Nadda emerges stronger after BJP’s win in four states

New Delhi: The four-one election results declared on Thursday in favour of the BJP—the first significant electoral exercise that the BJP fought under its new president Jagat Prakash Nadda—will strengthen the incumbent president’s hold over the organisation in the party, evidence of which will start becoming visible in the coming months, believe party leaders and political observers who have known him.
Nadda was appointed as the full-time president of the party in January 2020 and since then, the country has seen two Assembly elections in Bihar and Delhi in 2020, five Assembly elections in 2021 (Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal) apart from the five states that went to the polls in February and March this year (Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa).
Out of the seven states that went to the polls in 2020 and 2021, the BJP formed government in Bihar, Assam and Puducherry, apart from the four states that went to the polls in 2022—Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa. In Nadda’s tenure, the party has so far contested elections in 12 states and formed governments in seven.
Of the five states where it was unable to form government, BJP, for all practical purposes, was not in the reckoning, particularly Tamil Nadu and Kerala where it has just started expanding its political foothold. In Tamil Nadu, it had contested on just 20 seats of the total 234 seats, while in an alliance with the AIADMK. In Kerala, it contested 113 seats on its own while giving the rest 27 to its alliance partners. It won only one seat.
However, the party’s dismal performance in Delhi in the February 2020 polls and its inability to defeat the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal in May 2021 despite deploying all the resources at its disposal in the state, were hanging like the proverbial “albatross” around the neck of Nadda. The recent results in key states, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand where the party was battling massive anti-incumbency and internal challenges, have, however, come as redemption for Nadda, who had been declared by his political adversaries as a “rubber stamp” party president.
According to one of his old associates, the impact of the victories in the five states on Nadda was evident from the speech that he gave at the BJP office on Thursday night where he highlighted, for the first time, his efforts in these five elections. “Nadda likes to stay in the background, is soft spoken and hence people confuse these traits as that of a ‘submissive’ leader, when, in reality, he is a very efficient organizer and has this rare ability to preserve old personal contacts which is missing from many big leaders nowadays. His close associate Dharmendra Pradhan was given the responsibility of managing the elections in UP, where the party was fighting anti-incumbency, a resurgent Samajwadi Party and the impact of the farm laws. People talk about the CM and the PM as they are the faces during the campaign, but they tend to miss the role played by people like Nadda and Pradhan who have to deal with so many complexities, take into account the reservations that so many people have, and then chalk out a plan,” said a veteran journalist who has known both Nadda and Pradhan closely.
The results of UP will also put Dharmendra Pradhan, who was appointed election in charge of the state in September 2021, at a very important position in the party’s scheme of things for the coming 10 years. Pradhan, due to his swift ascent in the party, has made powerful adversaries within the party and if the party was unable to do well in the UP elections, it would have been a matter of time before he was “shunted” out in a party where the shelf lives of leaders is relatively short.