Amit Shah now second most influential politician in country

TNN

New Delhi, Oct 20, 2014: With the party emerging as No. 1 in Maharashtra and set to form the state government, and winning Haryana outright, Amit Shah has emerged as the most influential man in BJP after Narendra Modi. Even for Modi, Shah is the to-go man — the one who can ruthlessly turn the PM’s popular appeal into bagfuls of votes.

 

To win Modi’s full trust hasn’t been easy. Here’s an example of Shah’s commitment to the BJP’s cause. His chopper was about to land in Pune when he received a distress call from a BJP candidate somewhere in the Konkan region. The candidate had turned into a bundle of nerves that evening after learning that Goa CM Manohar Parrikar would not be able to make it to the rally in his constituency.

 

The BJP chief calmed him down. Though he had important party leaders waiting for him in Pune, Shah asked his pilot to fly to Konkan. He addressed the meeting there and got an insight too — the turnout convinced him that the decision to sever ties with Shiv Sena was the right one. On reaching Mumbai, he called a strategy session well past midnight.

 

Shah’s said to be a 24x7 politician who took the gamble of going it alone in Maharashtra and Haryana when even his well-wishers counselled against taking the risk just after the reverses in assembly bypolls. The ’audacity’ paid off, and Shah was on Sunday the toast of the party - a stunning transformation for the man who had to leave Gujarat only a couple of years ago on court orders.

 

The decision to plough its own furrow in Maharashtra and Haryana was not an easy call. It was the first time that BJP, traditionally forced to play an adjunct to Shiv Sena, was contesting all 288 seats in Maharashtra.

 

In Haryana, the party did contest all the 90 seats five years ago, but that was only because it could not find an ally. The 2009 result — a mere four seats — would have been a deterrent for a similar exertion.

 

Besides a setback for the party would have dented Modi’s aura, validating the suggestion that the Lok Sabha results were an aberration and that the Modi wave had already receded.

 

 

In Haryana, he told Kuldip Bishnoi to settle for 25 seats and called off the talks when the Haryana Janhit Congress insisted on a 50:50 division plus chief ministership as the condition to continue the alliance. "Your demands are disproportionate to your strength as indicted during the LS elections," Shah is learnt to have bluntly told Bishnoi whose party lost both the Lok Sabha seats it contested.

 

Having taken the plunge, Shah quickly put together an efficient machine to turn Modi’s popularity into votes. He made no allowance for factional considerations or reputation in the distribution of tickets. The ruthless adherence to electability was decisive for Haryana because of the widely held suspicion in the party that collateral considerations played a big role in distribution of tickets in previous elections.

 

Shah wheeled out Modi as his ’main battle tank’ but made good use of the light artillery at his disposal, organizing more than 700 meetings of party leaders of different sizes. He himself addressed 27 and 20 meetings in Maharashtra and Haryana, evolving from a strategist to a campaigner.

 

 

But while he might come across as a wunderkind for those who have started following him lately, Shah has been an old practitioner of "take-no-prisoners" politics. In Gujarat, when the BJP leadership had appeared content after ousting Congress and gaining power, he, encouraged by Modi, scripted and ceaselessly worked to end Congress’s domination of local bodies, cooperative institutions and sports bodies.

 

The same approach was evident at the time of LS elections in UP when he, despite being a complete stranger to the state, raised an army of volunteers to compensate for the anemic organizational structure.

 

Shah was visibly jubilant on Sunday when he briefed the media. But those who know him say that he is not going to rest on his laurels and will quickly move on to new targets — Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.