Stung by Bihar rout, blamed by party elders, Amit Shah plots strategy to remain BJP heavyweight

BJP President and Narendra Modi’s right hand man Amit Shah is on to his next project - a long rope to stay on top of party affairs, and is busying himself curating a meeting of the BJP national executive that may convene in Kolkata later this month, reports The Indian Express.

Amit Shah managed the Bihar backroom, BJP got a sound thrashing. More recently, a not so hot performance in the Gujarat local body polls. Before that, BJP lost in Delhi. Now, there are a string of state elections coming up - Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha. West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where the BJP does not have much of a hold. So, what’s Kolkata about? “Not a course correction,” The Indian Express quotes sources as saying.

Close to 200 BJP grandees are tipped to mark attendance at Kolkata and Shah is keen to spin new talking points after party elders led by L K Advani pinned blame to BJPs top dogs for the Bihar election while their targets were unwilling to be drawn into a “who is to blame” minutiae.

Advani has been “hurt’ by the way he has been sidelined after Modi’s rise to power but he runs the risk of flaming out because of lack of support from the far right of the party which he himself personified during the Babri Masjid demolition.

“Unless the PM decides to completely go against the wishes of Shah, the course correction demanded by the elders will never take place.” Besides, Shah has kept the RSS leadership in the loop, ensuring its support at every step, said sources. “He has presented a lot of counter-arguments, too, about how BJP had treated the failures of the elders when it was in the Opposition for decades,” sources told Sheela Bhatt of The Indian Express.

‘Retire at 60’ soundbite

Just after the Bihar rout, BJP president Amit Shah kicked up a row after he said Jana Sangh leader Nanaji Deshmukh had set an example in politics by retiring at the age of 60. Still smarting from the crushing loss in the Bihar assembly elections - Shah was chief of the Bihar backroom - the BJP president has recently come under attack from the party elders led by L K Advani.

Shah’s remark is being seen as an attack on the party’s old guard, including L.K. Advani, who along with senior leader Murli Manohar Joshi, former finance minister Yashwant Sinha and former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Shanta Kumar had issued a statement demanding a thorough review into the BJP’s Bihar assembly poll debacle.

“He (Deshmukh) set an example in world politics that one should retire at the age of 60 and dedicate himself to social work,” Shah said, addressing a gathering at the inauguration of the Sadguru Sewa Sangh Trust Hospital in Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh.

After Shah’s remark went viral on social media, and was termed an answer to the party’s old guard, the BJP issued a statement saying the party president’s remark was “distorted” by a section of the media.

The party said Shah was not talking about any individual other than Nanaji Deshmukh, and that his remark was taken out of context.