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BJP chief Nitin Nabin announces party reshuffle; Smriti Irani, Ram Madhav among list
The new team, which has 12 women, adheres to the party’s social engineering model, which gives representation to various castes and tribes.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday announced the new team of national office-bearers, seven months after appointing Nitin Nabin as the party’s 12th national president.
Among them is former minister Smriti Irani, who has been appointed as one of the party’s eight national general secretaries. Senior party leader Ram Madhav, a former national general secretary, has been appointed as party vice president.
Former Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar 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.
In all, the party has announced eight national general secretaries, retaining only Vinod Tawde and Sunil Bansal. Tawde and Bansal played key roles as election in-charges in a number of state polls and have been retained, with the upcoming assembly elections in mind, 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.
Also inducted as national general secretaries are Harish Dwivedi, a former MP from Basti who was recently the state In-charge for Assam and is an upper-caste; former Rajasthan state president and OBC leader Satish Poonia; Gajendra Patel, an ST leader from Madhya Pradesh; and Sanjay Bhatia.
Among the prominent leaders who do not figure in the list are Arun Singh, who has been the general secretary since 2015, and Radha Mohan Das Agrawal, who was appointed general secretary in 2023 after he vacated his long-held Gorakhpur assembly seat to make space for chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
Agrawal and Singh are both Rajya Sabha MPs. Tarun Chugh, who was recently elected to the RS, has now been made the office-in-charge of poll-bound Punjab.
Dushyant Gautam, a well-known Dalit leader who unsuccessfully contested the Delhi assembly polls in 2025 and 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.
Three-term MP Bhola Singh from Bulandshahr (SC) constituency in Uttar Pradesh and Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh and OBC leader Kavita Patidar have also been appointed national secretaries along with 14 others.
