On October 16, just days before Diwali, Nitin Nabin filed his nomination from the Bankipur seat in Patna for the fifth time for the assembly elections. At the time, Nabin, a minister in the Nitish Kumar cabinet, could not have known that another event unfolding the same day in western India would prove a precursor to a turning point in his political journey.
In Ahmedabad, Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel asked his entire cabinet to resign. Patel inducted 19 new ministers, retaining only six from his earlier team. The average age of the cabinet dropped from 60 to 55. Harsh Sanghavi, 40, was appointed deputy chief minister, marking a generational shift in the state BJP.
The reshuffle was widely seen as a strategic move ahead of the 2027 assembly elections in Gujarat, the state regarded as the BJP’s organisational laboratory. Outside Gujarat, the development was noted by party insiders but did not enter the wider political conversation, as the Bihar campaign dominated national attention.
After the Bihar results, which exceeded expectations, many within the BJP assumed that the most frequently discussed contender for the post of party president—Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who was also in charge of the Bihar elections—would soon be elevated. Pradhan, 56, appeared to fit the bill perfectly. His OBC credentials, at a time when the BJP is sharpening its social justice plank after announcing the caste census, added to his advantage.
Instead, less than a month after Bihar saw Nitish Kumar taking over as chief minister once more, and after Nabin retained his portfolios of road construction, urban development and housing, the BJP surprised observers again. The party’s highest decision-making body, the parliamentary board, elevated 45-year-old Nabin as its national working president. The move set the stage for him to become the youngest BJP president, and the first from Bihar and eastern India. The BJP chose a president 11 years younger than Pradhan and the same age as the party itself. The BJP and Nitin were born in 1980, just weeks apart.
The decision is being seen as a major reset.
By placing a leader younger than several Union ministers and senior office-bearers at the helm, the BJP disrupted its traditional age- and experience-based hierarchy. The next logical step, many believe, would be a Union cabinet reshuffle. “The BJP has once again demonstrated that any worker, at any level, can aspire to the highest responsibility. Under Nitin Nabin’s leadership, the party will scale new heights and strengthen its organisation, especially in regions where it is still expanding,” said BJP spokesperson Guru Prakash. “This reflects a generational shift. It is a decisive shift when compared to other political parties, with the BJP preparing itself for the next 25 years towards the vision of Viksit Bharat.”
Nabin entered politics in 2006 after the death of his father, Navin Kishore Prasad Sinha, a senior BJP leader with an RSS background. He belongs to the Kayastha community, an upper-caste group that constitutes less than one per cent of Bihar’s population.
Among party colleagues, Nabin is known as hardworking and energetic. He demonstrated his administrative abilities as road construction minister—the state’s road network saw notable improvement under him. Since 2006, Nabin has been elected MLA for five consecutive terms. He became a member of the national executive committee of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, the BJP’s youth wing, in 2008, and served as its national general secretary from 2010 to 2016. He was BJP co-in-charge for Chhattisgarh from 2021 to 2024. During this period, the party dislodged the Congress government in the state. Soon after, he was given charge of Chhattisgarh for the Lok Sabha elections, in which the BJP won 10 of the state’s 11 seats.
Nitin’s rise to one of the most powerful positions in India’s political system—heading the world’s largest party, which is in power in 15 states—also brings renewed focus on the role of the BJP’s ideological parent, the RSS. The sangh has been advocating a generational shift within the BJP for the past year, following the sobering 2024 election verdict in which the party lost 63 seats and fell far short of its “400 plus” ambition. Feedback from the ground provided by the RSS suggested that the party needed a younger leader who could be groomed for future responsibilities, along with a new generation of leaders across the organisation.
The experience of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government was frequently cited, when the focus on governance came at the cost of organisational renewal. When Vajpayee lost power, there was no mass leader ready to step into his role. The next line of leadership had not been adequately prepared. As a result, the RSS enforced a hard reset 16 years ago, on December 20, 2009, when its preferred choice—incidentally another Nitin—was elevated. Following the BJP’s poor performance in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, a relatively unknown Nitin Gadkari was chosen as the party’s youngest president. The 52-year-old was then little known outside Maharashtra but had built a reputation as public works minister, a portfolio similar to that once held by Nabin.
When Gadkari reconstituted his team in 2010, his choices pointed to the direction the party was about to take. General secretaries included Ananth Kumar, Vasundhara Raje, Arjun Munda, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Dharmendra Pradhan and J.P. Nadda. Now, under Nabin, further changes are expected within the party organisation, with more leaders likely to be inducted and groomed for future roles. His elevation is also expected to enhance the prominence of leaders from Bihar in national politics, with a longer-term aim of positioning the BJP to have its own chief minister in the state when Nitish eventually exits the scene.
At the national level, the choice of an upper-caste leader as party president suggests that the prime ministerial post would continue to be held by an OBC leader, like Modi. Nabin’s immediate predecessors were also from upper castes. So, when the issue of picking a new prime ministerial candidate arises in the post-Modi era, if Nabin is still the party president, will the new candidate also be an OBC to balance caste equations?