BJP organisational rejig could pave way for Union Cabinet reshuffle

The BJP has appointed Union Minister Harsh Malhotra as its Delhi unit chief, fuelling speculation about a possible reshuffle in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Council of Ministers

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) National President Nitin Nabin on Thursday appointed Union Minister Harsh Malhotra as the party's Delhi unit president, a move that may be a signal of an imminent reshuffle of the Union Council of Ministers.

 

Malhotra, who succeeds Virendra Sachdeva as the BJP’s Delhi unit president, is a Lok Sabha member from East Delhi, and the Minister of State for Corporate Affairs, Road Transport, and Highways.

 

The BJP’s constitution mandates “one person, one post”, a principle that Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah, and JP Nadda — the immediate three predecessors of Nabin — also observed either by demitting the office of the BJP’s national president within weeks of being inducted into the Council of Ministers or concluding their respective terms to pass on the baton to their successors. The BJP applies the principle equally to ministers who are sent back to the party to head its organisational posts.

 

 

The party constitution, however, does not specify any duration during which a party leader could continue on two posts, one in the party’s organisation and the other in a government at the Centre or in states. Pankaj Chaudhary was unanimously elected the chief of the party’s Uttar Pradesh unit in December 2025, but has continued as Minister of State for Finance at the Centre.

 

Sworn in on June 9, 2024, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government will mark two years of its current term with a meeting of the NDA in the second week of June. The Union Council of Ministers has 72 members, including Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi. Besides Modi, there are 30 cabinet ministers, five ministers of state with independent charge, and 36 ministers of state.

 

There have not been any changes to the Council of Ministers that took oath two years back. A reshuffle, if and when it happens, could seek to give more representation to some of the allies of the BJP within the NDA, such as the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which currently does not have a single minister in the Council of Ministers.

 

In the past 12 years, PM Modi has factored in considerations such as giving more representation to women, to other backward classes (OBCs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs), or to Members of Parliament (MPs) form poll-bound states, in the shaping of his Council of Ministers.

 

Seven Assembly polls are due in 2027. Elections will be held in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Manipur, Goa, and Uttarakhand by February-March 2027, and in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat by the end of the year.

 

Meanwhile, elections to 24 Rajya Sabha seats from 10 states are to be held on June 18. Eleven more Rajya Sabha MPs are set to retire — 10 from UP and one from Uttarakhand — by November this year. This could yield some space to induct party leaders who are not MPs as of now, into the Council of Ministers, as they could get a seat in Parliament's Upper House within six months of their inclusion.

 

After taking over as the BJP’s national chief in January, this is the first organisational rejig that Nabin has undertaken. He also announced presidents of the party's Haryana, Punjab, and Tripura units, according to separate notifications issued by the BJP National General Secretary Arun Singh.

 

Archana Gupta has been appointed as BJP Haryana president, Sardar Kewal Punjab unit president, and Abhishek Debroy has been made the Tripura unit chief, according to the notification. "All these appointments come with immediate effect," Singh said.

 

After his return from his five-nation tour, PM Modi held a meeting of his Council of Ministers on May 21, and reviewed the performance of key ministries. The PM will be on a visit to France and Slovakia in the middle of June, attending the Group of Seven (G7) Leaders’ Summit at Evian-les-Bains in France, which is to be held from June 15 to 17, and is also scheduled to visit Nice and Paris. 

A two-time former Congress legislator from Barnala and chairman of Dhillon Group, Kewal Dhillon joined the BJP in 2022. Dhillon is the first Sikh that the BJP has appointed as the party’s state unit chief, and it is the party’s outreach towards the Sikhs in the run up to the Assembly polls in February-March next year. “After West Bengal, the lotus will now bloom in Punjab too," Dhillon said. An industrialist who established PepsiCo’s “first and largest franchisee” for bottling and manufacturing of soft drinks in India at Sangrur in the militancy hit Punjab of the 1980s, the 76-year-old built a major beverages group through the Dhillon Group, which later expanded into  and later expanded into real estate, construction and other sectors

 

In Punjab, the BJP’s alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) meant that it mostly contested the Hindu-dominated urban seats. Its alliance with the SAD collapsed in 2023, after which the party appointed former Congress leader Sunil Jakhar as the party’s state unit chief. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP contested all the 13 seats in the state, all of which it lost, but doubled its vote share from 9 per cent to 18.5 per cent. According to the 2011 Census, Punjab has 57.69 per cent Sikhs and 38.5 per cent Hindus.