‘Challenge for Shah and Nadda was to enter new challenging territories, make a space, then emerge as a strong entity’.
NEW DELHI: Under the leadership of Jagat Prakash Nadda, whose extension in tenure as the national president of BJP was ratified on 17 January, the party won in eight states of the 17 where it contested the elections, either alone or in an alliance, since June 2019 when Nadda was appointed as the working president of the party.
Six months later, in January 2020, Nadda was appointed as a full time party president, replacing the incumbent Amit Shah. Post June 2019, after Nadda took over, elections were held in Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand. Out of these three states, the BJP was able to retain power in Haryana, while losing in the latter two.
In 2020, two states, Delhi and Bihar, went to the polls. Of this, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) again swept Delhi, while in Bihar, the BJP, along with the JDU, came back to power. In 2021, five states went to polls—Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
The BJP retained power in Assam, while failing to win in the rest four states, including in West Bengal, where it had executed a high octane campaign. Last year, Assembly elections were held in seven states, out of which the BJP was in power in six states—Goa, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. Following the results, the BJP came back to power in five states, while losing in Himachal Pradesh and failing in Punjab.
In all of the 17 state elections that were held since June 2019, the BJP won in eight states.
“Nadda has consolidated and taken forward the work that was done by Shah during his tenure as national president in which the BJP won in difficult states like Karnataka, Assam and consolidated its hold in other Southern and North Eastern states where the BJP was till recently considered a minor player. The challenge for both Shah and Nadda was to enter new challenging territories, make a space and then emerge as a strong entity. The numbers (referring to the party’s electoral performance under Nadda’s tenure) prove that the BJP has done that quite effectively under the guidance of Nadda, something which was also recognized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” a BJP parliamentary board member told The Sunday Guardian.
This year, nine states including Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya, will go to polls, out of which the BJP is in power in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura.