Book excerpt: She, The Leader by Nidhi Sharma | How Smriti Irani recovered from a mistake she made in her early years in the BJP

Smriti Irani, Union Minister for Women & Child Development and Minister for Minority Affairs, at a conclave in April 2023. (Photo by Ministry of Women & Child Development via Wikimedia Commons)

When Smriti joined the BJP, the party was in power at the Centre and was eyeing to wrest power from the Congress in several states. Her first big assignment was the Rajasthan assembly elections. In the run-up to the 2003 assembly elections, the BJP had decided to bring Vasundhara Raje into state politics and make her the state unit chief. Mahajan had foreseen a rebellion within the state unit and flew down about hundred young BJP activists from his home state Maharashtra to micromanage Raje’s campaign and election. Smriti was one of these activists.  Mahajan was hesitant in drafting in Smriti as her daughter Zoish was just two months old. But an eager Smriti decided to work for the party. She was still an actor and actively shooting for her serials. ‘I would shoot through the night. Come home in the early hours of morning, feed my baby, align everything at home and be at the airport by 8.30 a.m. to take the plane assigned by the party and then campaign the whole day. I would return at 6–6.30 p.m., bathe and feed my little one, and go back to my shoots,’ she says remembering how she got into the habit of catching up on her sleep on flights—something she still does. Did she ever feel stressed? Smriti says, ‘Life does not give everyone opportunities. It was giving me opportunities. How could I have refused or complained?’ This balancing act caught the eye of the BJP seniors. Within a year she was made vice-president of the BJP’s Maharashtra youth wing. ‘I felt that when people said “youth wing”, somehow only a male activist came to mind. I told Mundeji that we should involve more women in the youth wing. He assigned me the job of finding Yuvati Pramukhs in each district. We started with Vidarbha and within six months, every district of Maharashtra had a Yuvati Pramukh in place,’ says Smriti.

She, The Leader by Nidhi Sharma
In the national arena, the BJP was on a high. It had won elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh in 2003 and Mahajan advised Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to advance the parliamentary polls by six months to April–May 2004. Smriti was given a ticket from the Chandni Chowk parliamentary constituency against the Congress veteran and lawyer Kapil Sibal. The BJP was routed and the Congress-led UPA came to power at the centre. Smriti lost her first election to Sibal. In December 2004, Smriti took a political misstep. In Surat to inaugurate a jewellery store, she linked the party’s defeat to the 2002 Gujarat riots and said, ‘If Narendra Bhai gives up the post of the chief minister of Gujarat, it would prove that the BJP is a party with a difference.’ She went on to announce a fast unto death on Vajpayee’s birthday if Modi did not step down. It sent shock waves in the party—a political greenhorn had taken on Modi in his home turf of Gujarat. Smriti had clearly tried to choose sides, in this case Vajpayee’s camp. However, by later that evening Smriti had to retract her statement. Two months later, L.K. Advani hosted a screening of a documentary at his home and Smriti bent down to touch Modi’s feet, who accepted the gesture and blessed her by calling her ‘Gujarat ki beti’. Many felt that this would end Irani’s career, some said that she was made to give that statement, others said she clearly tried to choose a camp. In a 2016 interview with the well-known television journalist Barkha Dutt, Smriti cleared the air, ‘At that time, I was just a young kid,’ she said, while Mr Modi was ‘a star of the BJP’. He could very well have told the organization that this upstart of a girl has said something, kindly have her sacked, or kindly put her in a place from where she never politically rises,’ she said. Instead, Irani recalled, ‘He sat down with me, he said, “Tell me how you reached this conclusion.” When she replied  that she had been influenced by what was reported in the media,  she says Mr Modi replied, “Don’t judge me by editorials” and  then advised her, “You ensure you see me by the programs that I roll out, see me by the effectiveness, or if there is a gap, tell  me what the gap in that program is, help me work so that I  can deliver on the promise of development.”’ Irani said that the PM advised her, ‘I am not looking for apologies, explanations. If you can apply yourself to any one program and help me make it a success, that is something you should do for the party.’ She was appointed the national secretary and later the head of the BJP’s Mahila Morcha in 2010. Within eight years of joining the party, she was nominated to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat in 2011. The nomination had Modi’s blessings—he was present when Smriti filed her nomination papers. A little-known fact is that Smriti began her close association with Gujarat with this nomination and as an MP nurtured and closely monitored tribal-dominated areas such as Kevadia, where the world’s tallest monument, the Statue of Unity was planned and constructed.

Her spectacular rise through the echelons of the saffron party, which is perceived as patriarchal, started rumours objectifying Smriti as yet another actor charming her way into power. She had attracted the ire of the entrenched old guard. There were ludicrous claims of a tunnel running between Smriti’s and a senior leader’s home in New Delhi. But Smriti is never known to have bothered. ‘The problem is that when a woman gets attacked, she gets attacked for her character but never for her policymaking. Have you ever seen any criticism of a woman in politics about her policies?’ she asks. Putting in eighteen-hour days, balancing politics and home as a hands-on parent, reading voraciously about different issues, managing her party’s ideological stand, and her fluency in multiple languages saw Smriti emerge as an indefatigable, fiery, and dependable leader of the BJP.

Excerpted from She, The Leader by Nidhi Sharma, with permission from Aleph Book Company.