As RSS Feared, Amit Shah Lost Bihar For BJP

Nothing, absolutely nothing can beat the instinct of a reporter on the ground. From the 2014 Lok Sabha elections to the thumping Bihar mandate for the RJD-JDU-Congress Mahagatbandhan today, journalists with an ear to the ground have been proved right despite varying and contradictory opinion and exit polls. 

And why would a reporter covering Bihar not get it right when, for the past few months, the writing has been on the wall? In a column just days ago for ndtv.com, I wrote that the RSS wanted Amit Shah, the BJP President and Bihar in-charge to lose the  election. The Sangh, the ideological parent of the BJP, was feeling increasingly left out with Shah's autocratic way of functioning and the extreme centralization of decision-making powers between the Prime Minister and him.

Today, as I write this, the Mahagatbandhan or Grand Alliance is inching towards the 178 mark with Lalu's party, the RJD, emerging as the single-largest party in Bihar. After being routed in Delhi by the Aam Aadmi Party, Narendra Modi, who along with Amit Shah had worked electoral magic in Gujarat during his long tenure as Chief Minister, committed one blunder too many. Shah, the poll manager in most of Gujarat's state elections and Modi's top confidante, played the caste and religion card in Uttar Pradesh ahead of the national election; the state gave the BJP its maximum seats.

Shah, now as party president, was also in-charge of the Maharashtra polls in October 2014 and along with an energetic campaign by the PM, he won the state amid a strong anti-incumbency sentiment for the Congress-Sharad Pawar coalition. However the real test for Amit Shah came in Delhi in February this year and it is here that the master strategist first faltered. The power duo of Modi and Shah, who had isolated most voices in the BJP including party veterans, ignored local leaders in Delhi and made a last-minute choice of Kiran Bedi as the Chief Ministerial candidate opposite Arvind Kejriwal. The decision led to the BJP's complete decimation in the national capital.

But Shah, who had by now earned the ire of many senior leaders in the RSS, was in favour of centralizing power as opposed to building leadership in states, a strategy that led to the Congress being reduced to 40 seats in 2014.

Despite the presence of ex-deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi in Bihar, Shah dominated all electoral posters in the state along with the PM who addressed nearly 30 rallies, a record in itself.

The Grand Alliance woven together by Nitish, Lalu and Congress forced the BJP to develop amnesia over the RSS' stated line of discourse on Dalits and reservations, and Shah kick-started the election campaign on  Dr BR Ambedkar's birth anniversary, in an outreach to the lower caste vote, which has traditionally spurned the BJP.

The strategy could have well worked for Amit Shah, had he realized the difference of political and caste dynamics between Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In Uttar Pradesh, he shrewdly consolidated the Jats, Yadavs and upper-caste Hindus under the umbrella of Hindutva. But "kamandal" (political Hindutva) was not the answer in Bihar, where caste is the tent pole of politics. 

As they say, ask a child in Bihar his caste and he will tell you the difference of caste between him and his closest friend. Shah tried to win the caste formula in Bihar by adding to the mix Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, a Mahadalit and Ramvilas Paswan. But he made the PM the face of the election campaign despite suggestions from senior leaders in Bihar including Shatrughan Sinha and Kirti Azad to consolidate local forces. 

The PM, without any pretence of diplomacy, auctioned financial packages in his rallies for Bihar and targeted infamously the DNA of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. It is from here that the BJP started to make a steady decline in the state. The campaign, which started on the development plank, gave way to the worst possible personal barbs about Mahagathbandhan leaders.

The last straw in the decline of its fortunes came when Mohan Bhagwat gave his controversial statement on reservations, asking the BJP not to ignore the aspirations of the upper class. Then the BJP's Union Minister VK Singh appeared to compare the murder of two Dalit children to a dog being killed. 

Amit Shah, the rank outsider or "bahari" as he was called by his opposition hinted at ground being lost when he spoke late last month of the Bihar elections not being a referendum on Narendra Modi. 

Towards the last phase of the polls when nothing worked, Shah and his party resorted to the tried and tested communal polarization with cow posters emerging on the streets and Shah stating that crackers would burst in Pakistan if the BJP lost. BJP MPs used the Pakistan rhetoric to allude to the minorities, and brazen statements on beef-eaters were professed on a daily basis before the last two phases of polling.

Amit Shah's arrogance, which has been called out by one of its most significant allies, the Shiv Sena, had an RSS ideologue confess in an off-record conversation with me that the BJP would be restricted to 70 seats in Bihar. The party will close below that.

This election was a high-stakes prestige battle for Amit Shah with the election for Party President scheduled in January. There is already talk of churn, heightened by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat meeting former BJP president Rajnath Singh today. 

If Shah is the big loser of this result, Nitish Kumar, who has won is already being supported by Arvind Kejriwal, Mamta Banerjee and the Congress. The BJP has ceded space to new regional kingmakers. Like Gautam Buddha, it seems Bihar has once again come to the rescue of the secular nature of the country. going on to prove that communalism can and still be given a tough fight by the common man despite those in power. The litti chokha has finally prevailed upon the arrogance of Lutyen's Delhi.

(Rana Ayyub is an award-winning investigative journalist and political writer. She is working on a book on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which will be published later this year.)

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