On August 6, 2019, I was having coffee with a group of colleagues at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. We were discussing the abrogation, the previous day, of Article 370 in Kashmir. One of the younger members at the table, a computer scientist, remarked: “What we have now is not Modi 2.0, but Shah 1.0.” It was, of course, the new home minister who had planned and piloted the downgrading of India’s only Muslim-majority state.
Perhaps to see this as “Shah 1.0” was an exaggeration, but now there was little question that Amit Shah was not just the second-most powerful man in government but the only minister with any real authority and independence of action apart from the prime minister himself.
The Modi-Shah jugalbandi has had its precedents. Consider the partnership, in government, between Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel in the early years of independent India. While the poisonous polemics of contemporary politics represents them as rivals and adversaries, in truth they were friends, colleagues, and co-workers. Amidst the ruins of Partition, faced with the challenges of scarcity and privation, conflict and division, a united and democratic India might never have come into being had Nehru and Patel not worked together....
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