How Amit Shah Pandered To Sidhu - Only To Have It Backfire

Amit Shah has had a bad week. If there's one thing that he has painstakingly built up in the years since 2014, it's his air of unflappable infallibility. Sure, there were reversals in Delhi and Bihar for the BJP - but, in both those cases, he faced very tough odds. Those bad losses didn't take anything away from his own reputation for far-seeing, quick-moving politics. 

This week, however, has been different. 

First came Arunachal Pradesh. Now this is not a North Eastern state where you think anyone would want to expend vast amounts of political capital. But things are different for Amit Shah, the BJP - and for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Shah's number-one agenda is for the BJP to occupy the space that the Congress once occupied - as the natural party of government in every state in every corner of India. Every single place where there's a Congress government - even Uttarakhand, even Arunachal - has to feel under pressure. That's what "Congress-mukt Bharat" means.

Plus for the RSS - and for Shah, as a life-long swayamsevak - there's an additional incentive. The North East has to be brought into the "mainstream" of India, as the RSS defines that mainstream. And Arunachal has been a particular focus: Nitin Sethi explained in the Business Standard how they're going about it - "the Shiva-like Rangfraa," writes Sethi, "is a creation of the RSS affiliates who have converted the animist belief system of Tangsa in to a sect of Hinduism and Rangfraa into a clone of Shiva."

For the BJP, every political act has its social agenda behind it, and that's what underlay Shah's decision to spend political capital on destabilizing the Arunachal government. 
 But, clearly, Shah is overstretched. How could he not know that his carefully planned - and expensive - rebellion was falling apart? How could his carefully-husbanded MLAs stay at his expense in Assam, then head back to Arunachal and - the moment they were across the border - run back to the Congress? How could he arrogantly assume that the Congress would not learn from its error of keeping on Tarun Gogoi, and not change an unpopular chief minister if it meant keeping a government?  

What matters here is not that Shah got it wrong. What matters is that he committed so fully to something that he simply failed to follow through. Just like in Uttarakhand, he used government processes to political ends. Just as in Uttarakhand a BJP General Secretary flashed a victory sign while flying MLAs from Delhi to Dehradun only to discover the number of Congress defectors wasn't enough, Shah allowed overconfidence to scuttle his plan. Shah simply failed to have the right follow-through. The Congress outmaneuvered him neatly by keeping their eye on the ball. 

These cricketing metaphors are intended to gently slide you into the second Shah mess-up of the week: the departure of Navjot Singh Sidhu from the BJP. Sidhu, once a moderately entertaining opening batsman and now a completely un-entertaining TV personality, has been long a "face" of the BJP in Punjab. Three times elected to parliament from Amritsar, he was unceremoniously turfed out of his seat in 2014 so that Arun Jaitley could lose it by a lakh or so votes. He is profoundly unpopular not just with the BJP's allies in Punjab, the Akalis, but even within his own state party (presumably he tries to tell jokes in meetings, people like that are always detested in their workplaces).

Even so, however, Shah invested in Sidhu. He gave him a Rajya Sabha seat just weeks ago, as a "distinguished personality" no less. Apparently this was because the Akalis flatly refused to send Sidhu to the Rajya Sabha from Punjab - not because they recognized this would further batter the state's reputation, but because Sidhu has consistently blamed his abysmal performance as an MP on lack of cooperation from the state government. (His constant presence on the sets of awful "comedy" shows instead of in parliament or his constituency has nothing to do with his poor performance, of course.)
 Shah has every right to declare that Sidhu is a "distinguished personality" - Sidhu certainly has a personality, and it is certainly distinguished in the sense that it is painfully easy to distinguish his personality from absolutely everyone else's. And, after all, the Congress sent Mani Shankar Aiyar to the Rajya Sabha under a similar quota, and Aiyar is certainly similarly distinguishable. 

But the question is not Shah's right to do it, but his judgment in doing so. How could he have assumed that someone as unsettled in the party as Sidhu would take a nomination to Delhi and quietly forget about ambitions in Punjab? As Navjot Sidhu's wife, Navjot Sidhu - also, confusingly, a legislator from Amritsar - points out, her husband was upset because he wants to "serve Punjab". Translation: no Delhi sinecure can replace a leading role in state politics. Could Shah not have figured this out about Sidhu in advance? ​Why invest so much capital - a crucial nominated seat in the House that the government doesn't control - and then fail to ensure that the recipient of your generosity is satisfied? Once again, there's a failure to follow through. Here, at least, there's something that Shah could learn from Sidhu - when he used to race down the track to hit something over mid-wicket, he never stinted on the follow-through. 

Is Shah overstretched? Is his ambition catching up with him? Is the BJP in too much of a hurry to ensure it's the only game in town? These are the questions we'll be asking as we head into the UP campaign, which will either cement or destroy Shah's reputation. But one thing's for certain: he's shown successive, puzzling failures of judgment. Prashant Kishor will no doubt be overjoyed at what this means for UP. 

(Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.)

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