Modi hai toh mumkin hai’ has been the Bharatiya Janata Party’s catchphrase for a while. On 14 December, Nitin Nabin, a Bihar minister, came to personify it. Barely 20 years into politics, the 45-year-old is set to become the national president of the 45-year-old party.
The day of the announcement happened to be Energy Conservation Day. Hacks like me couldn’t miss the message—don’t waste your energy speculating about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s moves. We weren’t surprised. Because we have learned to be surprised by PM Modi almost always. That brings us to the moot question: What are the eligibility criteria for the BJP national president? Nabin has been appointed the working president of the BJP, and is likely to be formally anointed as JP Nadda’s successor next month.
Eligibility criteria for BJP national president
One has to be young and an ‘organisational man’, party leaders say while justifying Nabin’s selection. Of course.
The party has been promoting young leaders since the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) days. Syama Prasad Mookerjee became the first BJS president in 1951 when he was 50. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was 44 and LK Advani 46 when they became BJS presidents. Nitin Gadkari became the youngest BJP president at 52, a record that was broken by Amit Shah, who occupied the post at 49. Nabin is set to break Shah’s record now. From the Vajpayee-Advani to the Modi-Shah era, the party has continued to promote young leaders at various levels within the organisation and in governments. And this HR policy has done wonders for it.
Nabin is an ‘organisation man’, for sure. He held several positions in the party’s youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), before being appointed Sikkim election in-charge in 2019. The party ended up with zero seats and 1.62 per cent votes in the Assembly election that year.
In 2021, the BJP appointed D Purandeswari and Nitin Nabin in-charge and co-in-charge of Chhattisgarh. Purandeswari was replaced by veteran leader Om Prakash Mathur in September 2022. Four months before the November 2023 Assembly election, Mathur was made Chhattisgarh election in-charge, too, while Mansukh Mandavia was made co-in-charge. When the poll results came out on 3 December, with the BJP defying all predictions to dislodge the Congress from power, Mathur was celebrated as the architect of the victory.
“Asambhav kahte the sab, kar diya (Everyone called it impossible, I did it),” Mathur wrote on X that day.
Nabin’s contributions to that victory finally got talked about by BJP leaders after his appointment as the national working president. Mathur may be smiling, perhaps bemusedly. Nabin was election in-charge when the BJP won 10 of the 11 Lok Sabha seats in Chhattisgarh in 2024, improving its tally by one seat from 2019. It was quite a feat, because Nabin had been appointed the Lok Sabha election in-charge just three weeks before the first phase of polling in the state.
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Unlucky band of young organisation persons
PM Modi was spoilt for choice when it came to picking an organisational person for the party’s top post. Let’s not even talk about leaders such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan (66) or Nitin Gadkari (68). Modi had so many choices, even among leaders in their 40s and 50s.
Take the case of 56-year-old Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan. He was the election in-charge of Bihar, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) registered its best-ever performance last month. He was sent to Bihar after his stupendous show as election in-charge in Haryana, where he pulled off for the BJP what once looked like a lost cause. He was Uttar Pradesh Assembly election in-charge in 2022. The list of states where Pradhan left his mark as a brilliant organiser is much longer. He has seen it all, done it all. In the last Odisha Assembly election, he led the party to its first-ever victory, but was denied chief ministership.
Bhupender Yadav, also 56 years old, has a stellar record as an election in-charge in a number of states—the last one being Maharashtra, where he engineered the BJP’s least-expected victory in the 2024 Assembly election. The party has now entrusted him with the poll responsibility of West Bengal.
According to party insiders, Chouhan, Gadkari, Pradhan, and Yadav were all in the original list of presidential candidates. The RSS was okay with all these names. The top BJP leadership, however, decided to prepare a fresh list of leaders aged between 45 and 55 years. Many party leaders may be curious about this age criteria. Why not 50-60, 60-70, or the now-abandoned-ceiling of 75?
I don’t know who all made it to the fresh list in which Nabin’s name obviously figured. The RSS, as I am given to understand, decided to go with whoever Modi-Shah opted for. Talk about the war of attrition.
Be that as it may, the organisational work ostensibly being one of the criteria, one can randomly look at a few other options as presidential candidates. Let’s consider Biplab Deb, who has been appointed West Bengal election co-in-charge. He was earlier the organisation in-charge and Assembly election co-in-charge of Haryana (with Pradhan as in-charge). We know the Haryana results. Deb has bigger achievements to boast of. In his capacity as Tripura BJP chief, he was primarily instrumental in dislodging the Left from power in 2018. It’s the first time the BJP won in Tripura. Deb became the chief minister, only to be dropped before the 2023 Assembly election, for reasons best known to the party leadership.
When Nabin was in the party’s youth wing, the five-term MLA worked under two BJYM national presidents—Anurag Thakur and Poonam Mahajan. Five-term MP Thakur, 51, could possibly have been in the list of probables in the presidential race. A Modi-Shah fan and political firebrand, Thakur had made it into the Union cabinet, but suddenly finds himself sidelined. He probably had to make way for Nadda in the Union cabinet, as both come from Himachal Pradesh, which sends only four Lok Sabha MPs. Could Nadda have made way for Thakur in the organisation then? In an ideal world, why not? Thakur doesn’t live in the dreamland, though.
When Nabin, a Madhuri Dixit fan, was heading the Bihar BJYM, his national chief was Mahajan. A two-term MP who defeated Sunil Dutt’s daughter Priya Dutt in Mumbai North Central, Mahajan is a known Modi-Shah bhakt. She was, however, denied a ticket by the party in the 2024 elections—that, too, to favour a political rookie, Ujjwal Nikam. Nikam lost the election but was rehabilitated in the Rajya Sabha, while Mahajan has been virtually benched.
Poonam Mahajan, who is Pramod Mahajan’s daughter and younger than Nabin by about six months, may be wondering what she did wrong. Her successor as BJYM national president, two-term MP Tejasvi Surya, another political firebrand, might wish that PM Modi brought the age criterion for presidential candidates even lower—in the 35-45 bracket. After all, whatever arguments justify the choice of a 45-year-old would equally work for a 35-year-old. Surya is 35. I randomly picked the cases of these ‘organisation men and women’ to try to understand the exact criteria for the BJP national president. I am not sure if I get it yet.
Association with RSS/ABVP
A major eligibility criterion for a BJP national president used to be that he had his ideological grooming in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakhas. There are whispers in the BJP about Nabin’s stints in the RSS or its students’ wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). That’s because Nabin’s “journey” or bio-data on the BJP website doesn’t talk about the RSS or the ABVP—as it does in the case of other BJP presidents. Nabin’s educational qualification is Intermediate, and so one doesn’t know when or in what capacity he worked for the ABVP. But he might have worked for the organisation outside the campus.
As the whispers go, the party website should have specified Nabin’s association with the RSS. Seriously! Does it really matter? His father, Navin Kishore Prasad Sinha, was in the BJS. He could possibly have taken his child to RSS shakhas, as all Sangh volunteers do. It’s only a matter of time before many will come forward to recount their days with Nabin in the ABVP and in an RSS shakha. These whispers will stop then. By the way, Mookerjee, the first president of the BJS, was not from the RSS; he was in the Hindu Mahasabha.
Nabin’s father was a four-term MLA, which makes him the first political dynast who will become the BJP national president. However, that doesn’t matter in the BJP any longer.
Another aspect being cited by BJP leaders as they explain Nabin’s elevation is his ‘neutral caste’ Kayastha, a numerically insignificant upper caste that won’t rile any other group. Bangaru Laxman, a Dalit, was the only non-upper caste national president of the BJP. The question here is whether Nabin being a Kayastha is meant to please the upper castes or avoid displeasing the non-upper castes. Because the upper castes need no pleasing by the BJP. They have nowhere else to go, amid increasingly shrill social justice chants by Opposition parties. If it was to avoid displeasing the non-upper castes, why have an upper caste president at all? Why not just choose a non-upper caste—say, Shivraj Chouhan—who will not displease the upper castes. Chouhan, after all, hails from a non-dominant—or ‘neutral’, if you so prefer—Kirar community, an OBC.
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Behind Nitin Nabin’s choice
Nabin’s choice shows that Modi-Shah have taken up Sangh sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat on his words—that the RSS knows how to run the shakhas, and the government and the party know how to run their affairs. One can’t tell the other how to run their business. In the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Nadda said that the BJP was now capable of running its own affairs (and didn’t need the RSS for it). Nabin’s appointment vindicates the statement.
Nabin is a Shah acolyte. When the Union home minister visited his Patna residence during Chhath in October, nobody read the signs. Being a leader with few contacts in the BJP beyond Shah outside Bihar—not to speak of loyalty—makes Nabin an even better choice than Nadda.
Essentially, PM Modi has weighed decisively in favour of Shah retaining full control of the party organisation. The fact that Nabin will hold the post at least till the 2029 Lok Sabha election makes him a crucial player at defining moments.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
And THAT is why the BJP will continue in power for the next 50 years. Whilst they have competent cadre busting their guts to get noticed and are then rewarded for it, the Congress and other family parties have the same tired old faces of a fading and failing feuding system.
Modi-Shah still keep an ear to the ground. Like in Madhya Pradesh, they surprise everyone with their choices but are willing to course correct when it doesn’t work.
India needs a better opposition party – not the tired version of a failed dynasty.