How Amit Shah 'mishandled' the Bihar election campaign
November 10, 2015  11:33
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Now that Bihar has been lost, and badly at that, by the BJP, horror stories have started trickling in about the way the election was mismanaged by a person who had won laurels only 18 months ago for steering the partys Lok Sabha campaign and earned for himself the moniker Chanakya.


BJP chief Amit Shahs tactics of relying on outsiders over locals has earned a lot of flak, never mind that the party has officially blamed the social arithmetic from the alliance between Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar for the Bihar debacle.


Radhika Ramaseshan narrates one incident in The Telegraph, Kolkata, of Union minister Nitin Gadkari setting out for Bihar to campaign but being told by a member of Amit Shahs war-room at the last minute that his campaign for the day was off - no reasons given.

Gadkariji was stunned because no reasons were given. Before he could seek one, the caller switched off, a Gadkari aide said, she reports.

None of the BJP leaders she spoke to were willing to go on record -- such was the pervasive fear of Amit Shah.

If you check the political profile of the important members of the president's core team, you will find that none of them has proved his skill or worth in past elections or worked seriously on the ground. In that respect, unfortunately, our party is fast replicating the Congress, which traditionally rewards anything but merit and hard work, a Rajya Sabha MP of RSS provenance from a northern state tells Radhika.


A former Bihar MLA tells Radhika: We were regarded as useless people. The Delhi bosses only spoke to two or three state leaders like Sushil Modi and Mangal Pandey and ignored the rest. When that happened, many workers retired to their homes, thinking 'If there is no work for us, we may as well relax and spend time with our families'.


Radhikas report narrates instances of the wrong people from outside the state were sent out to campaign in Bihar either because their surname happened to be Yadav (like with Bhupender Yadav from Haryana), or their constituency boasted of Biharis (like with C R Patil from Gujarat), or for other silly reasons. The Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar was stationed in Bihar for weeks, she writes, but no one knew what he was told to do.

You can read Radhikas shocking report here
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