New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah on Wednesday completed his three years in office on Wednesday.
The workaholic Shah, considered to be a master political strategist, and the closest confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has rapidly increased BJP's electoral footprint and clinch states like Goa, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh.
The Modi-Shah combine has turned to be a nightmare for the fractured Opposition, which has failed to understand the logic of changing voter profile.
Shah, who was appointed as BJP president on July 9, 2014, has successfully blended his astute organisational skills with the NaMo charisma, and the result is evident. At present, the BJP has 13 states under its belt and it is in power in five more with alliance partners, besides enjoying unchallenged power at the Centre.
The 52-year-old leader from Gujarat is considered to be the architect of BJP's historic win in Uttar Pradesh during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He helped BJP bag 73 of the state's 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP. Not only this, the party won a thumping majority in the 2017 state Assembly elections, which also saw Yogi Adityanath at the helm.
Under the leadership of Shah, BJP has emphasised on booth management, which has reaped rich dividends for the ruling party.
Party leaders are quick to point out that under him the BJP has not only won most elections it contested, it also saw its vote percentage rise even in the polls it lost, like in Bihar.
Besides setbacks in 2015 when BJP failed to make the grade in Delhi and Bihar, the BJP juggernaut rolled on as it formed its maiden governments in Assam, Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir.
Under the leadership of Shah and Modi, the resurgent BJP has now set its eyes on West Bengal, Kerala, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. Notably, BJP's presence in these particular states is very less and all of them are ruled by strong regional parties.
In states like Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Manipur, the BJP has tasted power for the first time. In Goa, where it finished second after Congress, Shah despatched Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, a canny practitioner of realpolitik, to cobble together a majority and form a government with smaller parties.
In Arunachal Pradesh, the party under Shah engineered mass defection by 33 of the 43 MLAs of People's Party of Arunachal Pradesh and formed its own government.
The party also notched more than ever vote share in local bodies polls in Odisha, Kerala and West Bengal, states which Shah has marked out as it as the next potential growth regions for the party during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
With an eye on the next Lok Sabha elections, the former Gujarat home minister has announced that the party's golden era will arrive when it rules across the country from "panchayat to Parliament".
Under him, the BJP, once considered a 'Brahmin-Baniya' party, has reached out to the backward classes and Dalits, a strategy that paid rich dividends in the UP Assembly elections.
BJP chief Amit Shah was elected to the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. Shah, who on Wednesday resigned as legislator of the Gujarat Assembly, challenged the Congress to a battle in the forthcoming Assembly polls.
