I do not think Prime Minister Narendra Modi had common citizens such as I and my wife in mind when he created a Union Ministry of Cooperation and appointed his anointed favourite, Union Home Minister Amit Shah to be its first Minister, or Czar as some would say.

I am a great fan of the cooperative movement, and attribute some of my most precious possessions in life to it. As soon as I got a regular job, I turned 20 some 52 years ago, I became a member of the cooperative society in my office which asked for a joining fee of Rs 10, and perhaps a monthly contribution of a little more. The cooperative society paid an interest on the sum deposited with it, making its income from interest charged from members who borrowed to tide over some urgent domestic need, or perhaps to pay the bar bill of the Press Club, no less important to some.

A few years later, I sought a loan to get married. My fiancé and I had decided that we would not ask our parents for any help, even if they were able to do so. Advances from our cooperative societies and provident fund provided the corpus for the minimum jewellery a bride needed, the set of clothes for the occasion and the mandatory party for relatives and friends. I am happy to say some journalists, who became famous thirty years later, had gotten drunk at the evening party, with a few sorts of collapsing. A car, and then an apartment in a group housing cooperative society followed, the seed capital always sourced from cooperative societies and Provident Funds. Those were happy days.

That memory, however, does not cloud my cold understanding of why suddenly Mr Modi who prefers more targeted audiences would fall in love with the dispersed membership that cooperatives offer. With the farmers protest against his farm laws, and the  increase in rural distress,  he hopes for   another layer of  political outreach. And of course, Modi and Shah always have an eye on the money that can be borrowed – as I had done – or siphoned off as many did in Maharashtra, Gujarat and east India .

It must be clear that we are not talking of the sort of grandmother-robbing gold loan schemes which laid the foundations of several non-banking empires in south India. Their political clout was just to save their criminal skins, not to become the rulers themselves, even by proxy. This was higher game.

The politically astute CPI (M) understood the motives more clearly than most. Taking to Twitter, now accepted major political communication tool, its leaders hit out at Modi over the formation of the Cooperation Ministry, alleging that Union Home Minister Amit Shah taking charge of the new ministry was a “dual strategy” aimed at electoral gains and getting funds held in the cooperative sector. “Union Home Minister assuming charge of the cooperatives has a dual strategy. A direct assault on Constitution’s fundamental feature; federalism. Controlling the cooperatives which have direct mass contact with people is to be utilised for BJP’s electoral gains,” general secretary Sitaram Yechury said. This, he tweeted, was to undermine the influence of regional parties to strengthen the BJP at the expense of destroying the Indian Constitution. Cooperatives under Constitution’s 7th Schedule are a State subject. It is still not clear why the Ministry has been formed out of the blue, Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala, added.

Maharashtra with its big sugar cane growing belt has perhaps India’s most powerful single sector cooperative movement, giving the country politicians of the stature of Sharad Pawar, founder of the Nationalist Congress Party and a Prime Ministerial hopeful for half a century now. “With RBI regulations, the autonomy of urban cooperative and district cooperative banks is now in danger,” Maharashtra Minister Jayant Patil said.

And from Trinamool’s Bengal came a comment that would appeal even to the middle classes. “The Centre harmed cooperative banks through demonetisation. All the banks suffered because of the draconian decision of the government [to not let cooperative banks exchange banned notes],” said the State’s Cooperative Minister, Arup Roy.

“Having looted the public sector banks by granting humongous unreturnable loans to its cronies who have looted and deserted the country, the Modi Government is now eyeing huge funds in the cooperative sector for similar loot,” Yechury said. Amit Shah never lets a good crisis go waste, he added.

Truer words had seldom been said with such brevity.

In 2000, a financial crisis in the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank had helped Amit Shah, a rapidly rising and ambitious politician, get elected as chairman of the board of directors and wrest control of the bank from the Congress. The bank had for years failed to pay dividend; it had just posted a net loss of around Rs 20 crore, and was struggling to keep customer confidence.

Shah, finance historians write, led the bank into the lucrative domain of securities trading, financing brokers and accountants who mostly traded in small-cap equities. ‘Dot-com bubble’ was comparatively far in the future. Shah was banking on the cupidity of people just getting familiar with IT companies and fancy start-ups, many the criminally creative upstarts. 

Shah’s bank made it first profits. The 10 per cent dividend he paid in part helped him increase the BJP’s grip on the state’s deep-rooted cooperative structure, which included sectors as varied as diary, agriculture, textiles, labour and infrastructure, experts note. The BJP’s successive poll victories in Gujarat endeared him further to his boss, if such certification was needed for Modi’s acknowledged right hand man in all things good and bad.

A finance writer notes: “As Union Minister for Cooperation, he (Amit Shah) is now eyeing a bigger playground: India has one of the largest cooperative ecosystems in the world, with collective revenues running into several lakh crore rupees a year.”

Modi’s favourite experts are singing praises of his new ministry and Shah’s stewardship of it.  Experts say the new ministry will be a game-changer. “It’s a revolutionary step,” said R.S. Sodhi, managing director of the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, or Amul, the world’s second largest cooperative by turnover. “They have recognised that the cooperative way of doing business is a viable alternative to big businesses. Cooperatives are big businesses of small people -- farmers, taxi drivers, traders and so on.”

The cooperative movement is a European import from the 19th century, and has seen many iterations which include the massive, but forced, collectives under the Soviet regime, and the more alluring Kibbutz of Israel which helped it train its young in emerging technologies and agricultural sciences to tame its vast desert acquisitions and populate lands contested by the original Palestinians in many cases. The Kibbutzes were also the acclimatization zones for waves of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, North Africa, and in some cases from countries such as India.

India is familiar with the milk cooperative of Amul in Gujarat. The ubiquitous milk pouch – once the milk bottle – had made many children think milk comes from the neighbourhood and not from the cow or the buffalo. Other than in areas where remnants of the feudal system have kept much of agricultural land in the hands of a few castes or landlord dynasties, the now more than half-a-century-old cooperative movement covers all facets of their everyday life.

In Maharashtra alone, though initially confined to agricultural credit, the cooperative movement today covers processing, marketing, housing, dairy, storage, textile, finance, fishery and industries. According to media compilations, by 2018, there were about 1.98 lakh co-operative societies in the State.

The State’s 11.24 crore rural population is serviced by a grid of cooperatives covering sugar factories, cotton ginning and pressing, spinning mills, handloom and power loom, dairy, fisheries, rice mills, oil mills and other processing units. Farmers in 2018-19 took a crop loan of Rs 31,282 crore and agricultural term loan of Rs 36,632 crore.

Till recent years, the BJP and the Shiv Sena leaders had not taken much interest in the cooperative sector in rural areas, focussing on the RSS outreach in big and small towns. The few leaders with a finger in the cooperative pie were Nitin Gadkari and Gopinath Munde. Shah hopes his lieutenants will change all that.