Ahmedabad, July 10 – Amit Shah might have thrilled his supporters by his 71-out-of-80-seats performance from Uttar Pradesh in the recent Lok Sabha polls but his task as the new national BJP president might not be so easy if one goes by the mandate the party seems to have given him.
His mandate is manifold:
1. Win the Maharashtra, Haryana and Delhi assembly polls for the BJP with impressive margins and install a BJP Chief Minister in Maharashtra against Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray’s claims by keeping the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance intact.
2. Take the BJP’s popularity to the next level and prepare the party for a two-thirds majority in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
3. Create a new ideologically-committed OBC leadership from the BJP-RSS fold in an age of power-sharing as he did in UP to counter the caste politics of caste-oriented regional parties dependent on votebank politics for their survival.
4. Implement the RSS agenda in keeping with Modi’s slogan of “Sab ka saath, Sab ka Vikas” which would mean not raising Hindu-Muslim issues that polarise people sharply.
Though a Modi wave swept all these states, there is a qualitative difference in the situations between these states and UP. In Uttar Pradesh, Shah had the added advantage of capitalising on the blatant Muslim-appeasement politics of the Samajwadi Party which might not be the case in the three states, the partial exception being Maharashtra where the Prithviraj Chavan government has promised reservation for Muslims.
But in Maharashtra, the Chavan government has also promised reservation to the dominant Maratha community which could pose a challenge for Shah. Plus, getting a BJP man elected CM against Uddhav’s claim for the job after Gopinath Munde’s death would be difficult.
Whatever the result on this score, keeping the alliance of the ideological cousins intact would be the first priority for Shah. But a greater challenge for Shah would be consolidating the BJP in the South on the basis of the average-to-impressive inroads it has made there in the recent Lok Sabha polls.
This is an area that Shah has not examined but reportedly he is said to have impressive ideas on how to go about it. But on the flip-side there are strong factors on his side.
He boasts of the sharpest political brain in India after Modi and the two have the right connect on strategy as the former has grown up giving shape to the latter’s political scheme, sometimes adding to them as a top class strategist himself.
And so, Shah will have the right kind of support from Modi as he implements his strategies in different states. His second strong point is the huge support he enjoys from the BJP and RSS cadres who have almost started adoring him after the UP performance.
The massive celebrations by Maharashtra BJP workers after he took over as the party president were a proof of that. The support comes from the fact that Shah is seen as being committed to his RSS-BJP ideological goals, a fact he more than proved by creating a new OBC leadership from the RSS-BJP gotra in UP while distributing tickets for the Lok Sabha polls.
After a lot of consultation, two things won the day for Shah: One, the BJP-RSS leadership had to ponder whether it would have been proper to have both the PM and the party president from Gujarat.
And two, Shah’s image of being a tough customer among many BJP leaders when it comes to political and ideological matters which he amply demonstrated by not bending to break the rules he had made for ticket distribution in UP despite severe pressure from top BJP leaders. “Once he takes a firm stand based on sound logic, it is difficult to make him change his mind,” admits a BJP leader.
But, clearly, that toughness combined by a strategic mind and ideological commitment has brought him such great success so far and could continue to shower him with more success in the future too. Modi was right when he tweeted that the party will get stronger with Shah’s arrival.
-INDIA TODAY
