5 milestones that will define the Amit Shah era in BJP

Home Minister Amit Shah has officially handed over the reins of the party to trusted colleague J.P. Nadda, after over five years in charge.

Amit Shah outside Parliament | Praveen Jain | ThePrint

New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah has relinquished the BJP presidency after a five-and-a-half-year stint, honouring the ‘one person, one post’ principle, with his trusted colleague J.P. Nadda taking over the chair.

The era since 2014 for the BJP has often been labelled the ‘Modi-Shah’ era, and alongside the prime minister, Shah has left his imprint on the party in many ways. Under his leadership, the BJP has become the world’s largest political organisation with 18 crore members, which is more than the population of many countries.

He also led the BJP to its greatest electoral success, as it formed governments in 21 states, including a huge majority in the politically-important Uttar Pradesh, and the biggest majority in the Lok Sabha of any party (303 seats) since Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress in 1984.

While Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani will be remembered as the BJP’s founding fathers, the Modi-Shah era is etched in history as the BJP’s expansionist phase, which turned the country’s politics bipolar and sidelined many regional satraps.

“The Shah era defined a new political narrative, whether it was the scrapping of Article 370, the Balakot strike or the Citizenship Amendment Act,” a senior BJP leader said.

Here are five big milestones of Amit Shah’s BJP presidency.

Electoral success

Shah took over as BJP president from Rajnath Singh in 2014 after the latter became home minister under the first Modi government. At the time, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance was in power in eight states, but by 2018, the number had gone up to 21.

From forming an alliance government with the Peoples Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir to toppling the Left in its bastion Tripura and gradually ruling over the entire Northeast, either directly or in alliance, the BJP touched unprecedented heights.

In the last year and a bit of Shah’s tenure, the BJP, however, suffered defeats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. It also struggled to form the government in Haryana, and was unable to do so in Maharashtra due to differences with its pre-poll ally Shiv Sena, but its pan-India footprint is still unmatched.

At the national level, while the BJP’s 282 seats in 2014 didn’t come under Shah’s presidency, the fact that it managed to increase its seat count and vote share in 2019 was down to Shah’s strategy and planning, leaders say with near-unanimity.

Under Shah, the BJP was able to capture Uttar Pradesh like never before, not even at the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in Ayodhya. He was the BJP’s UP in-charge for the 2014 Lok Sabha, and took the party and its ally Apna Dal to victory in 73 seats out of 80. Then, in 2017, under Shah’s leadership, the BJP romped to victory with 325 seats out of 403 in the assembly elections, a number not seen in 40 years. The streak continued in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, as the BJP won 62 (64 including Apna Dal’s seats) of the 80.

The BJP made strong inroads into West Bengal too, winning 18 seats in the Lok Sabha polls, defeating Mamata Banerjee’s incumbent Trinamool Congress in several seats.

World’s largest political organisation

As mentioned above, the BJP now claims to have over 18 crore members, making it the largest political organisation in the world. And a lot of that is down to Shah’s innovative strategies and emphasis on reaching grassroots, such as every booth, and every person on every page of the electoral rolls.

Shah’s era also saw the rise of the BJP’s massive social media support base, with the dedicated digital army ready to trend anything the party brass wanted at any time.

Robust work culture

One BJP leader said Shah’s biggest achievement is that he has established a robust work culture in the party, setting big targets and working tirelessly to achieve them “with a killer instinct”.

The book Amit Shah and the March of the BJP by Anirban Ganguly, director of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Foundation, states that he travelled 7,80,000 km in the last five years — 3,38,000 km for organisational work and 4,52,000 for election campaigning. Shah spent 400 days travelling in the states, and stayed overnight for 300 days.

Shah also made it possible for the BJP to train seven lakh workers every year, according to BJP general secretary Anil Jain. For booth-level mobilisation, Shah made it the practice to hold ‘booth sammelans’ with more than two lakh booth pramukhs at a time, instead of the earlier 10,000.

“He has laid the path for success, which every party president will have to follow,” said Jain.

Party offices everywhere

Ganguly’s book mentions that it was Shah’s idea at the 2015 national executive meeting to have a BJP office in every district of the country.

By the time he demitted office, that target is nearly complete, with BJP offices in 635 of the country’s 694 districts.

The party built a massive 1.70 lakh square foot headquarters in Delhi in a span of just 18 months, and moved from the ‘temporary’ office at 11, Ashoka Road, that it was based out of until then.

“The Congress ruled for 50 years but never dreamt of making such infrastructure,” said a leader of the BJP’s office infrastructure committee.

Aggression in Parliament

The scrapping of Article 370 and the passage of bills like triple talaq and the CAA without having the required numbers in the Rajya Sabha is also attributed to Shah.

Even though he is now a Lok Sabha MP from Gandhinagar and the BJP’s leader in the Rajya Sabha is Thawar Chand Gehlot, Shah continues to function as the party’s de facto leader in the Upper House. And BJP leaders credit his “aggressive approach” in managing numbers for the passage of controversial bills, the kind which used to get stuck when the “conciliatory” Arun Jaitley led the party in the House.