How would India be without Modi and BJP without Amit Shah?

The inner contradictions of the BJP have come to the fore with the defeat in Bihar. Those who feel sidelined by the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo see it as an opportunity to upset the apple cart of the prime minister and his trusted lieutenant in the name of saving the party. Both Modi and Shah, seen as the most skilful players of Indian politics, have bungled in their Bihar strategy. A mixture of arrogance and overconfidence prevented them from drawing lessons from the Delhi defeat. It has proved costly for them as well as their party. Their apparent defence that they lost to the new and unique arithtmatic with the coming together of three political foes - Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav and the Congress - is justifiable only up to a point and can’t be an argument to cover the shortfalls of the leadership.

But in spite of Delhi and Bihar defeats no independent observer can forget the electoral achievements of the Modi-Shah duo. After they took over, the BJP formed the first ever full-fledged government in Haryana, had its first ever chief minister in Maharashtra, no doubt with some hiccups, and for the first time, became a part of ministry in Jammu and Kashmir where the deputy chief minister is now from the BJP. Today the party rules over the highest number of state governments and highest number of MLAs ever in India's electoral history. BJP secretary Shrikant Sharma said: “Is it a small thing that our leaders who used to be arrested for pro-India protests in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk are today ruling in Jammu and Kashmir? There is an attempt to highlight the aberrations with a definite motive. Both the prime minister and party president have provided excellent leadership."

So the question is, in what shape would the nation be minus-Modi? And what would be the state of affairs if Shah were to exit?

That Modi has provided the cleanest Union government in three decades is a big feather in his cap and his strongest point:

The starting point of corruption in the bureaucracy and top level governance was 1980, the year India Gandhi came to power after her 1977 post-Emergency defeat. Mrs Gandhi made loyalty the main criterion for selection after she came to power in 1980, stung by the betrayal of Babu Jagjivan Ram, who left Congress on the eve of the 1977 election to form a new party, Congress for Democracy (CFD), with 48 MPs and joined the Janata Party-led coalition. Things like cleanliness in public life were now of secondary importance to her. Slowly the loyalty-first criterion gave way to a culture of pure sychophancy in the Congress and the next bad fruit of this culture was corruption. As the party was in power this culture also corrupted the bureaucracy, which according to many old-timers, was fairly transparent till then.

One saw this ugly cycle starting in Delhi and then slowly spreading like a virus to the entire country. By the time Rajiv Gandhi came to power riding the crest of a wave following Mrs Gandhi’s killing, the virus was well-entrenched in Delhi. And Rajiv, despite his sincere efforts, failed to rein in the virus. He got sucked into the vortex, literally. One still remembers his famous 1990 statement that he tried his best to get at corruption but howsoever he tried, at the end of the day, only 15 paise reached the end beneficiary when Re 1 was released from Delhi. It was the most honest and frank admission of the deep-rooted corruption in the country.

This situation underwent some change under the Vajpayee government. But even in that phase, the grip that powerful corporate houses had established in the government's policy-making underwent only a partial change.

Narendra Modi’s government is the first since 1980 which has given the maximum possible proof of transparency in governance. There is not a single allegation of corruption that has tarred the Modi government’s image in the past 18 months. It's no small an achievement in a country known the world over for both high and low levels of corruption.

The stranglehold of corporate houses stands totally broken while steps to clean up the bureaucracy at the top most level in Delhi are almost unprecedented in the past three decades. In other words, it means that a most committed effort has been made to ensure that the delivery system, which only can translate vision into reality and take the benefits of good governance to the beneficiaries remains clean. Says Vivek Phalke, member of a Maratha Sardar family in Gwalior, who has relatives in non-BJP parties also: “As a responsible citizen, it is indeed a great thing for me that the Modi government has left no stone unturned to give a transparent governance. That it has not faced a single allegation of corruption is not a small thing. This alone is big enough reason for me to give a thumps up to Mr Modi as the prime minister."

The appointment of departmental secretaries, joint secretaries and additional secretaries at the Centre as well as the officers posted in the prime minister’s office (PMO) prove that transparency and a genuinely good service record have been the main criteria in selection of officers. On the other hand, even if the pace of reforms has been slow, the fact remains that India is doing well on most economic parameters including the FDI which has seen a rise of 40 per cent. It is a fact that can’t be negated by selective examples of the government’s failure. The power and coal ministries certainly have some great achievements to show. The steps in the area of skill development show genuine progress. And now the gates of reform that the government has just opened in a flood of initiatives leave little doubt that Modi remains the best bet for India.

The other side of Amit Shah that makes him indispensable:

The BJP's debacle in the Delhi and Bihar elections have only got Amit Shah brickbats. He was the hero of the grand BJP victory in Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Clearly, after two successive defeats, the argument that the BJP lost because of the consolidation of Opposition votes hold partially true though it can’t be an excuse to ignore the mistakes in Bihar. Shah has to be ready with a strategy on how to tackle this consolidation. But that’s besides the point.

If one has a look at the efforts by Shah to build up the party, one can’t but admire him. In 17 months as the BJP president, Shah has gone to every state party headquarter twice and met nearly 600 district presidents and general secretary twice. It a towering record that has few parallels in the BJP's history in recent years. When he took over as the party president, only 225 of the 600 district units had their own office buildings.

Now the work of constructing district unit buildings is in full swing in many of the 375-odd districts. In less than two years, all the 600 units will have office buildings of their own with well-planned libraries for helping the party workers to expand their vision. Even the books for the libraries have been earmarked with a vision. Eighty per cent of the books in each library would be on state and district history and 20 per cent on national history. And history books would be in regional languages as well as English and Hindi. Expanding people's vision on the basis of a nationalist history is part of the vision of both Modi and Shah.

There might be allegations that Shah doesn’t listen once he has made up his mind and is not open to suggestions, but the fact remains that he is one of the first presidents of the BJP in several years who has time for the party worker. An honest and simple worker gets more time with Shah than a suit-clad entrant in the party. His commitment to core ideals of the party is one of the best. He is one of the first leaders in the BJP in recent decades to see Savarkar's Hindutva connection (BJP leaders have highlighted his revolutionary role but have played down his Hindutva role under the pressure of pseudo-secularists) and confront the Leftists who have painted Savarkar as an anti-Muslim zealot as against the real truth about him which is that he was against Muslim appeasement and Islamic radicalism and not Muslims per say.

But there is a problem:

Modi, to a great extent, and Shah, to a lesser extent, have cut themselves off from their core supporters and strategists who played a key role in the 2012 Gujarat Assembly poll and the 2014 Lok Sabha campaigns. The switchover by Modi in the form of disconnecting himself from his core strategic supporters which had a mix of intelligent and transparent people and connecting instead with a new set of strategic group appears to be faltering. As a result, his feedback channels which were very transparent earlier are failing him now as his campaign mistakes in Bihar indicate.

Apparently there are few today among Modi's new strategic supporters who are willing to take the risk of telling him the truth when it is bitter. Even on core issues of importance, Modi is reportedly getting "coloured" feedback. Clearly, Modi needs to connect with the old, emotionally-attached crowd if he is to regain lost ground. Plus, there is an aura of stiffness around him that prevents even his Cabinet colleagues from chipping in with their feedback.

With Shah, the problem, for long, has been one of communication at the individual level. As it is, Shah was not a very good communicator at the individual level. His communication problem has in a way increased after becoming the party president. It may be owing to a paucity of time as a result of greater responsibilities. He has to be more communicative and rely more on senior party colleagues for precise feedback even while being objective and alert while acting on the incoming information. And last but not the least, he has to understand the dynamic of India’s communal problem and stick to a broad brand of nationalist rhetoric and resist the temptation of fishing in the waters of aggressive Hindutva for a sake of just votes - a mistake he committed in Bihar.

Clearly, the nation can ill-afford the weakening of the BJP of Modi and Shah.