PM Modi now template for what it means, takes to be national leader: Amit Shah

PM Modi now template for what it means, takes to be national leader: Amit Shah

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is now the template for what it means and takes to be a “national leader”, Home Minister Amit Shah has said, asserting that the label was earlier handed out to even politicians of no proven merit and only capable of winning election from one or two safe Lok Sabha seats.
While national leaders were identified in the immediate aftermath of the independence movement by their “name recall” across regions because of their participation in the freedom struggle, in the latter decades, notably at the height of the coalition era, the expression came to be much abused, he said, adding that Delhi media generously distributed the status to its “friends and favourites”.
Writing in the book “Modi@20 Dreams Meet Delivery”, brought out by Rupa Publications and to be launched on May 11, Shah said such “facile and insincere manufacturing of national leaders” was shown up for what it was after Modi led the BJP to its biggest Lok Sabha win in 2014 before repeating the feat with a bigger margin in 2019.
A confidant of the prime minister for over three decades, Shah wrote 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 75 years, he said, adding that before the 2014 and the 2019 polls, there had been no mandate for hope; and no mandate that was simply a reward for tested performance.
Noting that no party had won majority in Lok Sabha since 1984 till 2014, he said parties and prime ministers won majorities between 1952 and 1984 on the basis of the goodwill of the freedom movement, family legacy, anger against the incumbent (1977), a mix of fear and sympathy (1984) with appeasement, sectional prejudice, vote bank mobilisation and empty sloganeering like Garibi Hatao’ of 1971.
Everybody now recognises that the 2014 polls marked the most decisive shift in the history of Indian politics, Shah wrote.
With Modi’s appeal being seen as a major factor in the BJP’s win in state polls, including the recent phase of five assembly elections, he said the prime minister embraces state campaigns, issues and idioms.
He is not just an add-on, or 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, the home minister said.
Modi has the precious gift of personal connection with every state and region, he added, noting that one must go back to his years before 2001 to understand it and to his untiring Bharat Yatra of that period with a watchful eye, a listening ear and an open mind . That tapasya was his real-life university.
The prime minister’s experiential learning is his cognitive base, giving him an enormous understanding of the country as a bottom-up, rather than top-down, imposed-from-above and Delhi-centric, national leader, Shah said.
PTI

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