As the world’s largest political party contesting serial elections, notching more hits than misses and running governments at the Centre and 14 states, the BJP is known to be a stickler for organisational propriety and discipline. It’s no mean achievement considering that the exercise of executive and legislative power alters the dynamics within a party for the worse.
In the long years when the BJP was in the opposition, it scrupulously adhered to its own Constitution—as distinct from the Indian Constitution— particularly when confronted with imbroglios involving the leadership. The veto power lay with the extended family’s head, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that had the last word and sometimes shot down the BJP’s proposals and decisions to party leaders’ discomfiture. The RSS’s assertions were manifest after the BJP was seated at the Centre and some states. Competing pulls and pressures became inevitable as the playing field grew larger and the stakes for BJP leaders bidding for absolute power became apparent.
In 1991, when L K Advani became the opposition leader in the Lok Sabha, without a fuss he relinquished the BJP presidency for Murli Manohar Joshi. The import of this act gets amplified when in 2005, he scripted encomiums for Muhammad Ali Jinnah during a visit to Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi.
Following the first outcry of protest from Gujarat, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the chief minister and in the thick of fighting local body polls, Advani was pressured by the BJP and RSS’s sarsanghchalak K S Sudarshan to quit office as the BJP chief. But ringed by a cabal of new friends and advisers who advocated the merits of converting to secularism, Advani fought back for a while and eventually gave up office. If the BJP and Advani had still not become the forces they were by then despite the BJP losing the 2004 election, the view was he would have acquiesced.
Notwithstanding the skirmishes in BJP-ruled states—most notably between two factions in Gujarat, of which one was aided by Modi, then a state general secretary—the party made it a point to hold organisational polls from the lowest tier every three years. Rivalries often surfaced at the mandal and district tiers, but these were quelled to allow the process of appointing a new president to go on. So far in its history, the top post was never contested in the BJP, unlike the Congress which held polls twice to elect its president. It was either the RSS’s writ that prevailed, pre-empting the inevitability of a contest that would have undermined the Sangh’s own authority or the parivar’s unified purpose to reach the commanding heights which disallowed disruptions in an all-important quest for absolute power.
The current incumbent, J P Nadda, leads a charmed life. The soft-spoken and amenable party president—who has no choice but to lie low in the highly centralised power structure run by the Modi-Shah duopoly—is nearly at the end of a five-year term. It’s a record in a party whose Constitution stipulates two terms of three years each to a president. He stepped into the post once Amit Shah demitted office in 2019 on becoming a central minister.
Nadda hangs on to the post even after his induction in the Union cabinet, which was believed to be the first sign that a successor was being readied. His continuance has virtually put to rest the ‘one person, one post’ principle. But who cares for the party’s Constitution any longer? When an old-timer timorously brought up the subject of not adhering to the book at an internal meet, he was told that the Constitution existed because of the party and not the other way—so there was no need to obsess over its importance.
Where is the much-awaited successor? A plethora of names are bandied about periodically. But like the cat with nine lives, each time the succession chatter gains momentum, Nadda manages to survive. He was seldom embroiled in a controversy like his role model, former party president Kushabhau Thakre, who served during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s prime ministerial tenure.
Nadda gladly ascribed all credit for BJP’s electoral successes after the 2024 elections to Modi and Shah and is content delivering anodyne speeches at party meets. The only occasion he courted potential trouble was when he was held partially culpable for BJP’s defeat in the latest polls in Himachal Pradesh, where Nadda hails from. Although he never actively participated in the state’s politics, it was alleged in 2022 he played one faction against another.
Nadda again brought into focus the RSS-BJP fissures—which have come up a couple of times in the recent past—when he claimed in an interview that his party was capable of managing on its own and did not need the Sangh. He described the RSS as an ideological front. Was Nadda prompted to define the new roles? Insiders conceded he ought to have known the RSS’s damage potential after the BJP fell far short of its projection in the 2024 polls and had assembly elections to fight soon thereafter, which it couldn’t afford to lose.
While another party chief might have lost his job after an audacious claim, Nadda was left untouched, triggering rumours that all was not well between Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat and Modi. Nadda attempted to buy peace by attending the parivar’s coordination meeting in Palakkad last September; on its part, the RSS re-galvanised its cadres and put its army in action in Maharashtra and other election-bound states. The efforts paid off when the BJP retained Haryana and won Maharashtra conclusively after a poor showing in the Lok Sabha election.
The RSS reinforced its utility and significance for the BJP to such a degree that Modi secured Bhagwat’s validation before announcing the Centre’s decision to hold a caste census. He was not in a position to insouciantly brush aside the Sangh’s interventions—if he did, the Sangh would lay its hands off the impending polls.
It appears that Nadda will stay put, unless the BJP acts before the Bihar battle. But given the propensity of the Big Two to use elections as an alibi to fend off the succession issue, the BJP president might just get another lease on life.
Radhika Ramaseshan | Columnist and political commentator
(Views are personal)
(ramaseshan.radhika@gmail.com)