Nitin Nabin's reset: BJP builds for next decade, not post-Modi yet

The BJP chief's first team balances continuity with change, keeps the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah machinery intact and takes only a few steps towards a post-Modi landscapeNitin Nabin has been president of the BJP since January 20. He got a team of his own only on August 17, which by the standards of the office is neither unusual nor especially comfortable.Predecessor J.P. Nadda had taken eight months in 2020 and cited the Covid pandemic. Nabin has better reasoning—about three months after he took charge, the party was in the middle of a five-state election campaign, and nobody rebuilds the high command while the cadre is out fighting in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry. And yet, seven months is seven months; and for all of it, the youngest president in the BJP’s history had been running the organisation with Nadda’s office-bearers.The Nabin team list that finally came out on August 17 has 13 national vice-presidents, eight general secretaries, 16 national secretaries, a treasurer, seven morcha chiefs and a media and social-media apparatus rebuilt from the top down.Most of the political commentary is treating it as a repair job on the BJP’s 2024 Lok Sabha poll performance, its social coalitions, caste arithmetic, and the loss of majority on its own in the Lok Sabha. That reading is a year stale. President Nabin’s first electoral outing went extremely well. The BJP breached West Bengal. It returned to power in Assam on its own with 82 of 126 seats—a third straight term. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) stayed in power in Puducherry. Tamil Nadu and Kerala weren’t for the party to win anyway. A first-term president who wrests Bengal is not a man repairing damage. He is a man with credit, which makes the caution evident in the August 17 list of office-bearers the interesting question.Some of the answer could be personal. In March, Nabin went to the Rajya Sabha and vacated Bankipur, the assembly seat in Patna he had held since 2006 and before that his father for the BJP beginning 1995. Prashant Kishor won the bypoll—the first seat for his Jan Suraaj Party. If Bengal gave Nabin authority, Bankipur took a piece of it back, and a president who has just lost his former constituency does not walk into the BJP parliamentary board asking for a free hand.The arithmetic of a ‘young’ teamThe BJP had sold hard Nabin’s elevation to national presidentship as a generational change, and there is something to it. He is 46. More than two-fifths of the Indian electorate is under 40. In January, the BJP leadership went as far as writing the thesis into the rulebook, capping the Yuva Morcha’s national presidency at 35 and its state units at 32. So, it is worth asking what the team Nabin has named actually looks like.Take the 22 people in the tiers where power sits: the 13 vice-presidents, the eight general secretaries, and B.L. Santhosh. Seventeen have a documented date of birth. Nine are over 60: Vasundhara Raje 73, Tariq Mansoor about 70, D. Purandeswari 67, Manpreet Singh Badal 64, Vinod Tawde 63, and Tirath Singh Rawat, Baijayant Panda and Satish Poonia all 62. Ram Madhav turns 62 this week.Eight are under 60, and they cluster tightly in their fifties: Santhosh 59, Sanjay Bhatia 58, Sunil Bansal around 57, Biplab Deb 56, Harish Dwivedi 52, Gajendra Patel 51 and Smriti Irani 50. That leaves one leader under 50 in the entire commanding structure—Bharti Pravin Pawar, 46. Nobody is under 40.There is a younger cohort on this list. It sits one rung down, among the 16 national secretaries, where Anil Antony, Sandeep Pathak, Rohan Gupta and Phangnon Konyak are all in their 40s, and several of them are imports rather than cadre.Titles for the durbar, portfolios for the machineThe other thing the coverage flattens is the difference between the two tiers, which in the BJP is not cosmetic. General secretaries run the sangathan. Vice-presidents, with occasional exceptions, sit in a well-appointed waiting room.Sort the names that way and the story turns over. Into the waiting room go Raje—retained, incidentally, not elevated, in a post she has held since 2020—along with Madhav, back after five years but as vice-president rather than the general secretaryship he once held; Rawat; Purandeshwari; and Badal. All honoured and contained.Tirath, a former member of the Lok Sabha and former chief minister of Uttarakhand, had been sulking after being dropped. The elevation means he may not get to contest the Uttarakhand assembly polls next year. Purandeshwari has been pulled out of state politics so as to appease her brother-in-law and ally TDP’s Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. Badal’s entry into national politics means he is no longer to be considered for the Union cabinet.Tawde and Bansal, both continuing, are Amit Shah’s men and the leaders who actually win states for the party. Irani has Uttar Pradesh on her plate. There is Deb and Poonia, plus three new general secretaries in their early 50s in Dwivedi, Patel and Bhatia—a long history there of organisational grip and building election campaigns.The organisation wing was not touched at all. Santhosh stays. Shiv Prakash and Saudan Singh come in as joint general secretaries (organisation). Seven previous vice-presidents were dropped.Uttar Pradesh got resourced properly: Irani with the state’s organisational file; Rekha Verma retained as vice-president; and Bhola Singh and Sangeeta Yadav among the secretaries, all sitting on top of a state unit that changed hands in December 2025 when Pankaj Chaudhary replaced Bhupendra Chaudhary as the party’s Uttar Pradesh chief. The deadline of assembly polls in early 2027 is nearing fast.Now the big surprise: Piyush Goyal, the Union commerce minister, is the new national treasurer, which under the party’s one man-one post convention cannot hold indefinitely. Read that as a Union cabinet signal and watch what happens after the monsoon session of Parliament.Amit Malviya’s exit an admissionAmit Malviya has run the BJP’s digital operation since 2015—through the 2019 general elections, the pandemic, the 2024 parliamentary polls, and every row the IT cell generated and survived. Malviya’s survival became a fact about the party rather than about him. It told you how directly he reported and how completely he was covered. That cover is gone. An argument has been had, and it has been settled against him.For a decade, the BJP’s digital operation has been superb in one particular thing: owning the national conversation from Delhi. What 2024 exposed is that this is no longer where the fight is. It has moved to regional-language YouTube, to podcast and influencer networks nobody in Delhi controls, to WhatsApp groups that are local, and increasingly to AI-generated content the party’s own trend machinery was never built to produce or control.The Opposition’s caste narrative in 2024 did not travel on Twitter. It travelled through vernacular channels that the BJP’s Delhi leadership neither saw coming nor answered in time. Moving Malviya is the party conceding the point. The replacement is the more revealing half of it. New social media chief Deepak Mhaskey is the first leader coming up through the organisation to hold this post.Mhaskey’s two predecessors were laterals of a very particular kind. Dr Arvind Gupta was the digital campaign architect for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. He is an MBA from the University of Illinois and has 25 years behind him in consulting, software, banking and start-ups across India and Silicon Valley. Malviya came out of banking, got into the BJP’s orbit through the Friends of BJP forum in 2009 and was running the national cell six years later. Both were hired for capability. Neither had done a day’s organisational work.Mhaskey has done little else but organisation. He rose through the BJP’s Chhattisgarh unit as its spokesperson, ran the state’s digital campaigns and outreach, and holds a state appointment as chairman of the Chhattisgarh Medical Services Corporation. He isn’t a communications professional but a karyakarta who happens to have built a digital operation in one mid-sized state, from the district up.That is a change in the job description, not just the jobholder. The party has stopped hiring a technologist to run its narrative and hired an organiser, someone whose first instinct is to ask which booth a message lands in rather than which platform it trends on. If the diagnosis is that the BJP lost the vernacular ground war, promoting a man who has actually fought one is at least internally consistent.It is also, unmistakably, Nabin’s own pick. Chhattisgarh is the state he was election in-charge of, and where he pushed the Congress out of power in 2023. Mhaskey is someone he worked with and chose. Four co-convenors have been named alongside him—Priti Gandhi, Shivanand Dwivedi, Alok Bhatt and Arun Yadav, which supports the decentralisation reading being briefed out. But the structural fact is single: the sharpest weapon in the party has passed from a Narendra Modi-Amit Shah appointee of 11 years’ standing to a first-time national office-bearer who owes his chair to the new president.On a list where very little else moved, that is the one place Nabin got his man into a post that counts. It is his only unambiguous fingerprint, and it is also where he is now most exposed. If the vernacular strategy works, he owns it. If the machine misfires in Uttar Pradesh in 2027, there is nobody else to hand it to.The succession planIs this the cautious beginning of one? A finished succession architecture would have a second line with real executive authority, a working pipeline from state leadership to national command, and a president with a base of his own. What August 17 produced is a second line that is largely ceremonial, a pipeline that thins out below 50, and a president whose biggest asset—the West Bengal victory—is being credited upward to the prime minister’s campaign rather than to his organisation.For now it functions as insurance. Modi is 75 and the government’s term runs to 2029. Nabin’s own three-year term expires in January 2029, which means the man expected to run the organisational campaign for the next general election comes up for renewal in the same season it starts. That is leverage held back.Put plainly, the BJP has installed a young president, given him a team he mostly did not choose, left the RSS spine and the Shah election machinery exactly where they were, parked regional satraps somewhere dignified and powerless, and handed Nabin one real instrument to prove himself with.There are three things worth watching from here on—whether Goyal keeps his cabinet berth, which will tell you if the one man-one-post concept survives contact with the treasury; who gets to be the Uttar Pradesh election in-charge, a separate and more revealing appointment than Irani’s organisational file; and what Mhaskey actually builds, because a genuinely distributed digital operation and a centralised one look identical for the first year and nothing alike by the second.The BJP has begun building for the next decade. It has not begun building for the absence at the centre of it. On the evidence of these 22 names, phase one of that transition amounts to a president, a communications chief and a promise.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsPublished By: Yashwardhan SinghPublished On: Aug 17, 2026 22:26 IST