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BJP set to get new president, Nadda expected to succeed Shah

Nominations for the party president\'s election will be held on January 20, but a contest is unlikely

New Delhi: The BJP is set to get a new national president in place of Amit Shah on Monday, with its working president J P Nadda expected to be elected to the post unopposed.

Top party leaders, including those from the states, are likely to arrive at BJP HQ here to file nominations in support of Nadda, who has long been seen as the choice of both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah for the job.

His decades-long experience in the organisation, starting from student politics, proximity to the RSS and clean image are seen as his strengths.

Senior BJP leader Radha Mohan Singh, who is in charge of the party's organisational poll process, said nominations for the election will be filed on January 20, and a contest will take place the next day if required.

The BJP has the convention of electing its president on the basis of consensus and without any contest, and there is little possibility that it will be any other way this time.

The election of a new president will bring to an end Shah's tumultuous term of five and a half years during which the BJP expanded its footprint across the country like never before and enjoyed its best phase in electoral contests.

With Shah joining the Modi 2.0 government as home minister, the BJP began the exercise for electing his successor as the party has the convention of 'one person, one post'.

Nadda was appointed as the party's working president in July last year in an indication that the Himachali leader was the likely choice for the top organisational job.

In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, he was in-charge of the BJP's election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, where the party faced a tough challenge from an alliance of the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party.

The party won 62 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh. Apart from handling crucial states for the BJP in the general elections, Nadda was a Cabinet minister in the first tenure of the Modi government and has been a member of the parliamentary board, the BJP's top decision making body.

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