BJP's 'Chanakya' unplugged

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will take the oath of office for his second term, with his council of ministers, on Thursday. There is anticipation that Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah would be a member of the cabinet committee on security, reprising his role as home minister, a portfolio he held in Gujarat when Mr. Modi was chief minister.

Mr. Shah has had a meteoric rise in national politics. In mid-2010, Mr. Shah spent time in jail in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. Four years later, Mr. Shah was the BJP chief. He debuted in the Rajya Sabha by 2017, and BJP MPs were soon turning to him for advice on the party’s floor strategy instead of Leader of the House Arun Jaitley. Mr. Shah is now a Lok Sabha member, having won his election from Gandhinagar, and thought of as the natural successor to Mr. Modi post-2025.

In Amit Shah and The March of BJP, authors Anirban Ganguly and Shiwanand Dwivedi, both associated with a BJP think tank, the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, are effusive in their praise of the BJP’s “Chanakya” as a master political strategist.

The book, the authors state in the introduction, is an attempt at recording the story of Mr. Shah’s years at the BJP’s helm “relying on authentic sources, material and information” since most of the available material on the man is based “on speculations, surmises and assumptions” by people, they believe, have never had access to actual information.

The writers state that their several meetings with BJP chief “busted” the “false and often peddled descriptions” of Mr. Shah’s 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,” the authors write.

The book provides, for the benefit of its readers, “selected video links with QR codes” of 15 of Mr. Shah’s speeches. There is a separate eight-page section titled “Amit Shah’s Thoughts”. These include Mr. Shah’s praise of khadi, his simple lifestyle, commitment to “garib kalyan”, or welfare of the poor, his paeans to India’s cultural heritage and so on.

Of interest should be the authors’ efforts in selecting quotes from Mr. Shah’s speeches in praise of ancient Indian philosopher Chanakya and Hindu Mahasabha leader V D Savarkar. At his official residence at 11, Akbar Road, a government bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi, only two portraits adorn Mr. Shah’s living room wall, behind the chair he sits on in the centre of the room, that of Chanakya and Savarkar.

In his foreword to the book, eulogies flow generously from the pen of senior journalist Rajat Sharma. “Some may seem to know him but nobody actually does. It is for this, if not for anything else, that a book on Amit Shah was much required,” Sharma writes.

The book details the several electoral triumphs the BJP has notched up during Mr. Shah’s tenure, his efforts at increasing the party’s membership and galvanising the cadres to be battle-ready at all times. Most of this is well known.

More interesting are some of the personal details. According to the authors, Mr. Shah considers former BJP president Kushabhau Thakre a key influence on his stewardship at the helm of the party. Mr. Thakre, who died in 2003, was the BJP president from 1998 to 2000, a tenure that overlapped with Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre.

In his first speech as the BJP president on August 9, 2014, Mr. Shah spoke of the need for the party to be a bridge between the government and people. As the party chief, Mr. Shah has spurred party workers frequently reach out to people to spread awareness about the Modi government’s policies, programmes and schemes.

The chapter, ‘Rising Through the Ranks’, has details on Mr. Shah’s ancestral family and his political journey. The authors quote an unnamed BJP leader who was pleasantly surprised to find Mr. Shah sitting with his five-month-old granddaughter Rudri, “repeatedly looking at her in deep compassion and smiling, while humming the Mahatma’s favourite bhajan.”

Mr. Shah, the authors write, is fond of the “typical pakodas”. The late night meetings during the 2017 Gujarat Assembly polls would invariably have pakodas for food, the authors write. “Arre, keep eating, the leaders of the party which consumes more besan will ultimately win Gujarat,” Shah would tell party leaders as he munched.

Mr. Shah was born in 1964 to a wealthy Nagar-Vaishnav family of Gujarat. His grandfather relocated the family to their ancestral home in Gujarat’s Mansa from Mumbai. Shah’s great-grandfather and grandfather were nagarsheth of the princely state of Mansa. According to his family lore, Arvind Ghose, later known as Sri Aurobindo, visited the family once and it still preserves the chair that saint sat on. The authors say Mr. Shah’s family was rich but prepared him for a life of hard work. While his sisters would go to school in a horse-drawn carriage, Mr. Shah had to walk to the school.

Shah started his political work as a 13-year-old in 1977 when he stuck posters for Janata Party candidates from Mehsana, Maniben Patel, the daughter of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Later, he joined the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. The rest of the story is known widely enough for it to be recounted here.

The authors say Mr. Shah does not like to travel abroad. He has keen interest in cricket and chess and his last visit abroad was to Munich when he headed the chess association of Gujarat and has a good grasp of astrology. The authors write that Mr. Shah refused to discuss his interest as it was “personal and therefore inconsequential while emphasising that astrology is a completely scientific subject.”

Mr. Shah counts the writings of K M Munshi to have profoundly influenced him, and is a “great admirer” of the poems of Sahir Ludhianvi and Kaifi Azmi and “during his exile from Gujarat he would also spend time reading them”. The book has an interesting episode from Mr. Shah’s life when the courts had externed him from Gujarat in 2010.

In September 2010, Mr. Shah was on his first visit to Varanasi. One evening he joined the Ganga aarti and had an epiphany. “Shah felt strange ripples rising within himself, these were waves of thoughts, of a deep inward rumination of which he had no inkling, it was a state of being which he had never experienced before,” the authors write.

“Certain questions began haunting him: Why is this immortal city in such a state of degeneration? Is the lap of Mother Ganga only meant to dump the dirt that others generation?...She needed to be saved,” the authors write, stressing how the experience “left a deep imprint on his psyche”.

The authors write that there was then no possibility of Modi becoming the party’s prime ministerial candidate. “Yet Shah’s heart had hitched itself to the city, the thought of its plight was gnawing at him from within. It was as if he had to replay a debt to the city of Kashi. Shah told one of his confidantes, ‘As soon as I get a chance, I will do something for this city and this state’. His usually rock solid demeanour melted like wax at the site of Varanasi, his experience had been a transformative one; his willpower and resolve had strengthened,” the authors write.

Is it too much to ask of a prestigious international publisher such as Bloomsbury to come up with biographies that are a tad more dispassionate?