Rajnath shuffles party apex bodies; tries balancing act

Rajnath Singh, president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on Sunday reshuffled the party's top decision-making bodies. Supporters of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi are seen as having got a good share of the posts.

Modi himself was named a member of the 11-member parliamentary board - he had, much earlier, been removed from that body in Rajnath Singh's earlier tenure and as a member of the Central Election Committee. Both these bodies are considered the most powerful in the party.

By contrast, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan featured nowhere. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, M Venkaiah Naidu, Nitin Gadkari, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Ananth Kumar, Thawar Chand Gehlot and Ram Lal are now members of the parliamentary board.

Rajnath Singh seems to have tried to accommodate all factions, both in the states where the BJP is in power and where it is in the opposition. Prabhat Jha, who has publicly blamed the Madhya Pradesh CM for having him removed as state party chief, is now an officebearer at the centre. So is C P Thakur from Bihar, who resigned in anger because he felt the party was bending too much before ally and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Sadananda Gowda, former Karnataka CM, has also been brought to the centre.

Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha has not found a place on the team. This could be because he was one of the first to demand the resignation of former president Nitin Gadkari, who put his foot down when it came to Sinha. Najma Heptulla, Hema Malini and Shanta Kumar, earlier vice-presidents, have been dropped. Vasundhara Raje was a general secretary but has been dropped, possibly because she might get another assignment in poll-bound Rajasthan. However, this means Rajasthan, which gave the BJP 21 of 25 MPs in the last Lok Sabha poll, has no officebearer. Neither do West Bengal, Kerala and Assam, where there is potential for the party's growth.

Former Gujarat minister of state for home, Amit Shah, who had to step down in some disgrace, is a general secretary. Smriti Irani is a vice-president.

Dharmendra Pradhan and Meenakshi Lekhi are new spokespersons and Nirmala Sitharaman has been retained as one. Anurag Thakur continues as head of the youth wing. Varun Gandhi is also a general secretary. Poonam Mahajan, daughter of late party leader Pramod Mahajan, has been made a secretary.