Union minister Amit Shah and Narendra Modi govenment’s second most powerful person turns 60 today.
Considered as the Chanakaya of Indian politics, he has played several key roles in making the brand Narendra Modi who was just a Gujarati CM ahead of 2014 Lok Sabha elections. While 2014 is known for BJP’s comeback at the Centre after a decade, Amit Shah was the main mastermind of saffron party’s surprising performance in Uttar Pradesh.
“There was a huge Modi wave in the country but there were some factors that could have limited the impact of the wave in UP–the state is influenced by caste, there are dark zones meaning areas where neither television nor newspapers are read or seen, it was difficult convincing locals to vote for the BJP even if they sympathised with us since most problems of water and electricity are handled by the state government,” Shah has told ET back in 2014.
In 1998, the BJP had got 36% of votes which fell by nearly 9% the following year. In 2004, it got 22% of votes, 17% in 2009 and only 15% in the 2012 assembly elections. Also, the party had not contested panchayat or cooperative elections in the state in nearly two decades and had little to no contact with influential people at the gram pradhan level. After taking charge, Shah decided BJP would have to contest local elections.
How an outsider turned UP into a BJP state?
BJP in Uttar Pradesh, a key state when it comes to Lok Sabha polls, Shah inherited the party in comatose state. BJP won popping 71 seats, more than the UPA’s overall tally and much higher than the previous peak of 57 seats in the 1998 elections.
What Shah did to win Uttar Pradesh was a numbers game. “In UP, you can’t have one homogeneous campaign. It is almost as if seven different states make up Uttar Pradesh. So, our strategy had essentially four layers—one at the level of the seat, at the level of clusters, at the level of zones and then at the state level,” an aide of Shah told ET back in 2014.
Shah divided the seats into 21 clusters comprising of three to five seats each and devised distinctive strategies for these clusters. Above the clusters, there were eight zones. To reach out to the maximum people in a short time, the party conducted programmes in 13,000 college campuses to register volunteers.
While PM Modi became a household name after 2014, the entire planning in creating the persona of Modi was devised by Amit Shah. Nearly 800 full-time volunteers below the age of 30, largely fresh recruits, over 450 GPS-installed ‘Modi’ vans with campaign material and a 16-minute video were dispatched to the socalled dark zone in the state—areas that do not have access to any form of media.
Shah met initial resistance from statelevel leaders because of being an ‘outsider’ for the North Indian state.
Minor but symbolic changes introduced by Shah include encouraging veteran leaders to access the Internet and changing a hierarchical classroom style seating to a more democratic roundtable style.
Shah himself told ET that he had decided to keep his ego aside while working on the UP gameplan. Shortly after taking charge, Shah conducted day-long meetings in groups with the party’s MLA and MP candidates who had lost elections previously to know the reasons for their defeat. That helped him strengthen systems, whether it was distribution of resources or planning rallies.
To build crowd strength for Modi’s rallies, it was decided these should draw people from a radius of 175 km.
Also, one Bolero that could ferry 10 people per booth was the target set by Shah. There are a little over 1 lakh booths in UP. This helped in gathering large crowds that helped consolidate media perceptions of a Modi wave. A BJP leader who had worked with Amit Shah said rallies around Modi or other leaders were planned systematically. For every Modi rally, three assembly segments were covered. Similarly, other leaders were sent to areas where we weren’t very strong.
After every public meeting or a Modi rally, feedback was solicited and the number of attendees was cross-checked given the tendency of party workers to exaggerate.
The cross-checking was done through a call centre that was set up at the party’s headquarters in Lucknow. “Verifying details was necessary to get an accurate assessment of ground reality so that we could fine-tune our campaign,” said Shah who spent almost every day, except for a week or so, in the state after elections were announced.
Shah carried out extensive due diligence on every candidate before finalizing names and was ruthless during ticket distribution. The criteria was simple: deny tickets to those who had contested but never won elections since lack of success was evidence of their unpopularity and give tickets to those who belonged to the constituency as they would be approachable.
Social engineering or social equations was also taken into account. The party, therefore, gave the largest chunk, 28 out of 80 tickets to OBCs, 19 to Brahmins and 17 to Thakurs.
Tickets were also given to representatives of backward communities such as Nishad, Bind and Khushwaha who don’t dominate a particular constituency but are present in large numbers along the Ganges to help consolidate votes across constituencies.
