AMN / NEW DELHI
Senior BJP leader J P Nadda has been appointed as the BJP working President. The decision was taken at the BJP Parliamentary Board meeting held at party headquarters in New Delhi this evening.
Mr Nadda will remain the working president till the BJP’s membership drive and organisation elections are over. Briefing reporters after the meeting, Senior party leader and Union Minister Rajnath Singh said, BJP won several elections under leadership of Amit Shah.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, Thawar Chand Gehlot and other senior party leaders attended the meeting.
Nadda, who was brought to the national team by Nitin Gadkari in 2010, had to then settle for a position in the Union cabinet. However, he was seen as first amongst equals in the peer group.
He was made a member of the BJP parliamentary board — the highest decision-making body of the party and also a member of the central election committee that takes final decision for both Lok Sabha and Assembly polls.
Nadda was also chosen by Shah to steer BJP in the 2019 general elections in UP where he worked in close coordination with former Gujarat BJP minister Gordhan Zadaphia, and secured more than 50% votes and 64 seats for the NDA.
The BJP leader started his political career with the ABVP in Patna where his father was serving as the vice-chancellor of the Patna University.
In 2010, Jagat Prakash Nadda quit Prem Kumar Dhumal’s ministry following his appointment as BJP general secretary. In fact, Nadda had stepped down as a forest minister owing to his differences with CM Dhumal. Come 2012, and he was chosen unopposed as the Rajya Sabha member from Himachal Pradesh.
Seven years down the lane, the RSS man, known for his astute organisational skills, became the working president of the BJP. Back in 2014, Nadda was set to replace then president Rajnath Singh, whom the party wanted to bring into the government fold, in a bid to avoid two power centers. A reluctant Rajnath Singh gave in to the organisation’s demands, but it was Amit Shat who replaced him instead of Nadda.
Nadda remained unnerved, and was soon inducted in PM Modi’s cabinet as the health minister, much to the chagrin of Dhumal and his son Anurag Thakur. In 2014, Thakur won his third consecutive Lok Sabha election and expected a cabinet berth in Modi’s cabinet. However, Nadda dashed all the hopes of the father-son duo.
While the former health minister has maintained a low-profile, his political manoeuvres, especially in the hill state, have never gone unnoticed. Who can forget the 2017 rout, political assassination some say, of Prem Kumar Dhumal, who lost the Vidhan Sabha election from Sujanpur, a constituency he was forced to contest from by the party high command, despite being projected as the chief-ministerial candidate. It (anointment) was an unprecedented move by the BJP.
“The BJP troika would have been more polite if they had asked Dhumal to jump from the nearest hilltop,” writes journalist S Pal in one of his columns in website Punjab Today. The troika, Pal refers to, is that of Modi, Shah and Nadda.