BJP president JP Nadda announces new team of party office bearers; Tejasvi Surya appointed youth wing president

Setting eyes on the future, BJP on Saturday went in for a major organisational reshuffle bringing in nearly 50 per cent new faces in its national team drawn from diverse backgrounds and promoting leaders committed to its core ideology.

Firebrand young MP Tejasvi Surya, who was recently in a row over his tweet, has been given a leg up and appointed as National President of Yuva Morcha while MLA CT Ravi has been made BJP general secretary. Party general secretary (Organisation) B L Santosh has been retained while another state MP Rajiv Chandrashekhar finds his place in the panel of spokespersons.

Surya, a strong votary of Hindutva politics replaces Poonam Mahajan, daughter of BJP’s master strategist late Pramod Mahajan, who had replaced Anurag Thakur (now a Union Minister) in December 2016.

In the first comprehensive rejig in the after J P Nadda took over as Party President from Amit Shah in January this year, Shah’s stamp is also visible. Among the general secretaries---Bhupendra Yadav (in-charge of Bihar going to polls this year), Kailash Vijayvargiya (in-charge of West Bengal going to polls next year) and Arun Singh (Rajya Sabha MP) have been retained while the high profile Ram Madhav along with P Muralidhar Rao (in-charge of Karnataka), Anil Jain and Saroj Pandey have been dropped.

Party sources some of the leaders dropped could be accommodated as a reshuffle of Union Cabinet is on the anvil, besides the re-constitution of the party’s apex decision-making body BJP Parliamentary Board. But in case of many, performance has been a factor to show them the door, besides some of their actions irking the top leadership.

Among the eight general secretaries, there are five new faces--- Dushyant Kumar Gautam, D Purandeswari, C T Ravi, Tarun Chugh and Dilip Saikia. Social and regional representation has been taken into account and the number of women office bearers has been increased from eight to 13 in sync with BJP’s focus on cultivating women voters across the communities on gender justice plank.

The new list of BJP’s Vice President has party’s former Chief Ministers from states it lost in last two years—Raman Singh (Chhattisgarh), Vasundhara Raje Scindia (Rajasthan) and Raghubar Das (Jharkhand), besides former Agriculture Minister Radhamohan Singh who was not included in Modi 2:0 cabinet. With three former CMs retained as Vice President in the party, the party has given a clear indication of its plan for propping up new leadership in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan (which it lost in 2018) and Jharkhand ( in 2019).

As many new faces have been included, the party has also dropped its senior leaders Uma Bharti, Prabhat Jha, OP Mathur, Renu Devi, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, Avinash Rai Khanna and Shyam Jaju from the vice-presidents’ list.

In Nadda’s new team, there also those who defected from other parties to the BJP and is believed to have contributed to its rise like Baijyant Jay Panda, who switched over from BJD in Odisha, Mukul Roy from TMC in West Bengal and Annapurna Devi from RJD in Jharkhand (all three made Vice President).

Kerala BJP Vice President Abdulla Kutty has been made national Vice President while Tom Vadakkan from the state, who had switched over to BJP after a long career in Congress last year, has become a spokesperson. Kutty was MP from CPI-M twice and later represented Congress twice as MLAs before moving to the BJP after having been suspended by both for praising Narendra Modi. He hails from Kannur—a region where RSS and CPI-M are locked in a BJP battle and the region had seen many political killings from both sides.

The national in-charge of BJP’s IT and Social Media Amit Malviya has got another stint. The Media in-charge Anil Baluni has now been designated additionally as Chief spokesperson.

Rajesh Aggarwal has been named as party treasurer, a post which was vacant since 2014 after Piyush Goyal had moved to Modi cabinet. There is no announcement on the next Mahila Morcha chief. A former Odisha cadre IAS officer turned BJP MP Aprajita Sarangi figures in the list of spokespersons. Besides Shahnawaz Hussain, another Muslim spokesperson is Syed Zafar Islam, who was made a Rajya Sabha MP a few months back.