A gradual reset of the new BJP team

On August 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered a meeting of the newly appointed national representatives of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Instead, he spent the next four and a quarter hours asking them individually about their past organizational work.

The exchange was unhurried, with PM Modi at one point telling the audience that he too was once like them, a national office-bearer of the party during the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure as prime minister (1999-2004), some new office-bearers say.

The identification was interpreted in some quarters as a pep talk with the new team about how far organizational service can take you in the BJP, but for others it pointed to a unifying characteristic in a list of names that otherwise lacked a meta story and instead displayed the BJP’s political anxieties in piecemeal form.

This privileging of organizational experience by the prime minister was the highlight of the new team. The BJP, now in power for the third time and seeking a fourth in 2029, is attempting a reset amid various political anxieties with this new team.

Journalist Shekhar Iyer, who has followed the BJP for decades, says: “The new team represents a major shift in the approach of top partisans to challenges ahead of the 2029 Lok Sabha polls. The BJP is increasingly signaling that the men and women selected will henceforth represent less of their individual abilities and more of their capabilities and tasks.”

“The BJP is signaling that the men and women selected will henceforth represent less of their individual personalities and more of their skills and abilities for the tasks to be done.”Shekhar IyerJournalist

This means that the BJP chooses workers over personalities, some of whom may not be known to the world outside the party. “If they meet the expectations of the top brass, they move up the ladder faster,” says Mr Iyer.

The only exception to this weight given to behind-the-scenes operators is former Union Minister and current General Secretary Smriti Irani, whose oratorical skills were considered valuable.

The only two general secretaries retained from the senior team, Vinod Tawde and Sunil Bansal, had a good run with the states of Bihar and West Bengal in charge. Others like general secretaries Satish Poonia and Biplab Deb as well as new vice president Ram Madhav also have a proven record of behind the scenes organizational work in Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal and Haryana.

The BJP’s anxiety has more to do with the party’s ability to run the electoral machinery.

Lok Sabha polls 2024 and their discontent

A new slate of office-bearers is lurking in it, attempting to settle the jitters caused by the 2024 Lok Sabha poll results, in which the BJP lost its one-party majority.

During the 2024 elections, the unrest between the BJP and its ideological parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) came to the fore. It happened publicly when the then BJP president, JP Nadda, said during an interview that the party did not need the help of the RSS as an electoral muscle, adding that the BJP was “saksham” or adequate for the task.

Long-standing resentment within the RSS — the parent organization that has been overlooked while its political wing, the BJP, flexed its muscles — has exploded to the fore, with particularly damaging effects on the party’s prospects in Maharashtra, where the Mahayuti alliance of the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawaral’s party have suffered losses.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with BJP National President Nitin Nabin and the party’s newly appointed national office bearers during an organizational meeting at the BJP headquarters in Delhi on August 22. | Photo credit: ANI

In the assembly elections in the state later that year, this unrest was resolved by a coordination mechanism between the BJP and the RSS. The latter was headed by official Atul Limaye, who helped the alliance win.

The awareness that the RSS and the BJP need each other to stay in power was reinforced by the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Mr. Madhav’s return, first as poll in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir in the 2024 Assembly elections, the first such poll after it became a Union Territory and after Article 370 was read in 2019, and as Deputy Speaker in August 2026 was the second part of this rapprochement.

The understanding within the Sangh Parivar that internal affairs should not threaten the government was driven home to the RSS and the BJP. Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Madhav described himself as someone who believed in a “middle way”. In this case, the halfway point was the meeting point of the BJP and the RSS.

Analysis: Why Amit Malviya lost his job as BJP social media chief

Insider-outsider

A few months before the BJP announced its new team of national officers, a meeting was held at the residence of Defense Minister and former party president Rajnath Singh.

Among those present were not only new BJP president Nitin Nabin, but also Union Home Minister Amit Shah, party general secretary (organization) BL Santhosh and senior RSS leaders.

The topic of discussion was how to reconcile the aspirations of old-timers in the party with the influx of newcomers to the BJP since it came to power. This was not a new discussion. In an interview just before this year’s assembly polls in Assam, BJP vice-president and Assam in-charge Baijayant Panda, formerly of the Biju Janata Dal, told The Hindu that the answer to the conundrum was to be selective in distributing tickets to newcomers.

The BJP has benefited from outside talent, especially since 2014. Three of the party’s chief ministers – Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, Samrat Choudhary in Bihar and Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal – joined the BJP from other political parties.

**EDS: THIRD PARTY IMAGE** In this image released on Aug. 22, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks during a meeting with newly appointed office bearers and national functionaries of the party, as BJP National President Nitin Nabin and others look on, at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi. (@narendramodi/X via PTI Photo)(PTI08_22_2026_000557B) | Photo credit:-

In the new team, Rohan Gupta, who joined the BJP from the Congress, and Sandeep Pathak, who came from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), were appointed as national secretaries. They do not qualify as long-term players in the party but bring the value of being behind-the-scenes operators, with Mr Pathak being particularly valued for his organizational work for the AAP ahead of the 2022 Punjab polls, which the AAP won.

The fears of the old-timers in the BJP, who see the party growing with little reward for them, are allayed by the organizational crushing of the newcomers.

All the President’s Men

Another issue that arose during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls was the perception that the work of the organization was subservient to the government, that the party’s strings were being pulled by the high command at the cost of the BJP president’s authority.

“Naddaji was the general secretary of the national team in the past, served as an apprentice under Amit Shah as the BJP national working president in 2019 and his successor team had no idea about his personal likes or dislikes,” said a senior BJP official.

BJP National President Nitin Nabin (seen folding his hands) receives a floral welcome on his arrival to attend the party’s state executive committee meeting in Haldwani; he is joined by Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami (left). | Photo credit: PTI

However, in Mr. Nabin’s case, he has remarkable autonomy in bringing people with whom he shares a good relationship to his team. BJP national secretaries Swadesh Singh and Siddharth Shambhu are known to enjoy Nabin’s confidence, as is newly appointed head of the party’s Scheduled Caste wing Shivesh Ram.

The new head of the party’s social media cell, Deepak Mhaskey from Chhattisgarh, was also handpicked by Mr Nabin, who worked with him when he conducted the 2023 assembly polls in the state.

Generation Z protests and social media

It was Mr Mhaskey’s appointment to replace long-time head of the IT cell Amit Malviya that grabbed the headlines after the new team was announced. The announcement came in the backdrop of Gen Z protests against the NEET paper leak and the pasting done by the BJP and the government on social media during the period. That was a departure for a party that had a tight grip on the story, especially on social media, for the past 12 years.

One reason for replacing him was the need for the BJP to counter the narrative differently. In a brainstorming session held shortly after the new team was announced, with many of its young leaders in attendance, it was decided not to view Gen Z as a homogenous unit. Ami Shah, a political communications expert and visiting faculty member at IIM Bangalore, says the BJP had hyper-localized communications in Maharashtra in 2014.

She talks about studying jokes and humor that were segmented, with people from Vidarbha preferring grotesque humor while those in Konkan preferred wit.

“The BJP effectively used its cultural knowledge of the area in the 2014 Maharashtra assembly poll,” she said.

Mr Mhaskey is expected to channel these segmented second-tier urban and rural sensibilities in the BJP’s communication game, but he has had a rough start. Most of his team leaders, Priti Gandhi, Alok Bhatt and Arun Yadav, had to remove objectionable posts from their social media and some of the content posted by the BJP’s state IT cells and even the center trying to use the language of Gen Z has fallen on deaf ears.

When the BJP announced the new team, the party was careful to point out that six officials were below 40 years of age.

There are 15 between the ages of 40 and 49 and 21 between 50 and 59, which means that the average age of officials is 50. More than 40% of officials come from marginalized communities. In addition, 12 women from across the country also made it to the top.

The current national team faces an unprecedented challenge to manage the BJP’s bid to win a fourth term in 2029. In addition to the usual division of organizational berths into polling states, caste groups and other demographics based on gender and age, the new team reflects the BJP’s attempts at a three-term power reset.

nistula.hebbar@thehindu.co.in