The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday announced the new team of national officer-bearers, seven months after appointing Nitin Nabin as the 12th national president. The new team, which has 12 women, adheres to the party’s social engineering model, which gives representation to various castes and tribes.
Senior leaders, Smriti Irani and Ram Madhav, have made a comeback in the new team. While Irani is the only woman general secretary among the eight, Ram Madhav, a former national general secretary, has been made Vice President. Former CM from Tripura, Biplab Deb, has been appointed as national general secretary. Union minister Piyush Goyal has been appointed treasurer, a post he held from 2010 to 2014, and Anil Baluni has been retained as media in charge.
The party has announced 8 national general secretaries, retaining only Vinod Tawde and Sunil Bansal. The list includes Harish Diwvedi,a former MP from Basti, who was recently the state In-charge for Assam and is an Upper Caste; former Rajasthan state president Satish Poonia; Gajendra Patel, an OBC from Madhya Pradesh; and Sanjay Bhatia.
Tawde and Bansal played key roles as election in-charges in a bunch of state polls have been retained keeping in view the upcoming assembly elections, including in the politically significant Uttar Pradesh early next year. While Bansal played a key role in West Bengal, Tawde was in charge of the Kerala polls and has been the state in-charge for Bihar, overseeing the transition from Nitish Kumar stepping down as Chief Minister to Samrat Choudhary taking over.
Three-term MP Bhola Singh from the Bulandshahr (SC) constituency in Uttar Pradesh and Kavita Patidar, an RS MP from Madhya Pradesh and an OBC, have been appointed national secretaries, along with 14 others.
Notable drops include Arun Singh, who has been the general secretary since 2015, Radha Mohan Das Agrawal, who was made general secretary in 2023, a year after he vacated his long-held Gorakhpur assembly seat to allow Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to contest from the constituency, after the party won the state polls. Yogi Adityanath was then a Lok Sabha MP from Gorakhpur. Agrawal and Singh are both Rajya Sabha MPs. Tarun Chugh, who was recently elected to the RS, has now been made in charge of the poll-bound state of Punjab.
Dushyant Gautam, a well-known Dalit leader who unsuccessfully contested the Delhi Assembly polls in 2025, had been general secretary since September 2020, and state in-charge for Uttarakhand has also been dropped.
He was in the thick of controversy when his name was wrongly associated with the Ankita Bhandari murder case in Uttarakhand in 2022. Gautam filed a defamation lawsuit against the political parties and individuals involved, and the Delhi High Court subsequently passed interim orders to remove all social media posts linking him to the murder case.
Nabin, a five-term legislator from Bihar and now a Rajya Sabha MP, was appointed national president on January 20. His appointment was perceived as marking the beginning of a generational shift in the party, which had been formed a month before Nabin was born in May 1980.
