BJP leaders Baijayant Panda (left) and Dharmendra Pradhan. File
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
The BJP on Thursday (September 25, 2025) announced in-charges for the upcoming Assembly elections in Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. It appointed Lok Sabha MP Baijayant Panda as the election in-charge for Tamil Nadu while Union Ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Bhupender Yadav will take up the role in Bihar and West Bengal respectively.
Union Minister C.R. Paatil and Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya have been appointed as co-incharges for the Bihar election, while former Tripura Chief Minister and current Lok Sabha MP Biplab Kumar Deb was named as the co-incharge for West Bengal. Union Minister Muralidhar Modhol will be the co-incharge for Tamil Nadu.
Among the three States, Bihar will go to polls the earliest and Mr. Pradhan’s appointment is significant since he had handled the State during the 2010 election, when the National Democratic Alliance won 206 out of the 243 Assembly seats, the alliance’s most emphatic victory in the State yet.
His old ties with Bihar leaders, in both the BJP and Janata Dal (United), is also important, as is his experience of handling elections in Haryana, Karnataka and Uttarakhand in the past. Mr. Pradhan’s immediate challenge will be to ensure a smooth seat-sharing arrangement among the BJP’s allies, some of whom have been seeking a much larger share than it is willing to part with.
Mr. Paatil, Union Minister and Gujarat BJP chief, was involved in Bihar earlier as well, while Mr. Maurya has been roped in to ensure that the BJP’s support base among non-Yadav Other Backward Classes remains intact.
In Tamil Nadu, the BJP is a junior partner alongside the AIADMK, which has currently been facing some dissidence. Mr. Panda, also a vice-president of the BJP, had been the party’s in-charge of polls in Delhi earlier this year, when the BJP came to power after 27 years.
Mr. Yadav’s appointment in West Bengal is a sign that the BJP is keen to sort out intra-party issues before next year’s Assembly election. For Mr. Yadav, it is a role that he has been adept in, as witnessed in both the Madhya Pradesh and recent Maharashtra elections.
Mr. Deb, as a Bengali, is expected to help ameliorate the perception that the BJP is a largely Hindi-speaking party, with not much resonance as far as West Bengal’s own culture is concerned.
The Bihar election is expected in November, followed by West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, which are likely to go to polls in March-April 2026. While the BJP’s national leadership plays a central role in shaping the party’s campaign for Assembly elections, in-charges play a critical part as the bridge with State leaders, and in implementing the party’s strategies on the ground. The co-incharges assist them in implementing the agenda.
Besides West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, Assembly elections will also be held in Kerala, Assam and Puducherry next year.
Published – September 25, 2025 02:35 pm IST
