JP Nadda to take over as BJP chief today

Team Udayavani, Jan 20, 2020, 10:20 AM IST

New Delhi: The BJP is set to get its new national president in place of Amit Shah on Monday, with its working president J P Nadda expected to be elected to the post unopposed.

Top party leaders, including those from states, are likely to arrive at the BJP headquarters to file nominations in support of Nadda, who has long been seen as the choice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah for the job.

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

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’.

Nadda was appointed as the party’s working president in July last year in an indication that the Himachal Pradesh leader was the likely choice for the top organisational job.

In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, he 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. Apart from handling crucial states for the BJP in the general elections, Nadda was a Cabinet minister in the first tenure of the Modi government and has been a member of the parliamentary board, the BJP’s top decision making body.