Does BJP need Shatrughan Sinha at all?
“You cannot compete with Shatrughan Sinha. You can only grudge his luck. He started as a Bollywood villain but soon was seen romancing the most beautiful women on silver screen. Rekhaji, Reena Royji; Remember? In 2009, when the party fielded him from Patna Sahib, or was forced to, thanks to shotgun’s rapport with LK Advani, the seat had already become the safest in Bihar after the delimitation exercise. To top it all, there was a groundswell of support for Nitish Kumar then and Shatrughan Sinha successfully rode piggyback on it to reach the Lok Sabha. He proved a disaster as an MP; remained mostly inaccessible, but the Narendra Modi wave made him retain the seat with a bigger margin in the 2014 polls. Shatrughan Sinha is a perfect specimen of good luck. Now what can you say anything about someone, who has been so lucky all through his life,” said a senior BJP leader in Bihar, serious and contemptuous in equal ounces.
But the Patna Sahib Member of Parliament, who will celebrate his 69th birthday on July 15, seems to have run out of his rather infamous luck at the autumn of his legislative career. Sinha would be 73 when the next general election would be held in 2019.
Now, the question if BJP needs Sinha in Bihar sounds misplaced. Why should the BJP need Sinha? His crowd-pulling abilities have diminished; his goodwill as a politician is almost non-existent; and the less said the better about his star value.
Even with the Bihar elections just about three months away, it is hard to find fault with the BJP’s inability to see Sinha useful. Sinha belongs to the numerically insignificant Kayesth community - a social group which is already said to be backing the BJP in Bihar - with or without Sinha’s shenanigans.
For someone known for placing symbolism over substance, Sinha never gets tired of telling everyone that he had joined the BJP in 1984 at the height of his film career and when the saffron party had only two MPs. He describes his joining the BJP as an indicator of his commitment to the party, which ironically has not demarcated a role for him in the Bihar elections suitable to his personality.
A majority of Bihar BJP leaders describe Sinha as someone who has remained stuck in the hallowed grove of the past, someone who behaves like a superstar and more importantly, thinks he still is one with a misplaced sense of entitlement. “The world has moved on; but Sinha does not seem to understand the law of diminishing return. Look at Amitabh Bachchan, the megastar knows and openly admits that his star value has diminished with time. The Big B openly quotes the revenue figures grossed by the movies of the Khans and compares it with his movies to prove that he was a lesser star now. We expect Shatrughan Sinha to show similar wisdom, if not the Big B’s humility,” opined another BJP leader in Bihar.
In his acting career, Sinha, like that lovable exhibitor of strength Mangal Singh in Kaala Patthar, has never shied away from flexing his muscles. He seems to have followed a similar script in his political career as well. And with similar success so far, and when things don’t happen according to his liking, Sinha does not shy away from arm-twisting his own people.
Many still believe that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was forced to give Sinha a ministerial berth after he begun publicly acknowledging leadership traits in Sonia Gandhi. He served as Union health minister where his performance left a lot to be desired. He was later shifted to the shipping ministry in the Vajpayee government.
Having once again missed the ministerial bus in the Modi government after last year’s Lok Sabha election, Sinha has, however, never missed an opportunity to arm-twist the Modi government in the last few months.
In February, just before the Delhi election results, Sinha said, “A victory or a defeat will be Modi's. We will know who people have blessed... Modi is the captain". He went on, speaking off the saffron script and even praising his party's number one rival, Arvind Kejriwal, as a "good man". Only a month before this Modi had flown to Mumbai to attend the marriage of Sinha's son.
In the upcoming Bihar election, Sinha once again seems to have discovered an opportunity to assert himself. This also seems to be his strategy to stray from the official line, potentially embarrassing his party.
Shotgun Sinha (as he is popularly known) visited Lalu Prasad on June 11 to celebrate the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief’s birthday in Patna. A day after visiting Lalu, Sinha told mediapersons that it would be better if the BJP went to the Bihar elections with a chief ministerial candidate to take on Nitish Kumar who is named by the Secular Alliance as its nominee. Given that Nitish is someone whom the BJP considers as its biggest challenge, the actor-turned-politician raised eyebrows by claiming that he had tremendous love and regards for the Bihar chief minister.
It was seen as a telling sign that Shotgun Sinha will not hesitate from embarrassing the party in the run up to the Bihar polls. A month before, Sinha was quoted as having told a new agency about having no idea why he was not included in the Modi Cabinet “despite having seniority, experience and popularity”. In April, Sinha conspicuously skipped the public meeting of BJP president Amit Shah in Patna, claiming he had no formal invitation to it.
Sinha, however, has often been found perceptive enough to pick up the writing on the wall. A year before the 2014 Lok Sabha election, when whispers in BJP circles suggested that the party could replace sitting MP Sinha with Ravi Shankar Prasad as the Patna Sahib candidate, Sinha raised hackles in the BJP by visiting Nitish to inquire about his fractured toe.
By then Nitish had snapped ties with Sinha’s party and the BJP had adopted an extremely belligerent attitude towards him. But, if the visit alone was not enough, Sinha also called Nitish a “PM material”. The subtext was clear: Sinha meeting Nitish created an impression that he could possibly switch over before the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Though he never said this in as many words, the apprehension surely left the BJP frightened.The BJP soon fell in line. After offering to field Sinha from somewhere else, the BJP gave him Patna Sahib once again.
Things, however, have changed since the BJP won the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Unlike the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government under Vajpayee, Modi has a majority of his own. Besides, neither the BJP in Centre or in Bihar seem inclined to submit to Sinha’s arm-twisting. The change of circumstance, however, has not stopped Shotgun from punching above his weight — much like what he did on silver screen, years ago.