Rise of the party Commissar
Fifty years after Kamaraj, Amit Shah is the first truly powerful chief of a ruling party. Watch this cabinet reshuffle for evidence
The living-room of BJP President Amit Shah’s residence has minimal furnishing, much like the homes of old-generation politicians. He speaks to visitors sitting on his favourite spot on the middle sofa, with his back to the wall. The visitor notes the two framed portraits on that wall: Chanakya or Kautilya to the left and Veer Savarkar to the right. Those two deities determine his politics — Kautilya for political craft, and Savarkar for his ideology of Hindutva-nationalism.
Mr Shah could, however, add a third portrait to that wall, ideally in the space between Kautilya and Savarkar. It would be a pucca Congressman, because while his political and state power and philosophical impulse come from the two already there, his political style and authority over his own party hark back to the heyday of the late Congress President K Kamaraj (1963-67). Not since Kamaraj had cabinet ministers trooped into the ruling party president’s office, to read their own report cards, or offering to resign to devote time to party work. The drama is currently playing out as a cabinet reshuffle looms.
Not since Kamaraj in his first reign, 1963-67, has a full-time ruling party president wielded such power. For clarity, we are talking only of full-time party presidents, as distinct from Congress prime ministers who were also party president or a party president who had an “appointed” prime minister with limited powers. Other full-time ruling party presidents, Dev Kant Barooah, Chandra Shekhar (Janata), and those who held the same position in the BJP during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s prime ministerial years had limited powers and, therefore, do not make the cut.
Mr Shah’s power is more unique because Prime Minister Narendra Modi doesn’t owe his rise to him. It is the other way around. Mr Shah was Mr Modi’s personal choice as party chief in 2014. You can search hard, with the highest degree of suspicion as medical pathologists like to say, but it isn’t possible to find an issue on which he may have worked at cross-purposes with Mr Modi. Nor is there evidence yet of his having been overruled or a decision thrust on him. ust what were they smoking, drinking, eating, thinking, when they did so?” I had asked in a National Interest (Lose-Lose, July 13, 2013) when the BJP put him in charge of its UP campaign. For sure, I was proved wrong because he delivered 73 seats (including two with allies) out of UP’s 80. The reason, in retrospect, was an assumption I made erroneously: It is that the BJP once again wanted to build an NDA government in the image of the one of Mr Vajpayee, and that the party’s approach will be inclusive, soft Hindutva without upsetting the centrist status quo. If that belief was true, the conclusion about Mr Shah being a bad choice for UP was going to be correct. As politics unfolded, I was proved to have been unwise in making that assumption. Subsequent politics has further underlined how wrong that assumption was. Far from building one more government in Mr Vajpayee’s image, the Modi-Shah view was to build a “genuine” and unapologetic BJP-RSS government. There was also an understanding that Mr Vajpayee’s government was hardly a BJP government because a large number of key ministries were with non-RSS people. This is true for ministries given not just to allies like George Fernandes, who had the defence portfolio, but also for Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, Arun Shourie and others, who were not ideological natives of the RSS and the BJP.
That government is now seen to have been true
On Gandhi Jayanti in 1963, Kamaraj created a political upheaval by resigning as Tamil Nadu chief minister to rededicate himself to party work. Following him, six cabinet ministers and five other chief ministers also resigned. It saw heads like Morarji Desai and Jagjivan Ram roll. His was a brutal internal clean-up and was called the Kamaraj Plan though he wasn’t Congress president then. It has faded from memory now, but it was for long a purge of Stalinist dimensions, though bloodless and “voluntary”. It kept political cartoonists and satirists busy for a long time. Nehru, then in decline, was so impressed (and possibly insecure) that he asked that Kamaraj be made party president. He remained in his element after Nehru’s death, ensuring the swearing-in of Lal Bahadur Shastri first and Indira Gandhi next as prime minister, destroying the ambitions of the wellentrenched Morarji Desai. During these years, 196367, the most powerful Congressmen chased him for favours and his fabled reply “paarkalam” (let’s see) in Tamil joined India’s political dictionary.
We don’t yet know if Mr Shah has such a favourite line, but the rest of the Kamaraj playbook is all there. Ministers line up before him, but not the prime minister, who has given him this power. And he would persuade them to “volunteer” resignations to rededicate themselves to party work. They will all come out smiling, claiming to be loyal party workers with no other expectations even as their hearts bleed. They work on the presumption that the Modi-Shah leadership will continue till 2024 and have more clout as time passes. They would keep hoping that Mr Shah takes notice of their party work and brings them back at some point.
For half a century, Delhi has not seen a truly powerful ruling party president. It is taking its time, making adjustments. Mr Shah has made other significant changes. The BJP’s parliamentary party meeting now takes place in the party office, and the prime minister goes there to attend it. This changes the long-established practice of holding these meetings in the prime minister’s house for his convenience. The Cabinet, chief ministers, and even the heads of the most powerful departments and agencies now acknowledge where power lies, besides the prime minister’s office. They are making adjustments accordingly. This reshuffle will further reaffirm this new normal.