The BJP will face the electorate in Delhi and Bihar under Jagat Prakash Nadda (59) and not Amit Shah. The tenure of Shah (55) as BJP President ended on Monday with working president Nadda (59) getting elected unopposed for three years.
The election was a formality and Nadda was elected without contest. Popularly known as 'JP', Nadda was practically head of the party as working president for the past eight months since Shah became the home minister, but the party decided to put him in saddle only after completion of the membership drive and the organisational elections.
His name was proposed by Shah as also the two other former presidents -- Nitin Gadkari and Rajnath Singh.
Nadda, as No 3 in the party, enjoys the trust of both PM Modi and Shah and political observers rule out the possibility of him emerging as a third power centre in the Modi-Shah dispensation.
The biggest challenge for Nadda will be to keep up the pace set by Shah in winning one election after another, until they lost some key states to the Congress. Nadda’s immediate task is to deliver Delhi and then Bihar, where the BJP is in power with ally Nitish Kumar.
A Rajya Sabha member since 2002 and a health minister in the first Modi government, Nadda has been thrice an MLA from Himachal Pradesh as also a cabinet minister in the state, though he is originally from Bihar.
A B.A. LLB and father of two sons, Nadda was president of the Himachal Pra-desh University Students Union in 1983-84, the general secretary of the BJP Himachal Pradesh in 1990-91, the President of the All India Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha from 1991 to 1994 and the BJP's national general secretary since May 2010, before his elevation as working president.
