NEW DELHI: Eight years after first storming to power at the Centre in 2014, the BJP has now embarked on a mission to project Prime Minister Narendra Modi at par with -- and even above -- those who led the freedom struggle, with Home Minister Amit Shah seeking to build a larger-than-life image of his leader.
Writing in a chapter for a soon-to-be released book, Modi@20 Dreams and Delivery by Rupa Publications, Shah describes Modi as a template for what it means and takes to be a ‘national leader’, hinting through the text that all other leaders in the past pale into insignificance.
Ever the loyal second-in-command, Shah asserts that in the past, the ‘national leader’ label would be handed out to politicians of no proven merit and who were only capable of winning elections from one or two safe seats.
The Home Minister makes a clear distinction among those who were identified as ‘national leaders’ in the years immediately after the independence movement because of their “name recall” across regions, and the other whom he dismisses as media creations.
In later years, especially during the coalition-era politics, Shah writes, the expression was much abused with the Delhi media of the time generously attributing the status to its “friends and favourites”.
In the book, which will be released on May 11, Shah builds an argument in ascribing the ‘national leader’ status on Modi by saying that the best teacher for a leader is “travelling to ordinary places, meeting ordinary families, sharing ordinary experiences, and doing all this by ordinary means”.
“Narendra Modi has done so with greater frequency and perseverance than any politician in the past years,” he writes.
Without naming -- but hinting at – PMs from the Nehru-Gandhi family, Shah writes that parties and prime ministers won a majority in the Lok Sabha between 1952 and 1984 on the basis of the freedom struggle’s goodwill, family legacy, anger against the incumbent, a mix of fear and sympathy, with appeasement, sectional prejudice, vote bank mobilisation and hollow slogans.
Shah says “facile and insincere manufacturing of national leaders” was exposed after Modi led the BJP to its biggest national election victory in 2014 before repeating the feat with a bigger margin in 2019.
Modi, he writes, is not just a mascot flown in for a few events and rallies.
“He complements the deep understanding of local politics and concerns that state BJP units and leaders bring to the table. This is very different from the supposed national leaders of other parties. They are fly-in, fly-out visitors with no sense of the ground reality.”
Modi@20 is an anthology edited and compiled by BlueKraft Digital Foundation.
The chapters have been authored by eminent intellectuals and domain experts.
Some of these include External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, NSA Ajit Doval, former Niti Aayog chief Arvind Panagariya, Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and cardiologist Devi Shetty.