Amit Shah was elected unopposed as the Bharatiya Janata Party chief for the second time and his tenure will end in 2019. Union Ministers, senior party leaders and workers attended the ceremony at the BJP headquarter in the national capital on Sunday.
However, BJP veterans were conspicuous by their absence. LK Advani, MM Joshi, Yashwant Sinha, Shatrughan Sinha gave ceremony a miss, thus raising many questions.
As many as 17 nominations proposing the 51-year-old leader’s name were filed during the three-hour exercise, party vice president Avinash Rai Khanna said.
However, senior leaders LK Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi stayed away from the event.
As Shah was the only leader in the fray, his re-election was widely seen as a formality. Even before he arrived at the party headquarters in New Delhi to file his nomination papers, several congratulatory posters anticipating his unopposed election as party president cropped up at several places.
Reacting to the development, Modi congratulated Shah through a tweet and stated that the party would scale newer heights under his leadership. “Congratulations to Shri @AmitShah on being elected BJP president. I am confident the party will scale newer heights under his leadership,” Modi said on Twitter.
“Amit Bhai combines grassroot-level work and rich organisational experience which will benefit the party immensely,” Modi said in another tweet.
Union minister Venkaiah Naidu described Shah as the “most capable person” in the party. “He… has organisational abilities, good strategies and, above all, a commitment
to our ideology,” he said.
Congratulating Shah, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said, “I have full faith that under his leadership, our party will achieve great success.”
Shah’s name for the post was proposed by Modi, a bevy of Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP-ruled states. Among others who have proposed Shah’s name are Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, Anant Kumar and JP Nadda, M Venkaiah Naidu, besides BJP chief ministers Vasundhara Raje, Raghubar Das, Shivraj Singh Chauhan and others.
