 "Amit Shah")
There was nothing surprising in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday re-electing Amit Shah, the incumbent party president, for a full three-year term, which could see him take the party through a series of difficult Assembly polls and prepare it for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
None found it amiss that the entire senior leadership of the BJP, particularly L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, did not show up during the three-hour long process at the end of which 51-year-old Shah was declared elected ‘unanimously’.
Party sources said Shah would visit ailing former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee for his blessings, as also other members of the BJP’s Margdarshak Mandal or mentors’ group – Advani and Joshi – in the days to come.
Mentors’ group members Advani and Joshi, along with senior leaders Yashwant Sinha and Shanta Kumar, had issued a statement questioning Shah’s leadership and calling for a review after the Bihar Assembly poll debacle in November last year. None of these leaders was present at the BJP’s national headquarters at 11, Ashoka Road when party MP Avinash Rai Khanna, the returning officer for the election, announced in the afternoon that Shah was unanimously elected the national president of the BJP as no other nomination had been filed.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh was the first to congratulate Shah. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had spent Friday in Lucknow, the Lok Sabha constituency of the home minister, couldn’t attend as he was in Chandigarh with visiting French President Francois Hollande. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley was on his way from Swtizerland and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is currently in Bahrain. All these leaders are likely to congratulate Shah at the meeting of the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, the party’s highest decision making body, on January 28.
According to the party’s constitution, at least 20 members each of the party’s National Council from five states need to propose the name of a presidential candidate. In Shah’s case, the returning officer received 17 proposals from 20 state units, including from three dozen MPs of the BJP parliamentary party. These MPs were Modi, Swaraj and nearly all other senior ministers. Jaitley couldn’t sign as he was in Davos when the process had started. Nearly all BJP chief ministers, most of whom were also present on Sunday at the party headquarters, too, proposed Shah’s candidature. The election of the national president took place after the party, as mandated by its constitution, completed organisational elections to more than half of its 37 state units.
BJP presidents have traditionally been elected unopposed. Shah was appointed president of the party when Rajnath Singh quit after joining the Union Cabinet in accordance with the BJP’s ‘one man, one post’ principle. He was serving the remainder of Singh’s term. Reservations from the senior leaders aside, it was certain that Shah would be re-elected after the backing by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Modi tweeted to congratulate Shah: “Amit Bhai combines grassroot-level work & rich organisational experience which will benefit the Party immensely.”
Shah, along with his team of 39 national office bearers, had been hosted by the PM for dinner on Saturday. Shah’s next few steps will be to reconstitute his team of office bearers, reconstitute the party’s National Executive and hold its meeting, and reconstitute the party’s Central Election Committee and its disciplinary committee.
The BJP also issued a statement to highlight the achievements of Shah’s tenure of the past 18 months. Under Shah, the party has increased its membership from a “mere” 29 million to 110.8 million. It states how Shah travelled 265,000 km or 495 km a day during his presidential stint and that the party won four of the six state polls it contested, losing in Delhi and Bihar.
Shah’s term will end in January 2019, but it looks likely that he will take the party into the next Lok Sabha elections later that year.
Shah's challenges for the next three years
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Reconstituting his team of national office bearers and National Executive
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2016: state polls in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, none of which ever won by BJP
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Early 2017: state polls in UP, Punjab, Manipur, Goa and Uttarakhand
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End 2017: state polls in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh
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End 2018: state polls in Madhya Pradesh, Rajashtan
- 2019: Lok Sabha elections
