“We were expecting a big splash. A sonic boom,” said a BJP leader after party President Nitin Nabin on Monday announced the list of BJP office bearers who, from now on, can be called Nabin’s playing XI or BJP’s Team For 2029.
Let’s first deal with who is in and who is out. Ex-Minister Smriti Irani, ex-Tripura chief minister Biplab Deb, Harish Dwevidi, ex-MP from Basti in UP, ex-Rajasthan BJP president Satish Poonia, Gajendra Patel and Sanjay Bhatia are in. His profile had peaked after his effort led to the formation of a PDP-BJP government in J&K. He has returned to the party as the RSS wanted him back. Her portfolio needed some heft. Jagdish Patel was appointed national secretary from Gujarat. He has now been made co-in-charge for Uttar Pradesh. Patel is known to be close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
A quick read of the list will present a simplistic inference that team members brought in by J P Nadda as president in August 2022 have either been rewarded, retained or replaced by someone. She had defeated Rahul Gandhi in the Gandhi-Nehru family pocket borough in 2019. In 2024, she lost, but the BJP too had lost ground. She enters the organisational structure despite her not-so-cordial relations with Home Minister Amit Shah, as the BJP has no better candidate to challenge Rahul Gandhi, who will be Congress’ prime ministerial face in 2029. He is said to have played a key role in his victory in Varanasi in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as a backroom organiser.
For example, the new vice president Ram Madhav is back from six years of “vanvas” after six years as party general secretary. Deepak Mhaske, the new social media unit head in place of Amit Malviya, is said to be the choice of the new president Nitin Nabin. A senior Congress leader called the exercise “nothing more than a clever stratagem of statistics”. He said, “Compared to the big names and stalwarts in the Congress CWC, the BJP’s new team of office bearers is an army of political insignificants.”
