The BJP President Amit Shah is set to continue after his current ad hoc term ends in December.
The storm kicked up by the party elders, including L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, after the Bihar defeat seems to have petered out. According to reports, a consensus has emerged in the wider Sangh Parivar that removing Shah at this stage would be tantamount to holding him responsible for the Bihar loss. A lot of factors were at play in Bihar, especially the innocent suggestion by the RSS chief for a public debate on the entire gamut of issues involved in the caste-linked reservations. Besides, this was not the first time that the party had failed to win elections. Even under Advani and Joshi, the BJP had lost a string of elections and yet nobody had sought their removal. This was a valid counter to the demand raised by some in the party that there should be a change at the top since Shah had failed in Bihar. But what weighed in favour of Shah was the fact that Narendra Modi wanted him to continue to head the party. Since it helps if the prime minster and the head of the ruling party enjoy mutual confidence and trust, there could be no doubt that Shah and Modi make a perfect team, the former invariably playing second fiddle to the latter.
Indeed, Shah owes his meteoric rise in the party from a relatively unknown Gujarat-based leader only to Modi. As CM, Modi had relied on Shah the most in the State government, though officially he was only accorded the status of a junior Home Minister while Modi held the portfolio at the cabinet level. Given this level of trust, it was only right that Shah should continue. It may be mentioned here that Shah is now completing the unfinished three-year term of Rajnath Singh who had to quit as party president upon his joining the Modi Government as Home Minister. It is that ad hoc term which will end in December.
After this, as per the BJP constitution, Shah can hold two consecutive terms of three years each. In other words, at the party’s coming national executive meeting, scheduled to be held later this month in Kolkata, he is expected to get the go-ahead for his full-fledged three-year term from the beginning of the new year. Without doubt, a party once led by Vajpayee and Advani has undergone a vast change in image and personnel in the Modi era. But then this is true of almost all political parties, a fact reflected in the intellectual and organisational ordinariness of the people at the helm in most parties.
Shah is essentially a nuts-and-bolts leader, who engages himself in fine tuning the organisational structures in order for the party to win elections. Yes, he failed in Bihar. But the same Shah had succeeded rather big in the Lok Sabha polls and the subsequent polls in Maharashtra and Haryana. Again, winning and losing in democracies is no single party’s birthright. But where Shah has given cause for complaint is in his man-management. He is rough and ready in his behavior to the point of being rude. Arrogance reveals a lack of self-confidence, a point that Shah needs to remember. As the head of the party, he must be more communicative, more open and friendlier towards people, especially those from his own party. Also, he needs to involve as many people as possible in whatever he does for the party, especially elections.
One of the reasons for the wrong strategy in Bihar seemed to be his tendency to centralise all decision-making in his own hands so much so that even senior State leaders had felt marginalised. Again, projecting himself along with Modi might be fine since he is the party chief, but care should be taken that the State leaders are given due prominence. Politics is a collective, team sport. Shah in his first full-fledged term as BJP President needs to drastically reduce the distance between him and the party cadres. And always exude an image of easy conviviality towards one and all. No party boss can help to succeed conducting his affairs from behind a fortress-like office or by cocooning himself behind a forbidding ring of gun-toting commandos. With elections due in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and a number of other states, Shah has his job cut out. If the BJP wins Assam, it would have put behind the shock of Bihar. Having learnt from Bihar, he has appointed a popular leader as the State BJP chief.
