BJP set to get new president, JP Nadda likely to succeed Amit Shah

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Jan 20, 2020: JP Nadda, BJP’s working president, is all set to take over party reins from national president Amit Shah on Monday and is expected to be elected to the top post unopposed.

Top leaders, across the states and in government, are likely to arrive at the BJP headquarters to file nominations in support of Nadda, who was made party’s working president in June 2019. It was also the first time that the BJP had appointed a working president, Hindustan Times reported.

 

Nadda has long been seen as the choice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah for the top party role.

Nadda’s decades-long experience in the organisation, starting from student politics, proximity to the RSS and clean image are seen as his strengths.

In the lead to Monday, Shah held a meeting with senior party leaders, including several Union ministers and chief ministers of the party-ruled states, on Sunday evening.

Though there has been no official communication from the party, PTI quoting sources said the party leaders deliberated over the details of the election exercise.

Senior BJP leader Radha Mohan Singh, who is in charge of the party’s organisational poll process, said that nominations for the national president’s election will be filed on January 20, and a contest will take place the next day if required.

The BJP has the convention of electing its president with consensus and without any contest, and there is little possibility that it will be any other way this time.

The election of a new president will bring to end incumbent Shah’s tenure of over five-and-a-half years during which the BJP expanded its footprints across the country like never before and enjoyed its best phase in electoral contests despite suffering a few setbacks in state polls.

With Shah joining the Modi 2.0 government as home minister, the BJP began the exercise for electing his successor as the party has the convention of ‘one person, one post’.

In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Nadda was in-charge of the BJP’s election campaign in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, where the party faced a tough challenge from the grand alliance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

The party won 62 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.

Having risen through the saffron ranks, Nadda has long been a member of the BJP parliamentary board, its highest decision making body. He had served as a minister in the first Modi government.

A 58-year-old leader with background of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the students’ wing of the RSS, Nadda was a prominent youth leader. He was elected to the HImachal Pradesh assembly in 1993, 1998 and 2007.

Nadda moved to the national politics in 2010 as the party’s national general secretary after the RSS appointed Nagpur leader Nitin Gadkari as the president of the BJP in 2009.

He was in contention for the BJP president’s post in 2014 after Rajnath Singh became the home minister. However, he lost to Amit Shah who was Modi’s choice for the BJP president then.