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New Delhi: When Home Minister Amit Shah began preparing a rough draft of the bill that eventually scrapped Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir, only three people in the BJP were aware of it. One of them was Shah’s close aide and party general secretary Bhupendra Yadav, while the other two were working president J.P. Nadda and organising general secretary B.L. Santhosh.

Once the decision was made, Shah turned to his crack team of Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan, general secretary Anil Jain, the junior minister for Parliamentary Affairs from Kerala, V. Muraleedharan, along with Yadav to oversee the smooth passage of the bill in the Rajya Sabha where the BJP is not in majority. It was the same team that ensured the triple talaq bill was tabled and passed in the monsoon session of Parliament.

Shah has emerged as the pivotal figure in the Modi government’s second tenure and has a lot on his plate. To help manage affairs of the state and the party, the home minister depends heavily on a battery of his trusted men apart from the crack team.

ThePrint on the men that have the BJP president’s ear.

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J.P. Nadda — PM’s favourite, RSS’ too

Set to take charge as BJP president from Shah in December, Nadda is not only trusted by the home minister but also by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Once Shah assumed charge as home minister in May 2019, he began delegating routine organisation work to Nadda, who he, however, meets ever day to keep track of events.

Nadda also has a close association with Modi, who he has known since his days in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP. “Not only is he favourite of the PM but also of the RSS,” said a senior BJP leader. “He is another liked politician in RSS circles just like Rajnath Singh.”

Nadda had been the RSS’ choice to take over as BJP president from Rajnath Singh in 2014 but the party’s stellar performance in Uttar Pradesh, where it won 73 Lok Sabha seats in the seat, prompted Modi to insist that Shah take over. The home minister had then overseen the election campaign.

Nadda, however, has had a meteoric rise in the party since 2010 when then president Nitin Gadkari inducted him as a general secretary, the highest post in the party after the president. Gadkari had then fallen out with then Himachal chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, and replaced him with Nadda, who once served as a minister in the hill state.

Nadda continued to be a part of the core team under Rajnath Singh, who served as BJP chief between 2013 and 2014, before Modi inducted him into his cabinet in 2014. Nadda served as the Union health minister in the Modi government’s first tenure.

Bhupendra Yadav — Shah’s ‘eye and ear’

It’s an open secret in the party that the party general secretary is Shah’s most trusted man in the party.

“Yadav is Shah’s most trusted man. He is the eye and the ear of the BJP president,” said another senior BJP leader. “Shah outlines a plan and Yadav executes as the home minister wishes it.”

Yadav, the BJP Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan, has seen his career graph rise along with that of Shah. During Rajnath Singh’s tenure as chief, Yadav was just a national secretary. The then general secretaries were Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Varun Gandhi and Tapir Gao along with Shah, Anant Kumar, J.P. Nadda and Dharmendra Pradhan.

Once Shah took charge in 2014, he effected a major overhaul of the organisation, appointing Yadav as a general secretary. Yadav now oversees the party’s election in critical states that Shah believes require special attention. He was the state in-charge of Jharkhand in 2014, Bihar in 2015, Gujarat in 2017 and will now oversee the BJP’s election campaign in Maharashtra, where polls are due on 21 October. At one point, there was a buzz in the BJP that if Nadda had lost out on being working BJP president, Yadav would’ve landed the post.

Sharp & firm B.L. Santosh

The organising general secretary is another of Shah’s trusted aides in the organisation. He is known for his sharpness and firmness in dealing with organisational matters.

Anil Jain — always with Shah in Parliament

Once a practising doctor at the Apollo Hospitals in Delhi, Jain is another leader who has risen with Shah at the helm. He was a national secretary along with Yadav under Rajnath Singh and had spent a few years in the oblivion during Gadkari’s tenure as party president. Back then, senior leader L.K. Advani was against Jain’s inclusion in Gadkari’s team.

Shah, however, elevated Jain as a party general secretary and the doctor is another of the home minister’s trusted executors in the party. A Rajya Sabha MP, Jain always accompanies Shah, along with Yadav and the party’s media in-charge Anil Baluni in Parliament. Seen as Shah’s crisis manager, along with Yadav, Jain is the party’s in-charge of Chhattisgarh and Haryana.

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‘Backroom man’ Arun Singh

Arun Singh, the BJP general secretary and a relative of Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, is the backbone of the BJP headquarters looking after logistics, supervising the programmes of the president and other leaders, and election work among others. He is “backroom man” of the BJP headquarters and helps Shah and Nadda send their communication to the state unit while coordinating with them.

Anil Baluni — known for his ‘chemistry’ with PM, Shah

Once a journalist, Anil Baluni is now a Rajya Sabha MP and in-charge of the party’s media cell. He is another of the party leaders to enjoy the trust of both Shah and Modi. He has a long association with Modi that began with the PM’s Gujarat days. Back then, when Sunder Singh Bhandari served as the governor of Gujarat between 1999 and 2003, Baluni was his officer on special duty (OSD). Baluni began interacting with Modi and soon became one of the then Gujarat chief minister’s favourites.

When Baluni was appointed BJP spokesperson and head of the party’s media cell after Shah took charge as president in 2014, Piyush Goel, then power minister, asked some in Parliament who Baluni was.

It, however, soon became clear the chemistry Baluni shared with the PM and Shah.

He now manages the Prime Minister and Shah’s media affairs, fixes their media engagements and keeps track of the everyday news cycle. It also Baluni’s job to field party spokespersons or senior ministers to clear the air when the discourse turns against the party. One BJP insider told ThePrint that Baluni, who hails from Kathgodam near Nainital, enjoys more power than the BJP Chief Minister of Uttarakhand Trivendra Singh Rawat.

Himanshu Dev, who has filled Prashant Kishor void

Dev is the man behind all of the BJP’s outreach programmes and conducts surveys for candidate selection. He has filled the void left behind by the exit of political strategist Prashant Kishor from the BJP’s Political Action Committee (PAC). Himanshu now conducts electoral surveys, gathers feedback from the ground, reads the political mood and then reports to Shah regularly.

Deepak Patel — the man behind ABM

The Gujarati businessman helped set up the Association of Brilliant Minds (ABM) that has taken over the role played by Kishor and his Citizens for Accountable Governance (CAB) that ran the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha campaign.

ABM has a number of Kishor’s former colleagues and has since conceived and executed a number of the party’s campaigns such as the NaMo app and the Main Bhi Chowkidar campaign.

ABM manages the BJP’s Facebook pages, ensures that the party’s content goes viral and conducts surveys for the party’s campaigns. Shah depends heavily on their inputs.

When the BJP lost three states in December 2018, the ABM team was instructed to find out the reason separately. It surveyed the three states and discovered that the Congress’s Kisan debt waiver made a major impact. Following this, the Modi government launched Rs 6,000 Kisan Samriddhi Scheme before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Amit Malviya, the IT cell chief

Chief of the BJP IT cell, Malviya’s role is to launch BJP campaigns and counter political opponents with the help of a large number of social media volunteers and paid workers.

Sumeet Bhasin — go-to man for all research material

Sumeet Bhasin is a director at the Public Policy Research Centre that functions under the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Smruti Nyas, the BJP-affiliated think-tank. The centre supplies research material to Shah based on the feedback and impact of government schemes and the fault-lines in poll-bound states. It supplies talking points, comparison of charts and data revealing shortcomings of central and state government flagship schemes.

Kailash Vijayvargiya — BJP’s Bengal hope

When Kailash Vijayvargiya was brought to Delhi in 2015 from the then Shivraj Singh Chouhan government, he was the PWD minister, seen as the No. 2 in the Madhya Pradesh cabinet.

Many BJP leaders then felt Vijayvargiya was being brought to Delhi to give Chouhan a free run in the state. Shah, however, had other things in mind. He first handed the MP leader the task of ensuring victory in the then Congress stronghold of Haryana.

Shah has now appointed Vijavargiya as the party’s West Bengal in-charge as the party attempts to make inroads in the Trinamool Congress stronghold before the 2021 assembly elections in the state. “Kailash has proved his mettle by ensuring that the party won 18 of the 42 seats in West Bengal,” a BJP leader said. “Now, Shah trust him blindly.”

Such is Shah’s trust in Vijavargiya that when the latter’s son, Akash Vijayvargiya, landed in a row after thrashing a municipal officer with a bat, the BJP took no action.

Pradhan, Goyal, Shekhawat…

For organisation work, Shah depends a lot on his pool of three cabinet minsters —Dharmendra Pradhan, Piyush Goyal and recent entrant Gajendra Singh Shekhawat. Pradhan was BJP in-charge of Bihar when NDA won 31 out of 40 seats in 2014. Shah is known to trust his organisational strength and like his attitude.

According to party insiders, Pradhan is one one man who has been a favourite of all senior leaders — from Rajnath Singh to Arun Jaitley to Nitin Gadkari, besides Shah and Modi. “He is like Hanuman who keeps working without taking any credit. His word is usually taken as final in Odisha affairs,” said a leader.

Shah recently made him in-charge of the nationwide campaign on Article 370. Gajendra Shekhawat is another person on the job. He is a late entrant to Shah’s team but is fast moving up the ladder. Shah first inducted him into cabinet to counter Vasundhara Raje and he now fits perfectly into the BJP president’s scheme of things.

A senior party leader summed up Amit Shah’s team and their working in these few words: “Shah makes strategy, Shah’s trusted lieutenants implement it, and backroom leaders like Arun Singh provide best of logistics and infrastructure to implement that strategy.”

After two months, J.P. Nadda will take over from Shah as the full-time president of BJP. It is to be seen whether he inducts all of Shah’s men into his team or will make one of his own.

(This report has been updated to reflect that Sumeet Bhasin is a director at the Public Policy Research Centre that functions under the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Smruti Nyas, and not the director of Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, as stated earlier. The error is regretted.)

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