A FEW HOME TRUTHS

If  there is one thing Amit Shah never shies from, it’s from taking a tough question.

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AMIT SHAH
Union Minister of Home Affairs; Cooperation

And so it was at the 21st edition of the India Today Conclave, a day before the schedule for the summer’s  general election was announced, when the country’s home minister answered with a straight bat every bouncer that was thrown his way. Be it the notification of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Supreme Court turning the heat on electoral bonds, the breaking and unbreaking of alliances, Shah clarified his party, the BJP’s, position on all, sometimes with disarming wit, at other times with brusque dismissal.

The BJP stalwart set the tone from the very start, when asked if his party’s slogan, of char sau paar, came on the back of the government’s performance of the past 10 years, or betrayed a sign of insecurity stemming from the anti-incumbency accruing from 10 years in power. Was quoting a big number, then, a ploy to intimidate the Opposition to give up without a fight? Shah’s answer was matter-of-fact: “We have a track record of the past 10 years and an agenda for the next 25 years—to build a ‘Mahan Bharat’.”

As for the making and breaking of alliances as polls neared, the context being the alliance with Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in Uttar Pradesh, and parting ways with Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) in Haryana, he said alliances were about chemistry, not physics, that one plus one is not always two, sometimes it is 11 and many times one plus one becomes zero. The first alliance was keeping long-term imperatives in mind, the split with JJP was because of seat-sharing disagreement.