How BJP losing Bihar shot Shatrughan Sinha to relevance again

Suddenly, he [Shatrughan Sinha] became relevant again.

A few days after he cast his vote in the Bihar Assembly elections of 2015, when SS [Shatrughan Sinha] boarded a Jet Airways flight to London on November 2, 2015, for a personal meeting, it was as if many forces had combined to send him to Coventry.

His party had pointedly sidelined him.

Despite a thumping victory in the Lok Sabha elections (2014) from Patna Sahib in Bihar, he couldn’t be jubilant for long. As SS witnessed the gradual scaling down of his importance within his party, one saw him flash the navras (the gamut of nine main emotions) at various points.

There was buoyancy over a victory hard won. But there was bafflement as he watched a parade of Johnnies-come-lately take their oath in the Cabinet while seniors were kept firmly behind the cordon.

“Not only Johnnies-come-lately but also some who had lost the Lok Sabha elections, perhaps humiliatingly, were rewarded with not one but two and three ministerial posts, marginalising those who’d won with a record margin,” he said, without mincing words.

By the time the Bihar Assembly elections rolled along, the disregard for SS had snowballed. The new frontline of the party blocked him to the point where his open dissidence was ignored like he just didn’t matter. There was hurt and humiliation.

“Just as you find messages like ‘Prabhu, ab tera hi sahara (Lord, now you’re my only support)’ behind lorries and trucks, I was left with no other sahara but to use Twitter as my platform,” he said. He used Twitter to air his comments, “unabashedly and effectively”.

His tweets, which he considered more advisory than accusatory, cautioned his party not to underestimate Nitish Kumar. He openly said, “Don’t count on the anti-incumbency factor because there is no antiincumbency evident anywhere in Bihar,” and tweeted on the need to name a chief ministerial candidate from the party.

“I also cautioned my party that mehengayi, rising prices, will be an issue. We’d already shed tears and lost an election over onion prices in the past. SoI cautioned them to control the prices of essentials like dal and vegetables or pay the price. And we did end up paying the price for it,” he added.

The ethics in his politics depended on which side of the fence one stood.

From his perspective, these were points he wanted to raise within his party to energise and strategise their campaign. He wanted robust positivity, more credible, acceptable faces on hoardings, more democracy in the campaign, and less personal rhetoric against the Opposition. But his suggestions were met with stony silence, making him seem a disgruntled voice of dissidence that did not deserve either a hearing, or a platform as a star campaigner in his home state.

There was disbelief and disappointment in SS as Hema Malini and Ajay Devgn were brought in to campaign for the BJP in Bihar. It was like a personal affront to SS’ celebrity worth. Both actors were people he respected – Devgn was his daughter’s co-star; Hema was a family friend. But what was their grassroots connect with Bihar?

“The party was hijacked by some people in Bihar who conveniently played deaf-mute. They were not ready to listen to (me) or to speak (to me). That’s how they created an impression which the Opposition seized as an opportunity and the ‘Bihari versus Bahari’ (Outsider) slogan was coined. People from Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana and Jharkhand were brought in hordes and packed into Bihar, bhar diya gaya, as if the party hadn’t learnt a lesson from the Delhi debacle at the hands of Kejriwal. Certain local forces also joined hands with the baharis to settle scores with me once and for all. But thanks to my strategy, my tweets and the media, it boomeranged on them. Like our friend Lalu Prasad bounced back from the Opposition, which was an eye-opener to the country, I also bounced back because I was on the side of truth. I was doing things honestly and with transparency.”

There were moments when SS exhibited the human trait of heartache, when he despaired that political life was so complicated that had he known how tough it would be to play the game, perhaps he’d never have enrolled himself for the part.

Unlike party seniors LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, who too had been asked to sit it out and play mute onlookers, SS was not one to exercise RSS-style discipline or restraint. He was at his combative best. The more he was overlooked, the more frequently he supped with the Opposition, and the more defiant his tweets turned. He was anything but khamosh.

The party had chosen a tactic that hurt more than retaliation – they ignored him. “Why should we make a martyr of him by expelling him?” a spokesperson said, off-the-record.

It was as if neither SS nor his statements made a whit’s difference to any of them or to the party. “Whether we win Bihar or lose it, it won’t have anything to do with SS. He won’t make a difference either way,” they believed.

"They made themselves so helpless," SS shot back. "One heard that they'd be taking action against Shatrughan Sinha after the Bihar elections. I said, I didn't know my people were so helpless that they had to wait for an election to take action. That too against a man who had won with a vote share percentage of more than 55 per cent which even our prime minister and Kejriwal didn't reach; a man who could also stand as an independent and had the support of many, right from Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad to Rahul Gandhi. That's why I had made the statement, 'Those who want to take action against me must remember Newton's third law: Every action hasan equal and opposite reaction'.

Amit Shah, our party president, had predicted with great confidence that we would win with two-third majority. Perhaps it had become a habit with him because he had said the same thing in Delhi also. But ultimately we got only two or three seats there instead of two-third," SS smirked. "Right from state president Mangal Panday to Sushil Kumar Modi to Rajiv Pratap Rudy to Shahnawaz Hussain, anybody and everybody, repeated his words like parrots with full zeal, enthusiasm and over confidence."

In the media too, no anchor, pollster or journalist had counted on the possibility that the Shatrughan Sinha/Bihari Babu effect (ie the voice of dissidence) could also be a contributory factor in the Bihar elections.

When SS took off from London on his return journey to India on November 7, he was still the man who didn't count. But by the time he landed at T3 on November 8 at 10.30am, there was a sea-change in perspectives. It was as if en route, up in the air, the man had changed.

Within minutes, the routing of the BJP at the Bihar hustings turned SS from inconsequential to substantial, from redundant to important, from pathetic to prophetic. From the moment he landed, every TV channel sought his wisdom on Bihar.

Anil Agarwal, the founder-chairman of Vedanta Group of Industries was chuffed at something SS said. "He gave a statement that only two Biharis have made it outstandingly big outside the state. Shatrughan Sinha and Anil Agarwal," chuckled the self-made billionaire.

Agarwal knew SS right from his Patna days, before stardom took him to another state. Without getting drawn into making a political comment, Agarwal remarked, "What I can say with confidence about Shatrughan is that he is a man who needs to be convinced. He cannot be bought with any amount of money, he can only be convinced."

SS was convinced that there was nothing wrong in saying it like he saw it. He foresaw what few did - the victory of the Grand Alliance with Lalu making a comeback and Nitish back in the chief minister's chair.

The results of the Bihar elections suddenly turned the spotlight on the SS effect. When more seniors like LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Arun Shourie and Shanta Kumar turned the "miffidence" into a chorus, SS the politician seemed to have scored a point.

But the twists and turns were characteristic of his political life. This wasn’t the first time he had courted expulsion – the many flashpoints with his party surfaced in an incisive retelling of his career as a politician.

Reprinted with the publisher's permission.