Senior BJP leader JP Nadda on Monday took over as party president, after sharing the position with union home minister Amit Shah for over a year.
He was elected unopposed to the post and his name was proposed by Amit Shah, Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari.
Senior BJP leader Radha Mohan Singh announced the schedule after the party’s internal poll exercise was completed in 21 of the BJP’s 36 state and Union territory units.
Singh is in charge of the organisational election process.
The BJP’s constitution stipulates that its national president can be elected after at least half of the total state units have completed their organisational election exercise.
JP Nadda is trusted by both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah.
Speaking on the occasion former BJP chief and union defence minister Rajnath Singh said, “Amit Shah’s stint as BJP chief was unparalleled.
“He took the party to new heights.”I believe JP Nadda will tale BJP to newer heights,” Singh added.
Nadda was MLA in Himachal Pradesh for three terms before he moved to the central government as a cabinet minister from 1998 to 2003.
Nadda, in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, was in charge of the BJP’s election campaign in Uttar Pradesh.
BJP had faced a tough challenge in Uttar Pradesh from the grand alliance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
Having risen through the saffron ranks, Nadda has long been a member of the BJP parliamentary board, its highest decision-making body.
He had served as a minister in the first Modi government.
Nadda’s decades-long experience in the organisation, starting from student politics, proximity to the RSS and clean image is seen as his strengths.
Nadda’s election as the president ends Shah’s tenure of over five-and-a-half years during which the BJP expanded its footprints across the country.
Under Shah, the Saffron party enjoyed its best phase in electoral contests despite suffering a few setbacks in state polls.
With Shah joining the Narendra Modi cabinet as home minister, the BJP began the exercise for electing his successor as the party has the convention of ‘one person, one post’.
In June 2019, Nadda was appointed as the working president of the BJP.