Weeks after the BJP landed in a pickle following a massive mess in a performance-sensitive ministry, the party revamped its leadership team in the hope of getting back to business. Coming seven months after Nitin Nabin was picked as BJP’s national president, the shake-up has introduced a curious mix of youth and experience. If feisty Smriti Irani led the list of headline inductions, the axe fell most conspicuously on IT cell chief Amit Malviya. There were two Muslims in the eight functionaries inducted from poll-bound Uttar Pradesh. Nabin effort at revitalising the party’s cells with fresh leadership saw the admission of 12 women in the core team, six of them as vice-presidents. As for the South, two each from Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, and one each from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu found place. But inexplicably, Telangana was blanked out.
Irani’s comeback, as general secretary for UP, comes at a time the party faces its toughest electoral test in the most populous state. She had been left out in the cold after her 2024 loss at Amethi. Seasoned general secretary Vinod Tawde will manage the poll preparations.
The opposition is counting on voter fatigue after a decade of Yogi Adityanath’s rule and disillusionment among a section of Gen Z voters. Besides, the political damage done by the donation theft at the Ayodhya Ram temple is uncertain, though a probe team constituted by the UP government gave a clean chit to former temple trust general secretary Champat Rai. Since the BJP is keen on wresting Punjab, Sandeep Pathak, a recent defector from AAP, was inducted into the national team.
However, the biggest talking point was the replacement of the abrasive Malviya with Chhattisgarh leader Deepak Mhaskey to revamp the party’s IT team. Mhaskey specialises in generating Instagram reels, the social media tool Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently urged all his ministers to adopt as Gen Z voters prefer it. If Mhaskey—whose team members have deleted some of their abusive older posts, as if to start with a clean slate—can discipline the BJP troll army to use sober language and verified facts, it would be a welcome change in the national social media discourse.