Game Of Thrones in INDIA

strategists; Amit Shah has to wait for his revenge

The Rajya Sabha election in Gujarat on Tuesday saw a high-stakes battle that went down to the wire. But at the core of the battle was the political rivalry between BJP president Amit Shah and Congress' war horse Ahmed Patel. Electoral gains apart, the contest boiled down to a rather 'personal' battle, with each of the party strategists' prestige at stake.

After the Election Commission declared Patel as elected to the Rajya Sabha early Wednesday – after a contest marked by defections, cross-party voting and procedural violations – he would've breathed a sigh of relief, for a loss in his home state would have severely dented his reputation as a political manager.

According to report, Patel, the political secretary to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, betrayed the personal nature of this rivalry when he said: "Shah has a personal grudge against me which is why they are going all out, using the most underhand means that I have ever seen in my 40 years of politics to ensure that I lose. Money power, muscle power, you name it – they have deployed it."

Shah, on his part, pulled all stops to try and derail Patel's bid for a fifth term in the Upper House. In the end, ironically, as this report in The Wire points out, it was Shah’s personal involvement in the operation that proved to be the party’s undoing with the EC invalidating the votes of two Congress defectors since they had showed their ballots to the BJP president.