Domination Dossier
For a regular reader of india today, journalist-author Prashant Jha’s How the BJP wins—Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine may not be quite the “illuminating” work Pratap Bhanu Mehta says it is on the book cover. Between 2013 and 2017, several stories written by our widely-travelled reporters have explained how the BJP has built its mean election machine—powered by Narendra Modi’s pan-India appeal, support of the RSS cadre and the party’s robust organisational structure and grassroots units. Wherever expedient, the party has played the communal card to telling effect and poached and fielded vote-catching leaders from sundry Opposition parties.
What the book succeeds in doing, however, is clubbing together scattered information, and offering a quick understanding of how the BJP has been managing elections since the big triumph in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. It could actually be a useful handbook for Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, who desperately needs to walk his talk. In February 2015, Rahul had presented to Congress president Sonia Gandhi a blueprint to revive the
party. The plan revolved around exactly the strategy BJP president Amit Shah has implemented to fortify the party organisation over the past three years. Rahul kept talking about booth management to win elections; Shah offered practical lessons. But the Congress is not likely to learn, as a close aide of Rahul argued, that it was the organisational power of the RSS that really won the BJP election after election.
Jha’s book does provide some interesting insights, though. For instance, contrary to the popular perception that Yogi Adityanath became UP chief minister with the support of the RSS, Jha claims it was Amit Shah who saw the potential during one of his meetings with 20,000 booth committee chairpersons in the run-up to the assembly elections earlier this year. “Shah is understood to have hinted to Yogi that he should start preparing for a role to uplift UP from the sad situation it was in,” writes Jha. Of course, given who they are, neither Shah nor Adityanath is likely to confirm or deny this bit of trivia.
The book depends heavily on a few sources. For instance, though the author travelled across UP and Bihar during the polls, he seems to rely heavily on the word of Sunil Bansal, the trusted lieutenant of Amit Shah. Another source is Ram Madhav. As a native of Assam, I can vouch that he’s missed the internal dynamics that helped the BJP win Assam and form a government in Manipur. There is also no evidence the author has direct access to Shah, Adityanath or the RSS brass.