Power Duo

Together, they have built an unbeatable electoral machine that has delivered six states to them this year, from the spectacular victory in Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat and Himachal towards the yearend

- Uday Mahurkar

When Amit Shah was jailed as a co-accused in the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in July 2010, it was as though a bolt of lightning had struck Narendra Modi. People who would go to visit the Gujarat chief minister at his home or office during Shah’s three month imprisonment would see a man not quite himself. It seemed as if Modi had lost a limb. Reports of a Congress plot to entice Shah into turning approver and implicating Modi swirled about. A frantic CM consulted his advisers on ways to get Shah out of jail. Shah, in turn, relayed messages of reassurance from jail. He would never do anything to harm Modi, whatever the pressure. The jail term was possibly the longest separation between Modi and Shah and a vindication of their nearly three-decade-long partnership that has withstood the test of time.

Shah was the man behind the Modi juggernaut which pulped the Congress to a mere 44 seats in May 2014—making the BJP the first party in the past three decades to get a parliamentary majority on its own. Since then, the duo has delivered 13 states to the BJP, by either winning the elections straight or forming governments through alliances in states—the prize catch was Uttar Pradesh earlier this year and, more recently, Himachal Pradesh. The Congress’s five-state footprint is its smallest in two decades. Political analyst Japan Pathak notes that the Congress was unable to buck anti-incumbency after just five years in power in Himachal Pradesh whereas the Modi-Shah duo snatched another victory in Gujarat after more than two decades.