The Bharatiya Janata Party’s constitution clearly prescribes a three-year term for its national president. The incumbent Jagat Prakash Nadda, who is the union health minister too, took charge on 20 January 2020, meaning his mandate formally expired in January 2023.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s constitution clearly prescribes a three-year term for its national president. The incumbent Jagat Prakash Nadda, who is the union health minister too, took charge on 20 January 2020, meaning his mandate formally expired in January 2023. (Image Source: File)
New Delhi: The ongoing criticism of the Congress leadership for its handling of the Karnataka power tussle between Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D. K. Shivakumar has triggered yet another familiar debate: why are some leadership crises amplified while others are quietly normalised?
For weeks, the Congress high command has been accused, and rightly so, of indecision, weak internal discipline, and a tendency to allow factional disputes to fester.
However, if succession management and adherence to internal rules are the metrics by which we measure party discipline, then the BJP’s national leadership deserves the same scrutiny yet rarely receives it.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s constitution clearly prescribes a three-year term for its national president. The incumbent Jagat Prakash Nadda, who is the union health minister too, took charge on 20 January 2020, meaning his mandate formally expired in January 2023.
Later, the party extended his term first to June 2024 and then, practically speaking, into the post-election period with no clarity on transition.
If one includes the period beginning June 2019, when Nadda served as working president, his tenure approaches six years—double the constitutional limit.
Yet this prolonged incumbency has generated remarkably little controversy.
The same commentators who flag Congress’s constitutional infirmities in Karnataka seldom apply the same lens to the BJP’s national structure.
The selective outrage reveals more about the political environment than about the parties themselves.
Having said that, the BJP’s present leadership structure explains part of the asymmetry.
The party president in today’s BJP does not function as the supreme political authority; rather, leadership is centralised in the Prime Minister and the Home Minister.This arrangement has effectively rendered the president’s post a stabilising instrument rather than an office that exclusively controls the party’s workings.
The BJP’s present model suppresses internal contestation, not because its leaders are more united but because dissent rarely manifests publicly.
Democracies often respond not to what exists, but to what is visible. Congress’s troubles in Karnataka are visible: statements, rival camps, and public interventions from senior leaders. The BJP’s internal drift, specifically the absence of leadership renewal at the national level, is invisible by design.
But invisibility does not negate significance. A party that does not conduct internal elections, delays succession planning, and extends leadership terms indefinitely risks undermining its own institutional vitality.
The BJP today commands unmatched electoral power, but it increasingly exhibits the features of a hyper-centralised organisation.
The BJP’s ongoing reliance on a president whose term has long expired deserves the same democratic examination that the Congress receives for Karnataka. The health of a political party is not and should not be measured only by its ability to win elections, but also by its capacity to follow its own rules.
