JP Nadda - the original Jedi

The mild-mannered, affable, convent educated, master strategist, who as the quintessential karyakarta (worker), rose up the ranks with his sheer hard work, discipline, no-nonsense and grounded attitude, defines Jagat Prakash Nadda, the new National President of the BJP, the largest political organisation in the world. J.P.Nadda's story is inspirational as it showcases how meritocracy, loyalty to party ideology, sharp administrative acumen and of course, powerful oratorical skills never go unnoticed in the BJP, in sharp contrast to the incoherent opposition, where dynastic politics around the fading "Nehru-Gandhi" surname is the only glue that binds a motley bunch of "compulsive contrarians".

Nadda, who belongs to Vijaypur village of Bilaspur district, entered politics in the year 1975 when he joined the then-ongoing "Sampurna Kranti" (total revolution) movement started by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) movement, against the autocratic rule of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whose infamous declaration of the 1975 emergency is unarguably amongst the darkest chapters in Indian polity. Nadda later joined Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), while he was studying in Patna University. He won the polls to become the Secretary of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad at Patna University in 1977. 

Nadda served ABVP for nearly 13 years from 1977-1990 and held various key positions. After graduating from Patna University, he completed his Bachelor of Laws (LL.B) degree from Himachal University. He has been a sports enthusiast also and during his school days, he got a chance to represent Bihar in a swimming championship held in Delhi, a fact not known to many. Mallika Nadda, J.P.Nadda's better half and an erudite scholar in her own right, a professor of history at the Himachal Pradesh University, has also been a member of ABVP and from 1988 to 1999, was also its National General Secretary.

In 1987, J.P.Nadda had to face 45-day detention for organising an anti-government campaign against the ruling Congress Party, by forming a Rashtriya Sangharsh Morcha. During the Lok Sabha Polls held in the year 1989, he was assigned a major responsibility as election in-charge of the BJP’s youth wing when he was just 29 years old. Moving ahead, just three years later in 1991, he was made National President of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, preparing him for a much bigger role in the coming years.

Nadda contested his first assembly election in 1993 from the Bilaspur Sadar assembly and won, at the height of an anti-BJP wave in the state of Himachal Pradesh, at that point. He served as leader of the opposition in the Himachal assembly between 1994 and 1998, never looking back since then. He has been a Cabinet Minister in the Himachal Pradesh government for three terms, handling ministries such as Forest, Environment, Science, and Technology. As part of his notable achievements, Nadda is still widely known as the minister who effectively established forest police stations in the State, to curb forest crimes. He has also been credited for significantly boosting the green cover in Shimla and remains actively engaged in launching several tree plantation drives in the State, even today. Being the hugely multi-faceted leader that he is, he has also visited several countries including Costa Rica, Greece, Turkey, UK, and Canada, as part of various delegations representing India, on different platforms.

Nadda, who was the National General Secretary of the BJP in 2010, was subsequently elected to the Upper House of the Parliament in 2012 and thereafter, shifted his focus from state level to central politics, becoming in due course, the Union Health Minister in Narendra Modi's Cabinet during Modi's first term as Prime Minister, besides being a member of the Parliamentary Board and the Central Election Committee, the BJP's top two decision making bodies.

Today, under the Centre's flagship healthcare scheme, Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY), over 65 lakh patients have received treatment amounting to over Rs 9500 crore and, counting. A brilliant brainchild of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, PMJAY aims at providing secondary and tertiary healthcare of up to Rs. 5 lakh to more than 10.74 crore Indian families per year. This healthcare scheme, bigger than what Obamacare ever was, owes its tremendous success to the meticulously effective execution by none other than J.P.Nadda, whose deft managerial skills ironed out many operational problems during the initial rollout phase of PMJAY, helping to bring on board many States that were initially reluctant.

Administrative strengths apart, in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Nadda was in-charge of the BJP's election campaign in the politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh, where the party faced a tough challenge from the grand alliance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The party, however, managed to win a solid 62 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, showcasing Nadda's genius as an astute political mind who has always allowed his performance to do the talking on his behalf.

J.P.Nadda is not a fifth-generation dynast like Rahul Gandhi, the Congress scion, whose political getaways to Europe have made more headlines than his political exploits at home. Nadda is a 24/7 consummate politician, whose winnability quotient is his ability to build bridges and forge a consensus on key issues, without ceding ground. It would be apt to conclude by saying that the new National President of the BJP combines the best of both---a steely hard willed resolve burnished under the rumble and tumble of his formative years in Bihar that blends in perfectly well with an unflappable, calm exterior that comes naturally to a "pahadi".Since the "pahadi" in question is the indefatigable Jagat Prakash Nadda, a leader whose enduring work in Himachal Pradesh, the "Land of Snow", has left a flattering legacy, the coming years should see the BJP scale much bigger frontiers under his leadership.

(Ms. Sanju Verma is an Economist, Chief Spokesperson of BJP Mumbai and Author of Bestseller, “Truth &Dare—The Modi Dynamic”. The views in the article are her own and do not reflect those of DNA)