Bharat Bhushan: Has Amit Shah moved from being an asset to a liability in the Modi regime?
The coming Delhi
assembly elections may give us a signal where exactly Union Home Minister Amit
Shah now stands within the Modi regime. Should his picture appear in
election posters along with those of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and newly-minted Party president, JP Nadda, it would underline
his position as number two in the government. If his picture goes missing from
the election posters however, it can be surmised that the he has been brought
down a peg or two.
Not too long
ago, Amit Shah could do no wrong. Defying psephologists and
astounding critics he won even the most difficult elections for Prime Minister
Modi, his mentor, or “saheb” as he calls him. As the ruthless enforcer
of his mentor’s wishes, he is the only one permitted to touch his leader’s
feet, who otherwise discourages such genuflection. But Union Home
Minister Amit Shah may be emerging as a liability for Prime
Minister Modi. His tandava with the Indian Constitution has
damaged the prime minister’s carefully cultivated domestic image of a patriarch
and threatens his aspirations to be a global statesman. Has the “faithful”
instrument become blunted?
A loss of the famed
Midas Touch was evident in the electoral defeats in party bastions such as
Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. He barely
managed to cobble together a BJP government in Haryana through an alliance
practically forced on Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janata Party. His pugnacious
language and arrogance may have lost his party the government in Maharashtra.
Referring to his ally the Shiv Sena contemptuously, he said, “We made a tiger
out of a rat and that tiger is now trying to scare us. We need to show these
rats their rightful place”. In the end the so-called “rats” – remember that the
epithet “Mountain Rat” was also used by Aurangzeb for the Maratha hero Shivaji
-- managed to do the improbable. They joined hands with their ideological
enemies to form a government, stunning the BJP.
In September last
year, the Union Home Minister announced his desire to further unify the country
by making Hindi the national language. Shah’s call for “one nation, one
language” was seen in tandem with the Union government’s replacement of the
“three language formula” with a “two language formula” in the New Education
Policy (NEP) making the teaching of Hindi compulsory in schools. The South
Indian states and the Opposition erupted on the issue, forcing both the Home
Minister and the Centre to backtrack on the imposition of Hindi. To undo the
damage Prime Minister Modi had to speak a few Tamil phrases in Chennai and at
the “Howdy Modi” in Houston, he said “everything is all right” in eight Indian
languages! In case one missed his intent, he added, “This diversity is the very
basis of our vibrant democracy.”
The failure of the
Union Home Minister is all too evident in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Fears of
impending terrorist attacks was promoted by dramatically cancelling the
Amarnath Yatra mid-way and asking Hindu pilgrims and tourists to evacuate the
Kashmir Valley overnight. These moves prepared the ground for the shock therapy
of revoking the special Constitutional status of J&K and bifurcating the
erstwhile state into two Union Territories. As the Home Minister,
he could suspend the democratic rights of peaceful assembly and plant one
security personnel for every 10 Kashmiris in the Valley. Political processes
came to a halt with the arrest of mainstream political leaders, businessmen,
lawyers and social activists, and with the suspension of telephone and internet
services. His master should have
been pleased.
However, such baring
of ideological fangs, has brought the government international opprobrium and
charges that the Prime Minister is trying to refashion secular India into a
Hindu majoritarian state. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was able to cite
these measures as intimations of a fascist agenda, a threat that the Western
world understands more than Indians. The Prime Minister’s international image
crafted in the last five years as a statesman and a champion of economic growth
suddenly crumbled. In rapid succession,
Home Minister Shah managed to light fires across the country by ramming through
the Citizenship Amendment Act and threatening to implement a National Citizen’s
Register by expounding a “chronology” that sent shivers up the spine of the
population. Prime Minister Modi’s popularity and approval evaporated overnight
with the countrywide protests that followed.
Could one have even
imagined five years ago that fearless teenagers would be standing in the
streets shouting “Fascists!” at the Modi government? Protest art is further
ramming home such accusations in a huge outburst of the public imagination.
These young citizens are reading out the Preamble of the Constitution and
proudly reclaiming the nation and the tricolour while they oppose the new
citizenship laws. The very Muslim “sisters” in whose name the Prime Minister
stewarded the law to criminalise instant divorce among Muslims, have organised
sit-in protests across the country. They are joined by women cutting across
caste, community and religious lines.
This then is the Home
Minister’s New Year gift to his mentor. Prime Minister Modi
will have to find a way to regain his earlier standing domestically and
internationally. He may decide to take a few steps back in J&K by further
lifting restrictions, releasing political leaders and by retrofitting
governmental processes to redefine citizenship. However, these are core
elements of the Hindutva ideology to which he is also committed.
Without giving up his
core ideological agenda Prime Minister Modi could, however, try to refurbish
his image by putting a distance between himself and his Home Minister. A
pulling of the leash signalled by a change of portfolio perhaps? Not a
personable figure in the best of circumstances, shifting Amit Shah from the
Home Ministry may assuage public anger somewhat and help whitewash the Prime
Minister’s image. Otherwise, he will continue to make more enemies than friends
for the Prime Minister. Already to the chagrin of Hindutva ideologues, he has
turned secularism into a cause celebre for the citizens of India and eroded the
stature of his “saheb” within six months of his re-election.
