Aditi Tandon
New Delhi, January 3
The ruling BJP has entered the poll mode, drawing up an elaborate plan for the upcoming Assembly and the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, with the party’s national executive set to meet here on January 16 and 17.
Shah too got extension ahead of 2019 poll
Nadda is expected to get another tenure as BJP president, with his three-year term ending this month. He was elected unopposed as party chief on January 21, 2020, and took over from Amit Shah, who previously got a similar extension as party president to helm the affairs ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The 83-member national executive,which has 55 special invitees and 179 permanent invitees, is a forum for the BJP to take major organisational decisions and chart the future course of action.
Extension of tenure to sitting BJP president JP Nadda remains the top agenda along with deliberations on the strategy for nine state elections in 2023 and General Election to the 18th Lok Sabha in 2024.
Nadda is expected to get another tenure as BJP president, with his three-year term ending this month. He was elected unopposed as party chief on January 21, 2020, and took over from Amit Shah, who previously got a similar extension as party president to helm the affairs ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s praise for Nadda at the parliamentary party meeting in December was signal enough that the veteran’s path for extension was clear.
With PM as principal campaigner and Nadda as party chief, the BJP clinched historic mandates in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur by repeating its governments in all these states and bagged a record 156 seats out of 182 in Gujarat, ending 2022 on a high note. It lost Himachal to the Congress, while AAP went to Punjab. The national executive would strategise for the 2023 polls in Meghalaya, Tripura, Nagaland, Mizoram, Karnataka, Telangana, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
Performance of the BJP in the 2023 cycle would have a direct bearing on whether PM Modi becomes the second Indian PM to win a third straight term while in office, the first being late Jawahar Lal Nehru who led the Congress to victory in the first three Lok Sabha elections.
The party is likely to defer its organisational elections due in January until after 2024, by when the BJP would hope to fulfil implementation of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), the last of its three core pledges.
With the BJP choosing the state Assembly route to push the UCC, victory in states is key to the fulfilment of this promise.
