At 50, Amit Shah is the youngest president in the BJP’s history. He is also among the youngest presidents of a major political party in India. Gerontocracy was not always the hallmark of Indian public life. Jawaharlal Nehru became president of the Indian National Congress at 40, and Subhas Bose at 41. Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister at 40. Yet, these are remote or outlier examples. In recent years, grey hair has dominated India’s politics. Consider the contemporary Congress. Its vice-president is in his mid-40s, not much younger than Shah, and is still regarded as an “emerging” and “youth” figure.The fact that Shah has been named president of the BJP at 50 is not merely recognition of his talent as a political manager and the success with which he ran the campaign in Uttar Pradesh, delivering 73 of 80 seats for the BJP-led alliance. It is not areward for years spent as a consummate, energetic and somewhat obsessive, 24×7 political animal, who seems to live and breathe politics.This was a quality apparent well before Shah became BJP general secretary or Gujarat’s home minister, and well before the “encounter killing” controversies. He was acknowledged as special, as a man who knew his home-state backwards and took charge of election campaigns and party networks there smoothly. In reality, Shah’s elevation is important not for these reasons, not even for his proximity to Narendra Modi. An alternative candidate was J P Nadda, who too is a close confidant of Modi and very trusted by the Prime Minister. Shah’s arrival in the proverbial corner office at 11, Ashoka Road, the BJP’s national headquarters, represents a process so rare in India, in businesses and political parties alike: a succession plan.In the past few months, the BJP has quietly pensioned off its founding generation, the 75- and 80-somethings. Modi, Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj — the core of the Union Cabinet — are in their early 60s. They’re good for the next decade and will lead the party in the 2019 election. With luck, they could win a second term.What of 2024? A new generation — BJP 3.0 — will need to be battle-ready by then. In the coming decade, a new corps of party functionaries and managers, state-level leaders and national faces, younger politicians in their mid-30s and early 40s, will need to be found, groomed and promoted. By anointing a 50-year-old as its president and giving him this job of talentspotting and nurturing, the BJP has indicated it is aware of its responsibility. It does not want to repeat the mistake of 1999-2004, when the party organisation was neglected as the best people went into government. The sterling work L K Advani did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when he mentored a whole generation of BJP leaders — the ones who’re running the government today — is now being institutionalised. In a sense, Shah is its institutional face. If one interprets Shah’s mandate in these terms — rather than merely as a matter of winning the Maharashtra and other state elections in October or some such immediate, shortterm goal — one gets an indication of the shift in the BJP.If replicating the campaign, the mobilisation and monitoring of Uttar Pradesh in the Maharashtra election were the only factors propelling Shah’s rise, he may as well have been retained as general secretary and chief election troubleshooter. There was obviously something more to it.His whirlwind efforts in Uttar Pradesh — driving through the night, napping for only a few hours, being seemingly everywhere, phoning candidates in the late hours and giving details and trends about their constituencies that even they didn’t know — galvanised the party. It conferred on him a certain aura. To the BJP insider, it made Shah inspiring, even a sort of cult figure.Those who go on and on about the cases against Shah and the fact that both he and Modi are from Gujarat miss this point completely. The BJP believes the charges against Shah, the allegations of fake encounters and targeted killings, are untrue. It is convinced these were part of a UPA government mission to frame him, and somehow implicate Modi as well. Shah took the bullet for Modi. As such, the BJP is determined to stick by Shah. That is what it did when it named him general secretary in 2013. After he delivered Uttar Pradesh, the decision to make him president was almost a no-brainer. The Gujarati question was discussed but the fact is, for many party workers, Modi, and now Shah — albeit to a lesser degree — are leaders who have far outgrown their state identities. There are precedents. In the early 1980s, Indira Gandhi, an Allahabad native, elected to the Lok Sabha from Medak (Andhra Pradesh), was the Congress’ prime minister. Kamalapati Tripathi, child of Varanasi, was party boss and working president. This didn’t stop the Congress being a national party. The Modi and Shah jugalbandiwon’t stop the BJP either.The writer is a political and sports commentator