That Shah has consistently, resolutely and without reserve displayed a firm unwillingness and refusal to be co-opted by the cabal is his gravest ‘crime’
The left illiberal cabal, the Congress leadership (especially the current “high command”), directionless and ideologically bereft communists, five-star activists who raise funds in the name of relief and end up using the gathered loot for self-embellishment, and the entire motley crowd and members of the anti-Modi ecosystem — loosely known as the “Gole Market-Khan Market Consensus — and intellectual lumpen whose only and principal occupation since May 2014 has been to cross the seven seas and speak on how India has fallen on hard days, all have an acute and intractable problem with BJP president Amit Shah. It is not one single problem, but rather a conglomeration of problems and this compounds their hatred for the man, this compels them to conjure up tricks, resort to subterfuge and indulge in character assassination.
The latest attempt at witch-hunting has included launching a campaign of calumny surrounding Judge BH loya’s death that occurred in 2014. This attempted resurrection of a closed chapter, the attempt to generate a dishonest and false narrative, to manipulate the sequence of events, to twist testimonies and to hurl innuendoes relentlessly is a reflection of their desperation to get Amit Shah out of the way, to confine him and render him politically inactive or obsolete. This desperation will peak as we near 2019 and will reach its apogee when the next General Election is announced. In their desperation, the cabal will increasingly resort to trying to paint false stereotypes which they will then desperately attempt to fit the persona of Amit Shah.
For the Congress led by its supreme leader Rahul Gandhi, which has indulged in politics over dead bodies in the past, has in the last few years mastered the politics of ‘vulturism’ and has of late displayed an acute infatuation for India-breakers, the Judge loya episode has come as a stick with which to try and browbeat Amit Shah — seen to be the principal opponent of its reigning family — and to try and corner him. But each time, the knots are unravelling, the peddlers of falsehood are being exposed and the cabal is faced with a fresh challenge emanating from its own doing. In their desperation, the members of the cabal have terrorised Judge loya’s family members, have cast aspersions on them, and driven by their Amit Shah phobia they have even started hallucinating, hearing and seeing his name in places where it was never uttered or through the lips of people who never referred to it!
For those who have a memory of past events, Rahul Gandhi’s asking for a probe into the death of Judge loya is understandable; after all, he comes from a party and family some of whose members are alleged to have ordered the bumping off of Rustom Sohrab Nagarwala and the young investigating officer of the infamous Nagarwala episode, DK Kashyap, and to have deliberately damaged Jayaprakash Narayan’s kidneys in detention during Emergency, pushing him to eventual death. With such a murky past, it is but natural that Rahul Gandhi has developed a habit of seeing conspiracies and unnatural deaths wherever his eyes roll.
Amit Shah’s “crimes” have been many, according to this cabal; he is “guilty” on a number of counts. let us enumerate a few of them. For this cabal, Amit Shah’s “crime” has been that, as Home Minister of Gujarat, he had broken the backbone of terror networks in the state, had neutralised terrorists and had sanitised the state to the chagrin of many. According to this cabal, Amit Shah’s “crime” has been that he did not hesitate to take terrorism and terrorists head-on in order to ensure the safety and protection of the ordinary citizen, that he did not indulge and cower before false narratives of human rights, that he had no time for the merchants and mercenaries of human rights who shed tears at the death of terrorists but look the other way, ignore, applaud or justify when these terrorists themselves indulge in violation of human rights.
That Amit Shah, while facing trial in the Sohrabuddin case, never once tried to circumvent the law, never once complained of victimisation, went through the rigours of the process with due diligence and deference, never once cast aspersions on the motives and process of law, is seen as a crime by this cabal. Unlike them, Shah did not resort to name-calling nor did not play the victim card. He did not seek to elicit sympathy as one victimised by the system. He should have done all of these; the fact that he did not, displayed that he had faith in the Constitutional and judicial process of the land and that, according to them was a “crime.”
That Shah has displayed grit in winning elections, has re-scripted the scripts that this cabal had crafted, has succeeded in defeating their electoral narratives and has each time proved their versions wrong, is a “crime”. That he displayed the gumption to call for a “Congress-mukt Bharat” (Congress-free India) which in effects means the dissolution of the rent-seeking mentality, an obsession with control and corruption, a fascination with syndicatism and above all, means the end of dynastysm, the rejection of appeasement politics and propensity to indulge in casteism, are also seen as grave “crimes.”
That Amit Shah has succeeded in national politics after being written off as a regional upstart by this cabal, that he has engineered some of the most massive electoral victories in India’s recent electoral history, that he has taken the political and electoral narrative to the next level of undeniable progression, that he has proved to be an astute political realist, strategist as well as idealist, that he has expanded and infused new vigour in the party (a party which this cabal would want to wither away), that he has come up with a perfectly synchronised system of party-government working, has stood through thick and thin by his mentor and leader Narendra Modi, has reinforced the need for ideological direction and political pragmatism as the way forward to political survival and expansion, that he has matched every move of the cabal with equally deft counter-moves, that he has met ruse with ruse, strength with strength, word with word and action with action and has not ceded an inch in the last three-odd years that he has been at the helm, that he has not slowed down, nor tired, nor yielded are “crimes” enough in the eyes of this cabal.
Shah’s most compelling “crime”, however, is that he has, consistently, resolutely and without reserve, displayed a firm unwillingness and refusal to be co-opted into the circuits that this cabal has run for years across the power and intellectual circles of the Capital and across the country, while his other, more excruciating, “crime” in the eyes of this cabal is that he has dared to challenge the “family” that has fed, patted, fattened and nurtured them over the years. It is this inability of the marauders of the system to co-opt Shah that has instilled in them an acute sense of instability; it is that sense which drives them to despair and desperation... it makes them hallucinate and moan.
(The writer is director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Research Foundation, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal)
