All hail Amit Shah: PM Modi's main man is the biggest winner of assembly polls

There were many winners on Sunday when the Assembly election results were declared in Maharashtra and Haryana.  But the one who needed a big victory the most may have been party president Amit Shah, whose credentials as the electoral wizard were dented somewhat by the UP bypoll results last month.

After being credited with delivering the BJP an unprecedented 71 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, many were quick to point to the bypolls as evidence that Amit Shah may have been a flash in the pan. A man who overplayed the polarisation card to his party’s detriment. Not any more. The Assembly elections have cemented Shah’s reputation as the yoda of electoral politics, more so now that he had scored big at the state level.

True, Shah had the benefit of excellent timing, with the state assembly polls coming just five months after the astounding Modi wave swept the Lok Sabha polls, and against the same old weak adversary, the debilitated and discredited Congress party.

However, state politics are usually a completely different ballgame compared to the Lok Sabha elections. Smaller local bodies are the turf of regional parties, and they are often unparalleled in terms of organisational capability. The issues on which polls are fought are different - larger national questions rarely, if ever, become the planks on which electoral outcomes are decided.

In this situation, Amit Shah’s first big move – breaking with regional allies –  was always going to be a risky move. According to the Indian Express , even a number of Shah’s ‘well wishers’ had cautioned him against breaking off the two alliances with HJC and the Shiv Sena in Haryana and Maharshtra, respectively.

According to this Times of India report , it was Shah who 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,” a blunt Shah supposedly told Bishnoi, a prophecy that came true on election day, when HJC lost both the Lok Sabha seats it contested.

In Maharashtra, ET quotes party sources as saying, “The first meeting between Shah and Uddhav showed what will happen… there was no chemistry… Uddhav expected to be treated as the senior partner… He could not swallow a new BJP saying it wanted more seats. Shah increasingly began to feel that BJP alone had a better chance.

As pointed out then by Firstpost editor Sanjay Singh:

A positive showing on 19 October would also be a reaffirmation of Amit Shah as a master strategist. But if things go wrong, even in one state, questions would be raised on Shah’s leadership. There may not be any open dissent but murmurings would be loud enough to go beyond close party circles.

The fact that it ended up working out as well it did, was in no small measure to the efforts of Amit Shah.

Those out-of-the-box moves aside, BJP leader’s ferocious commitment to a BJP victory was evident throughout the campaign.  T he Economic Times reports :

Working frequently till 2 am, Shah had camped out at party headquarters in Dadar in Mumbai from September 22 to 29. He would catch a few hours of sleep every night at the Rang Sharda hotel nearby, where rooms are `1,500 a night — not the kind where ruling party chiefs spend their nights in.

Shah reportedly controlled every aspect of the BJP campaign - the entirety of which had to be squeezed into two weeks. A large part of this was the deft deployment of the Modi shastra. As Times of India notes , “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.” adding that “He made no allowance for factional considerations or reputation in the distribution of tickets.”

In Haryana, the Indian Express notes, Shah was deliberately given responsibility for the BJP poll campaign in order to avoid bickering among local leaders staking claim for the chief minister’s chair.

“The campaign was meticulously organised, with no leader being declared chief ministerial candidate. At Jind, while taking veteran Congress leader Birender Singh into the fold, Shah said the party knows how to honour leaders like him. It was taken as a hint that Singh was a possible choice as chief minister. However, when the tickets were announced, Singh’s name was missing while his wife was made a candidate. This was done to quell murmurs in the party that a turncoat was being promoted.”

Now that he has established himself as the king of poll strategy, what lies ahead for the BJP President? Will he take the BJP where no partyman has gone before: the states of Bihar, West Bengal, Jammu & Kashmir and Tamil Nadu?

Until now, Shah has scored big against a weak opponent that is presently facing decimation. But if he can crack the strongholds  of powerful regional parties, Shah will be without doubt the greatest electoral strategist in recent political history.