayed towards the Gandhi family and towards the Anglicised’ elite.⁸

The Struggle and Saga: Formation of Jana Sangh

May 2014 was the fifth and the most decisive high watermark of a long and arduous political saga and struggle that began in October 1951, with the formation of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS). Having resigned from Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, the first cabinet of free India, in which he was the minister of industry and supply, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901-1953), pioneering educationist, erstwhile leading light of the Hindu Mahasabha, a member of the constituent assembly and one of the dominant voices of Bengal politics, worked to form a political alternative to the Nehruvian behemoth.

Dissatisfied with the overall national direction under the Nehruvian dispensation, Mookerjee formed the Jana Sangh with swayamsevaks of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which, under the leadership of Guruji M.S. Golwalkar, directed some of its most energetic and young pracharaks—workers who had dedicated themselves full-time for the RSS work—for assisting Mookerjee as the proposed party’s first ‘administrators and managers’.⁹ Through his interactions with Guruji Golwalkar and the RSS organisation, Mookerjee was convinced that the RSS ‘could be anything but reactionary. It already had an extensive network of branches and a cadre of tried and selfless workers’.¹⁰ It was not that Mookerjee was not exposed to the RSS. In 1940, he had met the RSS founder Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. Guruji Golwalkar was present during that meeting. It was an interesting encounter in which Dr Mookerjee and Dr Hedgewar discussed the plight of Hindus in the then Muslim League ruled Bengal, the need to organise them, the RSS and politics and much more. It is said that during the course of the discussion, Dr Mookerjee suggested to Dr Hedgewar that the ‘Sangh must take part in politics’ to which Hedgewar is said to have replied that the Sangh ‘was not interested in day to day politics’ but with the ‘support and blessings of enlightened people like’ Mookerjee, the ‘beneficial Sangh activities in Bengal will grow fast’ and the ‘protection and help needed by the Hindus will thus become automatically available’.¹¹ By connecting with Guruji Golwalkar again, Mookerjee was taking forward a dialogue that had been initiated in the past. He was, in a sense, renewing his understanding and association with the RSS. Having met Guruji Golwalkar, Mookerjee felt that any political organisation supported by and ‘enjoying the confidence of the RSS could surely succeed in mobilising and consolidating the non-Congress and non-Communist nationalist public opinion’.¹² In the few early months, after the formation of the Jana Sangh on 21 October 1951, Mookerjee admirably withstood and countered the Nehruvian hegemony which was out to crush the newly born party. To Nehru’s resolve that he would crush the Jana Sangh, Mookerjee famously declared that he would instead ‘crush this crushing mentality’.¹³ The Jana Sangh’s symbol was the earthen lamp, a symbol that reflected the Indian cultural psyche. Speaking of the new party's symbol, Mookerjee hoped that the party ‘whose symbol in the forthcoming elections is a humble earthen pradip’ would try ‘to carry this light of hope and unity, faith and courage, to dispel the darkness that surrounds the country’.¹⁴ In the first general elections in 1951-52, the fledgling Jana Sangh could win only three seats but it had at least succeeded in making its ‘existence known everywhere’ with ‘its name and ideology’ reaching ‘the remotest villages especially in the areas in which it had contested elections. It had secured a foothold in the country and also in the hearts of the people’.¹⁵

Jana Shakti vs Raj Shakti: Deendayal Upadhyaya and Jana Sangh’s Growth

Mookerjee’s early death in 1953 in detention in Kashmir under mysterious circumstances brought about an existential crisis for the fledgling Jana Sangh. It not only ‘caused dismay throughout India’ but it ‘deprived the party of its only parliamentarian of national standing and its one secure link with powerful networks of highly placed professional and political bodies around which an anti-Congress front might have been constructed’.¹⁶ The Jana Sangh eventually survived the ordeal and began growing in political strength and spread under the leadership of Mookerjee’s youthful and far-seeing understudy Deendayal Upadhyaya who, through long years, steered the Jana Sangh ship in the often rough and choppy waters of the Nehruvian era and during the immediate phase after Nehru’s passing.

A dexterous and deft political organiser, a fundamental political thinker and theoretician and an earthy political tactician, Upadhyaya combined in him both idealism and pragmatism and saw to it that the Jana Sangh, from 1953 to 1968 (at the time of his untimely assassination) had clearly emerged as one of the polls of Indian politics. It displayed a remarkable upward growth over the years.

As one of the early and perhaps the only sympathetic biographer of the Jana Sangh, the American political historian Craig Baxter noted, ‘The Bharatiya Jana Sangh enjoys a unique position among the national political parties of India. It is the only party that has increased its percentage of the popular vote share of parliamentary and assembly seats in each successive election from 1952 through 1967.’¹⁷ In fact, the formation of the Jana Sangh in 1951 can be termed as the first watershed of an alternate political narrative in independent India.

Among the political parties in India, post-independence, the Jana Sangh and later the BJP went on to eventually emerge as the most stable political formations. Ironically, it was Madhu Limaye, one of leading Indian socialists of the 1970s, who was instrumental in the collapse of the Janata Party experiment. She spoke of being ‘amazed by the capacity of the JS-BJP [later the BJP] to hold together. It is alone among India’s political parties (written by Madhu Limaye) which has not suffered a division. Every other political party has suffered a split, some parties even repeated splits’.¹⁸ Upadhyaya’s projection of the fledgling Jana Sangh was that it reflected Jana Shakti as against the Congress steamroller which was representative of Raj Shakti.¹⁹ This caught the imagination of a section that had become increasingly disillusioned with the Congress.

Reaching out to the Last Citizen: Formulating a Political Philosophy

In terms of the articulation of a programme and ideology for the Jana Sangh, 1965 saw a second watershed. In that year, Upadhyaya formulated his political philosophy of Integral Humanism. It was a political philosophy that was to become the foundation of all the ideological positions that Jana Sangh would henceforth articulate and would also continue to guide and later influence the ideological direction of the Jana Sangh’s political successor, the BJP.

While Syama Prasad Mookerjee founded the party, it was Upadhyaya who laid its political foundation in terms of organisation and ideology. One of the main pillars of this political philosophy was the vision of Antyoday—the empowerment, the rise and inclusion of the marginal citizen in the growth story of the nation. In his approach to governance, Upadhyaya argued for the need to evolve systems and programmes that would ensure such an inclusion and empowerment.

In his first presidential address in 1980, after the formation of the BJP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee reiterated that political philosophy when he spoke of the need to correct distortions of inequality and ‘regard the individual, particularly the weakest individual, as the focal point of our developmental endeavours’.²⁰ Narendra Modi bases his entire governance philosophy on Antyoday, while his party today has structured its programmes and outreach basing itself on that philosophical foundation.

Fragmentation of the Congress Juggernaut and the SVD Experiment: 1967

The third political watershed was reached in 1967 when the Congress’s pan-Indian political domination was demolished, and the Jana Sangh became a part of a number of coalition ministries that were formed in the states, comprising the Praja Socialist Party (PSP), Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP) and the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD). This formation, known as the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) on the floor of the state assemblies in which the Congress was ousted, succeeded for the first time in providing a governance alternative to the Congress. The year 1967 was thus an important milestone year for the Jana Sangh, primarily because of Deendayal Upadhyaya’s political pragmatism; the Congress juggernaut could be challenged, slowed and, in some states, halted. That year the Congress lost power in six states. As Baxter put it:

In 1967, for the fourth time in India’s history, the opposition went to the polls with the high, and previously dashed, hopes of displacing the Congress Party. This time, however, there was a different result for the opposition did reduce the Congress to a minority in several states, and, almost without exception, in other states sharply reduced Congress majorities. In the Lok Sabha the results were headlined by one paper as ‘Congress struggles to a majority’.

In the Lok Sabha, the Jana Sangh won thirty-five seats and was the largest non-Congress formation after the Swatantra Party which had bagged forty-four seats. Upadhyaya’s party emerged as the second party in India ‘in terms of votes received and assembly seats won’, while the Congress was in a state of shock.