Modi’s Troubles at Home

If the Gujarat CM has watched the arrest of his deputy home minister with a sense of personal injury and alarm, it’s not without reason.

The arrest of Amit Shah by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on 25 July turns the searchlight on Gujarat and its Home Department once again. Amit Shah is the state’s second minister for Home to bite the dust. The department has been headed by Chief Minister Narendra Modi ever since he took over in 2001 and moved Haren Pandya to the state’s revenue ministry. Modi’s subsequent deputies, Gordhan Zadafia and now Amit Shah, have also had rocky stints.  

Both Zadafia and Pandya were once seen as loyal members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yet, interestingly, both fell out of Narendra Modi’s favour and turned bitter foes of his; while Zadafia broke away to start his Maha Gujarat Janata Party (MJP), Pandya was bumped off as he sat in his car after a morning walk in the Law Garden area of Ahmedabad—after a sordid sequence of events, as it turned out. 

The CM’s principal secretary PK Mishra had asked Gujarat’s intelligence chief RB Sreekumar to find out if Pandya had met an independent citizens’ tribunal (which included former Supreme Court Chief Justice VR Krishna Iyer) investigating the Godhra riots of March 2002. Mishra had made it clear that the CM suspected as much, by the record of Sreekumar, who took charge as intelligence chief about a month after the mayhem and diligently kept diary notes of all instructions given to him by senior officials in the state. In June 2002, he confirmed Pandya’s tribunal meeting. On 26 March 2003, Pandya was murdered. 

It was a death Modi was able to live down, despite his government being put in the dock by Sreekumar’s testimony. But that was then. Now, Amit Shah’s case might give Modi, whose dreams of national leadership are said to be vivid, his most sleepless nights yet. 

Unlike his predecessors, Shah has not fallen out of favour with Modi. Quite the contrary. Which is why the BJP is scurrying for cover with its hamhanded criticism of the CBI. Shah’s closeness to Modi is no secret, but is a surprise all the same.  

The CM’s apparent dislike of anyone getting ‘too close’ to him was why the other two home ministers fell afoul of him. But Shah, a stockbroker who wheedled his way deep into Gujarat’s cooperative banking sector, is a grassroots politician and an ace manipulator of people and events. Year after year, for example, he has handled LK Advani’s election to Parliament from Gandhinagar, the state capital. Shah’s assessment of voter sentiment has rarely been out of tune with electoral reality, say sources, and this drew him close to Modi. If the man betrayed a gnawing mistrust and hatred, it was of the media; in a phrase that now has an ironic ring to it, he described it as a “thoroughly corrupt force in Indian politics”.

That Shah never questioned Modi’s decisions is well known. Yet, says a source, “He was busy doing his own thing. There are about 20 pieces of evidence against him in the [CBI] chargesheet. Some businessmen have given evidence that Shah demanded money from them after the Sohrabuddin fake encounter. They paid him to keep their names out of the police investigation into Sohrabuddin Sheikh’s activities. But the fact remains that these activities were going on right under the nose of the CM.”

The dirt currently being uncovered by the CBI is likely to tarnish Modi, even if indirectly. Recently, a suspended inspector of the Anti Terror Squad (ATS) blew the whistle on a compact disc with scandalous sex clips of Sanjay Singh, a BJP leader in charge of Gujarat and vocal Modi opponent. The whistle-blower, BR Chaube, told the CBI that the CD was fake. This corroborates the assessment of the Forensic Science Laboratory at Hyderabad. Though Chaube himself had distributed copies of the CD at a BJP convention in December 2005, he has reportedly said that the video images, crafted in Gujarat, were given to him by DG Vanzara, the state’s ATS chief then.

Vanzara is currently in custody for the Sohrabuddin case, in which Gujarat cops are alleged to have illegally gunned down this supposed ‘terrorist’ and his wife. As for Sanjay Joshi, after a long hibernation after the scandal, he was re-inducted as a BJP office bearer once Nitin Gadkari took charge of the party. 

The difficulty of speaking against Modi in Gujarat is widely acknowledged. Still, former acolytes such as Zadafia are ready to test their courage. “A band of criminals is running the state,” he says, “It is a kind of extortion collectively. Gujarat is in a bad situation. Governance is bad. Amit Shah and I worked together for two decades. He was home minister when CDs of Sanjay Joshi’s sexual activities were circulated… I was kept under constant intelligence surveillance even when I was home minister. I had approached Advani and the RSS, but they were not keen on taking up the matter with Narendrabhai.” 

Another dissident is Jaspal Singh, former state minister in the Modi cabinet and retired IPS officer. In early July, he wrote Gujarat Governor Kamla Beniwal a request for departmental action against three government officers who recently visited the CBI director in connection with the Sohrabuddin case. Jaspal Singh has termed the visit ‘impropriety by the state and its senior officers’. All three—chief secretary AK Joti, additional chief secretary (home) Balwant Singh, and director general of Police S Khandwawala—report directly to Modi. According to the letter, the trio went to Delhi with the ‘fullest knowledge of the CM and his home minister to influence the investigation’. Further, ‘Never has any government used officers in this manner and never have high ranking officers allowed themselves to be misused in this manner’, states the letter. 

Modi’s critics say that it is precisely because of people such as Zadafia and Jaspal Singh that the CM clings to the Home portfolio. It makes it that much harder for anyone to speak up. Ashwin Patel, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader, did dare to oppose the CM, but was arrested in October 2008 and slapped with sedition charges. He was charged with ‘circulating defamatory SMSes against the chief minister and trying to create social tension amongst different communities’.

Even in New Delhi, the BJP senses trouble coming its way from Gujarat. With scant regard for the balance of evidence, BJP Chief Nitin Gadkari has come out in support of Amit Shah, calling the CBI the “Congress Bureau of Intimidation”. Perhaps he had too few other options. “The CBI has completely left the Andhra Pradesh government off its radar,” says Gadkari . “The Supreme Court had specifically observed that the identity of the seven police personnel who had accompanied Sohrabuddin was not known in the probe conducted by the Gujarat government. This was the reason the case was handed over to the CBI. The CBI has not bothered to interrogate the Andhra Pradesh government or its police officials. There is a Congress government there,” says the BJP chief.

Gadkari’s fervent intervention may not be enough, admits a central BJP leader. “Narendrabhai was hoping to lead a non-Congress government at the Centre,” adds the leader, “The focus on the wrongdoings of the Home Department, a ministry held by him, has dealt him a big blow.” For all the overt support for Modi within the BJP, it is no secret that there are quite a few covert smiles at his plight.

Amit ShahGujaratNarendra Modi