Why Nitin Nabin’s rejig of BJP national team is a fascinating exercise in chicanery

At face value, the new office bearers appointed by 45-year-old Nitin Nabin seven months into his tenure as BJP national president do seem to infuse his team with a higher number of youth and women. Analyse closely, and the façade falls off rather easily.

More young faces

Regarding youth representation, while the new team of general secretaries and secretaries includes no leader aged above 65, the fact is that a bulk of the outgoing office bearers too were in the 50 to 65 age bracket when they were last appointed.

Interestingly, the youngest person in the top three tiers of the BJP organisational hierarchy (president, vice presidents and general secretaries) is Nabin himself, at 45 years of age. The few office bearers younger than the party chief are party secretary Anil Antony (40) and newly appointed BJYM chief Hemang Joshi (35).

Also read: BJP's new national team: Smriti Irani, Ram Madhav come back; Amit Malviya benched

What Nabin seems to have pulled off, particularly with increasing representation of women in the party, is, in fact, similar to the trick Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government wove into the Women’s Reservation Act back in 2023. Modi’s promise of “Naari Shakti Vandan” is rooted in increasing the overall number of seats in Lok Sabha and state assemblies and then granting one-third share of seats to women. It’s a plan far more convenient to roll out than the Opposition’s repeated demand for reserving one-third of seats for women within the existing strength of various legislative houses, which would involve denying many male lawmakers a constituency.

Women handed ornamental roles

The organisational reshuffle that Nabin has given effect to can be seen as a sample of the Modi model of increasing women’s representation while ensuring that the men have no reason to complain about their ‘share’ being taken away.

Sample this: much is being said about the BJP now having six women national vice presidents – Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Daggubati Purandeswari, Rekha Verma, Varshaben Doshi, Bharti Pawar and Madhuchandra Kar. What has been left unsaid in this shrewd sales pitch, however, is that the party now has 13 national vice presidents as opposed to 11 it had earlier, of which five – Vasundhara Raje, Lata Usendi, Saroj Pandey, DK Aruna and Rekha Verma – were women.

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Besides, it is also pertinent to note that the post of vice president in the BJP is largely an ornamental one; often handed out to appease sulking leaders or simply to make a statement about the party’s respect for their services after denying them any actually meaningful assignment. Raje, for instance, was roped in as party vice president in 2019 after she was voted out of power in Rajasthan and she is now among the four earlier vice presidents to be retained in the new list after being denied the post of Rajasthan chief minister that she has often publicly coveted.

Smriti Irani’s giant comeback

Within the BJP, while the vice presidents may be second in organisational hierarchy after the president, it is the general secretaries who wield actual power as they are the ones assigned specific tasks such as the charge of one or more states where they act as the bridge between the central and local leadership.

The appointment of Smriti Irani as general secretary does mark her big comeback after over two years of being in political wilderness following her humiliating defeat from Amethi in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Yet, does it really mark a major boost for women in the party’s pool of national general secretaries?

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Before Monday’s reshuffle, the BJP had seven national general secretaries (including the post of general secretary-organisation) and none of them were women. This number has now been increased to nine in Nabin’s new team. Irani is the sole woman among these nine.

The other eight general secretaries are Vinod Tawde, Sunil Bansal, Biplab Kumar Deb, Satish Poonia, Gajendra Patel, Harish Dwivedi and Sanjay Bhatia. Of these, Deb, Poonia, Patel, Dwivedi and Bhatia are new appointees.

Token representation to women

The same praxis of increasing the number of office bearers and then doling out some token representation to women can be seen in the list of party secretaries too. The previous lot of BJP office bearers included 11 party secretaries, of which two – Pankaja Munde and Alka Gujar – were women. The new list includes 16 secretaries, of which only three – Kavita Patidar, Phangnon Konyak and Sangeeta Yadav – are women.

The other newly appointed secretaries are K Surendran, Bhola Singh, Pradip Verma, Jagdish Patel, Sandeep Pathak (who defected from the AAP to the BJP just this May), Ma Venkateshan, Manoj Tigga, Siddharth Shambhu, Swadesh Singh, Mriganka Deo Barman, Rohan Gupta and Jai Prakash.

What is also striking is that with the exception of party vice presidents Vasundhara Raje and Rekha Verma, Nabin has found no other woman office bearer from the previous lot worthy of continuing in office. In contrast, if Baijayant Panda and Tariq Mansoor have been retained as vice presidents, BL Santhosh, Vinod Tawde and Sunil Bansal have been retained as general secretaries and Anil K Antony has been retained as secretary.

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Additionally, Shiv Prakash has been retained as national joint secretary (organisation), Anil Baluni will continue as the party’s media convenor, while Tarun Chugh, previously a party general secretary, has now been assigned the role of central office in-charge.

Interestingly, none of the new roles carved out by Nabin in the party have been assigned to any woman leader. If Sambit Patra and Rajiv Babbar have been appointed the party’s north-east coordinator and joint coordinator, respectively, Vishnu Dutt Sharma has been roped in as coordinator (all cells) while former party secretary Rituraj Sinha and Vishnu Vardhan Reddy will function as Sharma’s deputies.

Other major takeaways

If the organisational revamp has to be judged on the quotient of its messaging, what would, perhaps, make for better examples are some of the figures who have been given a fresh lease of political life and others who have faced the axe.

Irani’s appointment as party general secretary, BJP insiders said, isn’t merely her political rehabilitation. Besides whatever specific charge she is assigned as general secretary, the garrulous leader is likely to be utilised extensively by the party in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly poll campaign early next year and the party granting her a shot at contesting the 2029 Lok Sabha polls from Amethi to avenge her 2024 defeat isn’t ruled out either. Many in the BJP are also seeing her return as the party’s message to the Congress and, in particular, the Gandhi family, given Irani’s history of having defeated Rahul Gandhi in Amethi in 2019 and, subsequently as an MP, launching acerbic tirades against both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul.

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The other notable comeback is that of RSS ideologue Ram Madhav. Though as party vice president, Madhav is unlikely to wield any substantial power within the organisation, his return signals that the party under Nabin will continue to keep the BJP’s ideological motherboard – the RSS – in good humour.

Sources in the BJP said the Sangh’s “significant role” in the reshuffle blueprint wasn’t visible in just Madhav’s return as vice president but also in other new appointments (VD Sharma, Gajendra Patel, Lal Singh Arya, among others) and the continuation of older office bearers like BL Santhosh.

Notable departures

If these were significant new entrants, there were also at least three major exits.

Amit Malviya, the party’s IT Cell chief, notorious as the man who helped the BJP weaponise social media for over a decade by building a troll army that would relentlessly push the party’s communally polarising narratives and malign Opposition leaders with dubious – and many proven – fake posts, has finally been benched.

Malviya has been replaced by Chhattisgarh BJP leader Deepak Mhaskey. Mhaskey, sources said, has a strong personal rapport with Nabin as the two had worked closely when the latter was the BJP’s co-in charge for Chhattisgarh between 2021 and 2024. What will be interesting to see, though, is whether the BJP's IT Cell under Mhaskey pushes content that is any different from the one that Malviya became infamously synonymous with. Mhaskey's immediate challenge, of course, will be to undo the damage that the BJP and Modi's personal image faced in the wake of student and youth protests against examination paper leaks and the brutal police crackdown on these agitators in Delhi on July 20.

Also read: Nitin Nabin as BJP president: Do party chiefs wield power in Modi-Shah era?

Other prominent departures include that of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha chief Tejaswi Surya and party general secretaries Arun Singh and Radha Mohan Das Agarwal. Surya makes way for Hemang Joshi, a confidante of Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Agarwal’s exit, sources said, was linked to the major embarrassment that the BJP faced recently in Karnataka when its lawmakers cross-voted for Congress candidates in the Legislative Council polls. Agarwal was the party’s in-charge for Karnataka.

The culmination of the BJP's organisational reshuffle has now reignited speculation over an impending rejig of Modi’s council of ministers.