Making The BJP Future-Ready

The current assembly elections will be a turning point for the party. If it wins in Bengal, nothing will stop its return in 2024. But if it loses, it could trigger a domino effect and jeopardise its reforms agenda

- Raj Chengappa & Anilesh S. Mahajan

WHEN HE WAS YOUNG, Jagat Prakash Nadda was an ace sprinter and swimmer, winning gold medals both in school and college in Patna where he grew up. Sports, he said, taught him focus, consistency and the patience to wait for the right opportunity. These qualities held him in good stead when he returned to his home state, Himachal Pradesh, joined politics and was elected an MLA of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 1998, when the party won the assembly poll, he was bypassed for the chief minister’s post which was given to Prem Kumar Dhumal. The BJP general secretary who made that choice was Narendra Modi. Even though Nadda had worked closely with Modi to ensure the BJP win, he showed no rancour and even joined the Dhumal cabinet. Modi was apparently impressed by Nadda’s positivity and maturity.

Twenty years later, Modi would reward Nadda for his patience and equanimity when the Himachal leader would formally succeed Amit Shah as the BJP president in January 2020. By then, Modi and Shah had built the BJP into the world’s largest political party with over 150 million members. The two leaders had spearheaded the party’s astounding back-to-back parliamentary majorities in the 2014 and 2019 general elections. Not just that, the BJP had by 2018 formed, or was part of, governments in 21 states, which accounted for 70 per cent of the country’s population. This included winning a brute majority in Uttar Pradesh, where it returned to power after a hiatus of 15 years.