BJP chief Amit Shah, whose three-year term was due to end in January 2019, is known as the chief electoral strategist of the party.
New Delhi: Barely months before key assembly and Lok Sabha polls, the BJP Saturday unsurprisingly decided in favour of continuity, extending the term of party president Amit Shah by one year and deciding to stick to the tried and tested to lead the way in 2019.
Shah, whose three-year term was due to end in January 2019, is known as the chief electoral strategist of the party. He, along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has led his party to many electoral victories.
Shah first became party president in 2014 after then president Rajnath Singh, who despite leading the party to its best-ever Lok Sabha win, was forced to step down once he became cabinet minister. The ‘one-person-one-post’ principle trumped Singh’s desire to remain at the helm of the party. Shah stepped in to complete the remaining part of his tenure, and was re-elected in January 2016 to lead the party.
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The term of a BJP president is ordinarily three years.
The post of the party president of the BJP, though much-coveted, has never really been easy, and the history of BJP presidents is, in fact, more chequered than smooth. The journey of its various presidents, their challenges and the circumstances of succession also gives a peek into the party’s own evolution.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
In 1980, senior leader and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee became the first ever BJP president. Under him, the party acquired a more moderate face than its predecessor Jan Sangh, but its disastrous electoral performance in 1984 — when it won merely two Lok Sabha seats — caste a shadow on Vajpayee’s leadership. The veteran leader offered to quit, but continued until 1986 when another veteran, L. K. Advani replaced him.
L.K. Advani
The Vajpayee-Advani dichotomy is well known — the former representing the party’s moderate, even liberal face, and the latter a hardline one. With Advani as president, the party acquired an extreme Hindutva stance, leading the movement to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and build a Ram temple. Advani, in fact, became the face of this movement which had a violent aftermath. This worked for the BJP and in the Lok Sabha polls that followed, the BJP won the second largest number of seats.
Murli Manohar Joshi
Murli Manohar Joshi, who by then had been with the RSS for nearly five decades, took over from Advani in 1991. Much like his predecessor, Joshi was also the Hindutva face of his party, playing an active role in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. He remained in the position until 1993, paving way for Advani yet again.
Re-entry of Advani
This was an adventurous phase for the BJP and it won the largest number of seats in the 1996 elections, but unable to prove its majority, the government lasted just 13 days. While Vajpayee became PM and his charisma helped the BJP electorally, Advani was widely credited as the electoral brain in the party.
It was around the same time in the mid-1990s, however, the Jain Hawala case erupted, with the role of several leaders, including Advani, coming under the scanner. It left an embarrassing taint on the party that claimed to fight what it said the Congress had come to be known for — corruption. However, Advani got a clean chit later.
‘Weaker’ presidents
After Advani stepped down in 1998, it is believed Vajpayee and he chose to push for “weaker” presidents, wanting to remain the power centres themselves. What followed was a period of short-lived, unstable presidential terms.
Kushabhau Thakre, though a senior politician with deep roots in the RSS, was barely a mass, well-known leader. He served as BJP president from 1998-1999, when Bangaru Laxman took over — becoming the first Dalit to do so. His term, however, ended unceremoniously in 2001, when he was forced to resign following a sting operation that raised allegations of corruption.
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Yet another lesser known, non-mass leader stepped in. Jana Krishnamurthi from Tamil Nadu became party president in 2001 but yet again resigned without completing a term in 2002 after he became minister in the Vajpayee cabinet. Venkaiah Naidu, again not known for his mass politics, took charge as party president and a semblance of stability returned. A senior politician, but not the best of electoral strategists, Naidu resigned from the post after his party received a drubbing in the 2004 elections and the Congress stormed to power.
Advani came back as party president for the third time, but was barely third time lucky. In 2005, he generated a controversy after he praised Muhammad Ali Jinnah during a trip to Pakistan, earning the wrath of the RSS.
Rajnath Singh
After Advani was forced to resign following the furore, Rajnath Singh — who had served as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh — took over. His tenure was defined by a strong Hindutva stance of his party, but the strategy clearly did not pay off as the Congress-led UPA returned to power in 2009 with an even bigger mandate. Singh resigned following the electoral debacle and Maharashtra’s Nitin Gadkari, known to be close to the Sangh, took charge, becoming the party’s youngest ever president.
Known for his pragmatic, congenial politics, Gadkari’s presidential term also ended on a tough note when he resigned in early 2013 when charges of financial irregularities against him emerged and knives from several quarters of the party came out against him. The trusted Rajnath Singh replaced Gadkari.
In the meanwhile, the Congress-led UPA government was floundering during its second term, embroiled in a series of corruption scandals and being criticised for policy paralysis. This coincided with a meteoric rise in Modi’s national profile and popularity, forcing his detractors in the party to bow out and let Singh announce his name as the party’s 2014 PM candidate.
Under Singh’s presidentship, the BJP won a stunning mandate in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, but a lion’s share of the credit went to Modi — the face of the party.
Amit Shah
After the elections, Singh had to step down since he assumed a cabinet position, despite his desire to continue leading the party.
This marked the entry of the controversial Shah — known to be Modi’s trusted aide from Gujarat — as the party’s top leader. Since 2014, the Modi-Shah combine has come to be known as an election winning machinery, expanding the party’s footprint into hitherto unexplored territories, ensuring the party has chief ministers in 15 of the 29 states. No wonder then, the party prefers holding on to him ahead of some challenging electoral battles.