With 10 of the BJP’s central office-bearers, including party President Rajnath Singh, moving to the government, an organisational re-election is the next urgent item on senior leaders’ agenda.
The practice is that a new president selects his team after his own election, conducted presumably in accordance with the party constitution. Article XIX of the BJP Constitution prescribes the procedure for the election of the national president by an electoral college consisting of the members of national and state councils.
Any 20 members of the electoral college of a state can jointly propose a person who has been an active member for four terms and has 15 years of membership.
But such joint proposals have to come from more than five states where organisational elections have been completed for the national council.
However, the procedure is usually a formality not exactly followed strictly. The name of the party president is decided in consultation with the RSS and senior leaders and then the states are asked to send their proposals. In January 2013, Nitin Gadkari was tipped to be re-elected, but his name was changed at the last minute.
Rajnath filed his nomination after the RSS had had several rounds of consultations with BJP leaders and was declared elected unopposed.
Now, Rajnath has been elevated to the Union Cabinet, leaving a vacancy along with vice-presidents Jual Oram, Uma Bharti and Smriti Irani; general secretaries Ananth Kumar, Thawar Chand Gehlot and Dharmendra Pradhan; party treasurer Piyush Goyal; and spokespersons Prakash Javdekar and Nirmala Sitharaman.
A new party president is to be elected but the present general secretaries JP Nadda and Amit Shah (who is also a key adviser of Prime Minister Narendra Modi) have emerged as favourites for the top job.
Once the appropriate rounds of consultations are over, a president will be picked from among the two favourites and his name will be proposed by the states. The process is followed by a meeting of the BJP’s national council that endorses the name of the president. The president then selects his team of national office-bearers. The process is already under way.