It was the year 2013. I received a phone call from a gentleman from Madhya Pradesh. He requested me to help fix a meeting with Narendra Modi so that he could present to him his book, a biography of Modi, that analysed his journey from working in the organisation and then as chief minister. While talking to him, I just asked if he had met Modi earlier, regarding writing a book on him or in any other connection. The man emphatically told me that he had never met him but he had written Modi’s whole biography by reading about him in newspapers and whatever he saw of him on TV. On hearing this, I lost all interest in continuing the conversation and asked him to contact the CM office.
Actually, in the last few decades, many books have appeared on Modi which deal with his time in the organisation, as a CM, and even him in the PM’s office. Only a few of these have been written by people who have observed Modi’s politics closely or have had interactions with him from time to time.
Ajay Singh, in that way, is different. His book ‘The Architect Of The New BJP’ has just hit the stands. He has been in journalism for the past five decades and, presently, he is the press secretary to the President. He has been closely watching Modi and his politics for the last 27 years. He met Modi for the first time in 1995. This was the year when Modi was successful in getting Keshubhai crowned as chief minister of Gujarat. He was the architect of this government.
As an organisational general secretary of the BJP in Gujarat, Modi had made the party so strong that it could come to power in the state on its own. With the win in Gujarat, people started talking about Modi all over the country though he had already made his mark as the organiser of LK Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1990 and with the Ekata Yatra of Murli Manohar Joshi, who was the BJP president at the time, in 1991-92.
However, in 1995, Modi had to head to Delhi just after the BJP won power in Gujarat because Shankersinh Vaghela, a senior BJP leader, had revolted. At that time, to end the rebellion, the central leadership of the party had called Modi to Delhi and he was entrusted with the responsibilities of one state after another.
Ajay Singh has witnessed Modi’s political journey
It was around this time that Ajay Singh first met Modi. After that, their meetings kept on happening regularly. During this, Modi had become organisational secretary in the central unit of the BJP and, in 2001, he became the chief minister of Gujarat and then the Prime Minister in 2014. Ajay Singh has been witness to Modi’s rise all through these years and he was continuously in touch with Modi and conversed with him on important issues. So, he got the opportunity to watch Modi’s administrative efficiency and organisational skills very closely.
Ajay Singh spent many years working in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and came to Delhi in the 1990s. He has tracked various streams of politics with academic interest. He has witnessed the transition period of the fall of the Congress and the rise of the BJP. He has tried to understand the role Modi has played in all these developments and this book is the result of that effort.
Five years of research has gone into the book
Ajay Singh started working on this book in 2017. In 2019, he became the press secretary to the President of India. But he kept researching for his book and kept meeting people in this connection. He managed to get time from Modi to meet for this book despite his busy schedule. There have been hundreds of people who have witnessed the organisational skills of Modi very closely and who had ties with Modi. Ajay Singh met them all. However, mentioning the names of all these people would have taken this book’s 200 pages to over 300.
Title gives a preview of the content
The complete title of the book is ‘The Architect Of The New BJP: How Narendra Modi Transformed The Party’. The title itself gives a glimpse of the book’s content. But to know the organisational journey of Modi, you need to read this book. This is not at all a difficult task. If you wish, you can finish this book in 4-5 hours as it has been written in a very lucid style. The important thing is that this book is not just for those who love Modi or are BJP supporters but for those global intellectuals, and academics also who want to understand the organisational skills of Modi.
Even academics and teachers of politics all over the world are interested in knowing about this aspect of Modi. After all, when Modi had joined the BJP in 1986 as a Pracharak from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the party had only two seats in the Lok Sabha – one from Mehsana, his home district, and the other from Andhra Pradesh. In the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, all the heavyweights of the party had lost. The country was in the grip of a sympathy wave for the Congress following the assassination of Indira Gandhi that year, and Advani kept calling this an election of Shok Sabha instead of Lok Sabha.
Modi’s organisation skills still a riddle for many
The party which had just two seats in 1984, came to power in 2014 and again in 2019 on its own strength, which speaks volumes about the organisational skills of Modi who still remains a riddle for many. Ajay Singh has managed to solve this puzzle with his book. Many books have been written on Modi’s administrative journey which saw him rise from the post of CM to the post of PM. But there are few that dissect his organisational skills. Ajay Singh’s book accomplishes this. He has given space to Modi’s thoughts, contacts, and normal organisational tradition of meetings, along with techniques, models, experiments, courage, dialogues, and cooperation, which made him unparalleled, in this journey to the highest political post in the country. Ajay Singh’s book has documented all this. The book has many interesting anecdotes and it also propounds political theories. The book has been introduced by Walter Andersen who was the first person to have written an authentic book on the BJP’s precursor Jana Sangh’s organisational structure and its development.
Ajay Singh’s book is not just a document of Modi’s organisational journey. It has also tried to lay before the readers some major political events as they unfolded during the Modi years. He has been successful in telling the world how a party that was considered a party of only Brahmins and Baniyas spread from north to south and east to west in the country, how under the leadership of Modi a severe blow has been dealt to the caste and community-based politics of voting bloc and replaced with a beneficiary bloc. Under the leadership of Modi, the country got its first Dalit President and now seems set to get its first Tribal Woman President. If someone wants to know how the BJP achieved all this, then there is no better source than the book by Ajay Singh who has sitting in the most famous building in the country on the Raisina Hills for the past three years and, after observing Modi’s politics from the outside, is looking at it from the inside. If you wish to understand the organisational skills of Modi, then wait no longer and immediately read this book ‘The Architect Of The New BJP’ published by Penguin.
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