Some in the BJP defend the transition to a more formalised structure, citing the growing size of the organisation and expanding responsibilities of senior functionaries.
In the old days, political work at the BJP headquarters could afford to drift. A leader might spend an afternoon over tea, see a few visitors, hear a few requests and go home without anyone asking what had come of it. That is no longer how the party’s national headquarters on Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg works. Every officebearer now carries a defined brief and a timeline, and knows that someone will ask what the result was. The assignments vary widely. A leader may be responsible for a state, a Union Territory, a remote region, a particular event or a task at the Centre. What they share is the expectation of an outcome by a given date. The work has to be followed up continuously, because the question will come: what happened to that task, and where did it end? Politics, in this system, is no longer a hobby or a pastime.
It is closer to a job with targets. The building reflects that culture. The five-storey headquarters opened in 2018 after the party moved from 11 Ashoka Road. It was conceived as a modern organisational centre with communication facilities and offices for the national leadership, and contemporary reporting described it as distinctly corporate in character. A visit shows a clear distinction between its public-facing and organisational functions. The ground floor houses the media briefing hall and the media department, and it is the most accessible part of the building. Journalists, visitors and members of the public can enter, attend press conferences and meet the party’s media functionaries. The character of the building changes as one moves upwards. The second floor is where the organisational machinery becomes visible.
The party’s national general secretaries and other national coordinators work on that level, each handling a different part of the national organisation. The party’s new national team, announced in August, has eight national general secretaries and 16 national secretaries, and the party has also appointed a national coordinator for its cell cluster. Different verticals and senior management functions operate within one central system, a structure familiar from a corporate headquarters. Party functionaries say the third and fourth floors house other senior officebearers. The party does not maintain a public, current floor-by-floor directory, but the pattern is visible from the building itself and from where its leaders sit.
The fifth floor is the office of BJP national president Nitin Nabin, who took charge in January this year. The result is a vertical hierarchy. The ground floor deals with the outside world, the middle floors house the organisational machinery, and the top floor is reserved for the leadership. That hierarchy is reflected in access. Meetings with the party president require prior confirmation and an appointment, and access has become increasingly appointment-based even for party functionaries. The difficulty is felt even by party functionaries. There have been instances where functionaries have made repeated requests over several days without getting an appointment, while in other cases the meeting has come only after a considerable wait.
The requests too, are done through WhatsApp, which is then vetted by the President’s personal staff and sent for approval to Nabin. The issue, according to party leaders and functionaries familiar with the process, is not simply whether an individual knows the president personally. Once he occupies the office of party president, access is increasingly governed by his schedule and the appointment mechanism. The change is not limited to the president. Veteran journalists remember a more informal headquarters, where senior leaders, including those who would be called party’s “Chanakyas” today, could be approached without ceremony. A reporter could walk into a room, introduce himself, sit down over tea and talk at length without a scheduled appointment. Repeated casual meetings could build into a working relationship and into access that depended on no formal request. That culture, they say, has faded.
Journalists and visitors with no existing relationship with a senior functionary find it particularly hard to get an audience, and an introduction through a mutual acquaintance can now often determine whether a meeting happens. Reporters new to the party beat, who lack the links older colleagues built over years, feel this most. Party workers and political visitors recall the old office in the same way, as a place where political conversations developed organically and people moved between rooms and met leaders without the institutional filtering that exists today. Party sources defend the more controlled system of meetings and access on organisational grounds. They say national officebearers are assigned specific responsibilities, often involving particular states, Union Territories, organisational units or programmes, and are expected to deliver against those responsibilities. Their argument is that senior functionaries cannot spend a substantial part of their working day receiving every visitor who seeks a meeting. They also point to the size of the BJP’s national organisation and the volume of requests that reach its headquarters. Party sources say the appointment system is intended to ensure that senior leaders have sufficient time to focus on their organisational responsibilities. They argue that officebearers are expected to spend their time following up on assigned work, travelling to states and organisational units where required, and reporting back on the progress of those assignments, rather than spending large portions of their working day in Delhi meeting people who seek access without a defined organisational purpose or for personal reasons.
For regular visitors, the appointment system and security arrangements are a normal part of a large national organisation. For people from villages and smaller towns, the experience can be very different. During a recent visit, visitors from outside Delhi could be seen finding their way through a large institutional building with several security personnel monitoring movement. Some found the scale, the security and the controlled access intimidating. They had expected the personal contact and informal request that once led to a meeting in a traditional political office. This was also a criticism when the party moved in eight years ago. The party workers saw the new headquarters as increasingly corporate and contrasted it with Ashoka Road, where leaders were seen as easier to approach.
The contrast is curious. The BJP’s political organisation still depends on a large grassroots network, yet the headquarters through which that network is coordinated has become formal and hierarchical. At the bottom is the party’s interface with journalists and the public. Above it is the machinery, with specialised responsibilities divided among senior office-bearers. At the top is the president, whose office is the apex of the national structure. The headquarters has therefore become more than a place where leaders sit and meet workers. It works as a central command and coordination centre for a nationwide organisation, and the change goes beyond architecture to the idea of political work itself: a brief, a deadline and a reckoning at the end. For those who remember the old office, the shift from informal access to appointment-based access is its most visible sign.
