[Analytics] The power of two: Modi and Shah, newsmakers of the year in India

Politics, like money, never sleeps. Nor does Narendra Modi. Or so it seemed in 2019 when the prime minister was perennially in fast-forward mode, working punishing hours even on holidays and setting a scorching pace that his colleagues and rivals found hard to match. On Christmas Day, for instance, he chose to launch the Atal Bhujal Yojana, aimed at improving groundwater levels in 8,300 villages in seven states. Modi may have turned 69 this September, but he remained indefatigable in pushing through a radically new national agenda that he and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had set in a year full of tumult, trials and tribulations. Raj Chengappa specially for the India Today.

Ironically, the year had begun on a bleak note for Modi. His political ratings were plummeting and the BJP had just lost the three crucial north Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in December 2018 to the Congress. The economy was on a slippery slope, with GDP growth beginning to falter (it dropped dramatically in the next two quarters). There was much good that Modi had done on the social development front in his first term, including building millions of toilets, providing gas connections and housing for the rural masses. However, an adventurist demonetisation and poorly-executed reform such as the Goods and Services Tax (initially lauded for its good intention) had impacted employment adversely. It may have also resulted in what Arvind Subramanian, a former chief economic advisor to the Modi government, termed the great slowdown of the Indian economy.

Then, in February, in one of the deadliest terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir in three decades, a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden SUV into a CRPF convoy, killing 40 security personnel in Pulwama. Two weeks later, Modi lived up to his reputation as a risk-taker by ordering Indian Air Force jets to strike a militant camp in Balakot inside Pakistani territorythe first such operation since the Indo-Pak war in 1971. The IAF then handled Pakistan’s riposte, even though it lost an aircraft. Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, too, was captured, but Modi managed to muster enough international pressure to force his Pakistan counterpart, Imran Khan, to release him. In ordering the air strike, Modi showed steel and sent a clear message to Pakistan that, unlike in the past, India would not shy away from retaliating if our neighbour continued to abet terror.

This was the moment that turned the tide in favour of Modi and the BJP in the general election in May 2019. In his quest for re-election, Modi was ably assisted by BJP president Amit Shah, with whom he shares a guru-shishya relationship. Far from being complacent after the 2014 victory, Shah honed the party into an even more formidable fighting machine, its strength reaching 180 million in August, making it arguably the largest democratic political party in the world. He also finessed the party’s electoral strategy, building on his exemplary booth management skills, along with sharp political arithmetic and caste calculus. Propounding muscular nationalism alongside vikas (development), the Modi-Shah duo unleashed a blitzkrieg of election rallies across the country. It helped that an enfeebled opposition was unable to get their act together and project a single leader as a prime ministerial candidate to challenge Modi.

The outcome of the poll proved to be a landmark not just for Modi but in India’s electoral history as well. Modi led his party to a clear majority, with the BJP winning 303 seats on its own and its allies winning another 50 to take the NDA tally to 353 in the 545-member Lok Sabha. Not since Indira Gandhi’s back-to-back majorities in the 1967 and 1971 elections had an Indian leader achieved such a feat. Modi had established himself as a colossus on the Indian political stage. At his victory rally at the party headquarters in Delhi, he declared: This election has left India with only two castesthose who are poor and those who work towards eradicating poverty. At that rally, party president Amit Shah was the only leader to greet Modi at the entrance, walking a step behind him as delirious supporters showered them with petals. It was a sign that Shah had graduated from being Modi’s shishya to becoming his key general.

The Modi-Shah relationship goes back more than three decades though the prime minister is the senior by 14 years. The duo met in 1984 when Modi was an RSS pracharak and Shah had joined the BJP as a party worker. Modi’s sense of nationalism and ability to mentor those who worked with him impressed Shah. Modi, in turn, recognised his young acolyte’s sharpness and ability to grasp the import of current events and their historical context. The two, along with other leaders, worked to decimate the Congress in 1995 and instal the first BJP government in Gujarat. Later, during Modi’s 13-year stint as Gujarat chief minister beginning 2001, Shah handled a dozen portfolios and emerged as his No. 2. Their bond strengthened when Shah, who was in judicial custody for the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case in 2010, refused to turn on Modi despite immense pressure from the Central Bureau of Investigation.

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha election in 2014 and in the five years of the BJP-led government’s first term, Shah earned Modi’s trust and loyalty by delivering electoral victories in key states. While Modi concentrated on running the government, Shah set about consolidating the party under his guidance. He was an able mediator between Modi and Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Modi did not always have a comfortable relationship with senior RSS leaders as the latter saw him as unbending on many issues the Sangh wanted to push. Shah would step in to iron out the wrinkles.

Modi consulted Shah on the many welfare schemes he launched in his first term and used the feedback Shah provided from party cadres to fine-tune them. Shah also played a key role in gubernatorial appointment in various states and rewarding party loyalists with appointments on the boards of various government commissions and public sector units. In 2017, Shah was inducted into the Rajya Sabha to ensure floor management for his party in Parliament.

It became clear then that Modi was grooming him for bigger things down the line, possibly as his second-in-command. There have been other such political duumvirates in the pastincluding the Atal Behari Vajpayee-Lal Krishna Advani partnership in the first NDA regime and that of Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh in the decade-long UPA reign. But the Modi-Shah equation remains unique because the relationship continues to be one of boss and subordinate and not of comrades. Or, as one aide described it, Shah plays the Hanuman to Modi. Always deferential towards Modi, Shah rarely acts on a big issue without his consent. He is careful to mention Modi as the prime mover in all his speeches.

With the BJP’s landslide win in the 2019 general election, Shah had truly arrived. Having held no portfolio in the first Modi government, he became the logical choice for induction into the Union cabinet in the second term. As a sign of his clout in the party, he retained the post of party president. J.P. Nadda would be working president to handle the day-to-day business of the party and Shah was to mentor him till organisational elections were held in 2020.

When Shah was made home minister, replacing Rajnath Singh, who was shifted to defence, it was a signal that Modi was entrusting him with the task of pushing pending issues on the RSS’s Hindutva agenda outlined in the BJP manifesto. These included abolishing Article 370 of the Constitution which conferred special autonomy on Jammu and Kashmir, ensuring closure on the Ayodhya Ram Mandir issue, setting up a National Register of Citizens (NRC) to weed out illegal immigrantsparticularly the large number of Bangladeshi Muslimsamending the Citizenship Act to help Hindu refugees from neighbouring states become Indian citizens and establishing a Uniform Civil Code.

At the start of his second term, Modi announced that he wanted most of his big-bang reforms initiated in the first 100 days and told his council of ministers to get cracking. For home minister Shah, the first priority was dealing with the deteriorating situation in Kashmir. Whatever efforts the BJP had made in the state, first by running a government in alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and then imposing governor’s rule, had failed to reverse the growing disaffection in the Valley against the Indian State. To thwart any attempt by Pakistan to destabilise the Valley, Modi had considered abolishing Article 370 after the Pulwama attack in February, but deferred it fearing that it would be seen as a political ploy to win the parliamentary election.

When Shah took over as home minister, there was nothing to move the needle forward on Kashmir. To his credit, Shah read every file on Kashmir since Independence and then proposed to Modi that the way out was a clean, decisive break from the past. The duo discussed it with their key aides and it was decided that not only would Article 370 be repealed but the state would also be split into two Union territoriesJ&K and Ladakh. President Ram Nath Kovind issued an order to the effect on August 5, and Shah moved quickly to have it ratified by both houses of Parliament. Days before the order, Shah had worked out a strategy with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to pre-empt any uprising in the Valley. The Amarnath Yatra was cut short and key leaders of the Valley, including three former chief ministersMehbooba Mufti, Farooq Abdullah and his son Omarwere placed under house arrest. Thousands of other leaders and followers were also put in detention and a complete communication blackout imposed. With the government failing to release them even after claiming the situation in the Valley was normal, it faced increasing criticism both domestically and internationally for human rights violations.

While he left Shah to handle the execution and fallout of the Kashmir decision, the prime minister focused on tackling the continuing slide in the economy. In the first budget of his second term, presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 5, he ensured that she committed to the ambitious goal of making India a $5 trillion economy by 2024almost doubling its current size in five years. This would entail a sustained GDP growth of 9 per cent annually. The July budget fell far short of expectations in addressing the pain points in the economy, particularly the slump in demand. Simultaneously, quarterly growth figures began showing an alarming decline.

Concerned at the state of the economy, Sitharaman, under Modi’s guidance, started holding a series of meetings with stakeholders in key sectors to assess their concerns. A spate of relief measures followed, including a rollback of some of her tax proposals in the budget. Corporate tax, for instance, was lowered from 30 per cent to 22 per cent for existing companies and from 25 per cent to 15 per cent for new companiesmeeting a long-pending demand of business leaders. This was followed by measures to address the liquidity crisis of banks with mounting NPAs and to stimulate sluggish private investment. Simultaneously, the Reserve Bank of India undertook an asset quality review of 10,000 non-banking finance company (NBFC) units after the collapse of some big ones last year. The central bank found that 50 big units accounted for 80 per cent of the total loans disbursed by NBFCs and that the assets of only six of them had turned toxic. The Modi government set aside funds to refinance the sound ones.

Meanwhile, key players in the telecom sector were staring at huge losses after the Supreme Court in October ordered them to pay the government pending spectrum charges totalling

Rs 1.7 lakh crore. The Modi government stepped in with a two-year moratorium on spectrum-related dues. Steps were also taken to relieve stress in the real estate sector, one of the worst-hit by demonetisation, including a Rs 23,000 crore window to revive stuck projects. In Parliament, the Modi government moved on labour reforms by streamlining the complex maze of 44 federal laws into four codes addressing the issues of labour security and employer flexibility. Yet, to the frustration of Modi and his team, the economy continued to slide.

The bright spot for the Modi government came from an entirely different source. Clear in his first term that his government would respect the Supreme Court verdict on Ayodhya and resisting pressure from the Sangh parivar to bypass the courts and take over the disputed site through a government order, Modi-Shah, backed by RSS chief Bhagwat, put pressure on the apex court to hold daily hearings of the long-delayed review petition of the 2010 verdict of the Allahabad High Court. The court consented, and a five-judge bench headed by the then-chief justice Ranjan Gogoi fixed a time-frame of 40 days for the hearing. Delivering a historic verdict on November 9, the apex court bestowed the disputed site entirely on the Hindu litigants, to build a Ram temple, while granting five acres (in an unspecified location) as compensation to the Muslim party. To their credit, Modi, Shah and key RSS leaders had cautioned their supporters not to show triumphalism should the verdict be in their favour and ensured that law and order was maintained after the judgment.

Buoyed by their success in Ayodhya, Modi and Shah decided to go full throttle on the remaining issues in the Hindutva agenda. And that is where things started unravelling and accusations of hubris began to be hurled at the duo. Shah rammed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, 2019which selectively offers citizenship rights to non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistanthrough the just-concluded winter session of Parliament. He then talked aggressively in Parliament about conducting an NRC so as to root out illegal immigrants from the country.

The home minister and other BJP leaders saw the CAA as a way out of the political mess created by the Supreme Court-administered NRC in Assam. Here, close to 1.9 million peoplehalf of them Hinduswere rendered stateless. For the Sangh parivar at least, the original target of the exercise was to root out illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh. The BJP brain-trust now thought the CAA would help them in the upcoming state election in West Bengal, which has a large number of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh. Shah was dismissive of opposition charges that the government was pursuing a divisive Hindu rashtra’ agenda, selectively placing India’s 200 million-plus Muslim community under scrutiny. In its haste to push through the CAA, the government failed to disseminate a palatable narrative for the need of it prior to its passing, as it had done in the case of the Ayodhya verdict.

Clearly, Shah failed to anticipate the extent of the protest that engulfed not only university campuses but also spread to other sections of society, resulting in some 20 deaths in Uttar Pradesh alone. Opposition-ruled states, including West Bengal, staunchly opposed the NRC. Not just chief minister Mamata Banerjee, but even NDA allies like Nitish Kumar, who heads a coalition government with the BJP in Bihar, distanced themselves from it, much to Modi’s consternation. So did the party’s issue-based supporters like Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik, Telangana chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy.

Meanwhile, the series of steps taken by the Modi government since May 2019including the passage of the triple talaq bill, the continuing confinement of thousands of Kashmiris along with top political leaders, passage of the CAA and the resultant violence and the talk of an NRCbegan to be seen in international circles as evidence of attempts to isolate the Muslim community in India. The criticism began to mount. This, when Modi in his second term had made impressive strides in foreign policy, which included holding an unprecedented joint rally with US President Donald Trump, called Howdy, Modi’. Despite continuing differences with China, the optics of his informal summit with President Xi Jinping in the temple town of Mamallapuram had added to his international stature.

However, with the stigma of his government’s actions in Kashmir and the protests against the CAA, Modi’s carefully-crafted image started taking a beating. To the prime minister’s embarrassment, his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe cancelled the informal summit to be held in Guwahati over the CAA unrest in Assam. Bangladesh foreign minister A.K.A. Momen cancelled a scheduled visit in pique. Members of the US Congress too began raising concerns over the human rights situation in Kashmir during a US trip by defence minister Rajnath Singh and external affairs minister S. Jaishankar.

Sensing that the situation could get out of hand, Modi stepped in to cool things down. At a major rally to launch his party’s campaign for the upcoming state election in Delhi, even while he accused the opposition of instigating violent protests against the CAA, Modi signalled his concern by contradicting Shah’s strident promise to conduct an NRC. Indeed, the prime minister asserted that his government had never had any discussion on NRC. He also reassured the Muslim community that those born in India need not fear losing their citizenship and that his government was committed to its 2019 sloganSabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas. Modi’s clarification was seen as a move to rein in Shah and remove the growing perception that the Hindu rashtra and not the country’s economic development was his first priority.

Two days later, however, the Modi government further muddied the waters by announcing that it was going ahead with a National Population Register (NPR) from April 2020. A seemingly chastened Shah went on television to explain that there was a vast difference between the NPR and NRC. He claimed that while the NPR was an exercise in creating a database for policy-makers and required no identity proof from those surveyed, the NRC would need people to provide proof of citizenship. It didn’t cut ice with the opposition, which dubbed the NPR as a consensus-building exercise for the NRC and said that the Modi government’s statements in the past five years had freely linked the two.

Even as agitations over the citizenship act mounted, more bad news mounted for the Modi-Shah duo. The BJP, which had governed Jharkhand for the past five years and had swept 11 of the state’s 14 Lok Sabha seats in May, lost the state election badly to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-Congress-Rashtriya Janata Dal combine. Last month, the two leaders tripped up badly in Maharashtra when the BJP failed to form a government despite winning 105 of the state’s 288 seats on its own because the party allegedly didn’t live up to its power-sharing promise to alliance partner Shiv Sena and alienated its chief Uddhav Thackeray in the process. Soon after, their attempt to foist a hastily sworn-in government with Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar was thwarted, paving the way for an unprecedented Sena-NCP-Congress alliance with Thackeray as chief minister for the full term. The BJP faced a steep decline in its fortunes in Haryana as well, and managed to form a government only with the support of the Dushyant Chautala-led Jannayak Janta Party.

Clearly, the Modi-Shah mystique that worked so wonderfully in the general election was eclipsed in the state elections by local issues and leaders dominating the narrative. Following the defeat in Jharkhand, the BJP, which just two years ago governed 70 per cent of India’s land mass, has now been reduced to 35 per cent and shrinking. Gloomy news from a flailing economy gives the lie to the government’s claim that a recovery is in sight. If the downward trend continues, Modi’s assertion of a $5 trillion economy in five years will start looking like a giant mirage. The ranks of the unemployed continue to swell, however much the government tries to suppress such figures. This is one reason why many are seeing the CAA as a political ploy to deflect attention from the key economic issues the government has failed to address.

Yet, as he has demonstrated earlier, crisis brings out the best in Modi. As a new year and new decade dawn, the prime minister has more than four years to steady the course of his government on some fronts and turn it in others. Those who know him well say that in his second term he is far more self-reliant and impatient to get things done quickly. The prime minister remains hard-focused on making India a developed nation and wants to own the legacy of India’s great moderniser’. The image that is getting strengthened instead is of him as a Hindu Hruday Samrat. And it comes at a big price. His supporters in the BJP may believe that his prime duty is to establish a Hindu rashtra this term. But the reason Modi won so decisively in 2019, and in 2014, was for the development of the country as well as maintaining its security, unity and integrity. His recent major reform of creating a Chief of Defence Staff is a step in that direction. In the remaining years of his second tenure, he, Shah and their colleagues must fulfil that broader promise first rather than the narrower vision of the Sangh parivar. If Modi doesn’t arrest the slide, he might lose the plot early in his second term, just as UPA-II did.

In 2019, however, Modi and Shah dominated the Indian political landscape, apart from setting a radical, new agenda for the country. For these reasons, they have been chosen as INDIA TODAY’s Newsmakers of the Year.

with Uday Mahurkar