The long-awaited overhauls of the Union ministry and the BJP organisation could take place soon, with Narendra Modi and Amit Shah in full command following the sweeping victory in Bengal, party insiders said.
These rejigs have been pending since the surprise appointment of the relatively low-profile and young Nitin Nabin, 45, as BJP national president this year. His promotion was seen widely as the opening shot ahead of a broader, generational transition engineered by the top leadership.
These plans were, however, temporarily shelved amid concerns that major changes could unsettle the political equations ahead of Assembly elections in Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. With the Bengal hurdle now crossed emphatically, the leadership is believed to be moving swiftly to execute the deferred
shuffle.
A meeting of the Union council of ministers is to be held on May 21 after Prime Minister Modi returns from his foreign tour. Within BJP circles, the meeting is being viewed as the first formal step towards an extensive revamp, expected in the second half of June.
“The indication from the top leadership is that the changes could be substantial, not cosmetic,” a senior BJP leader said.
He said the party and government overhauls were likely to be synchronised.
Ordinarily, a new BJP president quickly constitutes his own organisational team. But months after Nabin’s appointment, the exercise remains incomplete, reinforcing speculation that the leadership is waiting to align organisational appointments with ministry changes.
Party insiders said the scale of the impending rejig could be unusually large because the Bengal victory had altered internal power equations and restored Modi-Shah’s unquestioned supremacy after the setback of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
“With back-to-back victories in Bihar and Bengal, Modi and Shah have re-established complete dominance over both government and organisation. They now have the political capital to push through a sweeping generational shift,” a party veteran said.
Modi’s first two terms, between 2014 and 2024, were marked by periodic high-voltage cabinet overhauls, and a similar exercise is now expected in his third stint.
In August 2017, around half-a-dozen senior ministers were dropped and fresh faces inducted, sending a political message ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.
The churn was even more dramatic in July 2021 during Modi 2.0, when nearly a dozen ministers were shown the door, among them high-profile names such as Prakash Javadekar and Ravi Shankar Prasad.
The BJP’s reduced tally of 240 seats in the 2024 general election, however, punctured the Modi-Shah duopoly’s “400-plus (seats)” pitch and, for the first time in a decade, visibly dulled their aura of political invincibility. The setback also triggered rare public signs of unease within the wider Sangh Parivar.
The strain was reflected most sharply in RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s criticism of the “ahankar” (arrogance) of a “sevak”, which was widely interpreted as a reference to Modi, who frequently describes himself as “pradhan sevak” rather than Prime Minister.
Bhagwat appeared also to take an oblique swipe at the personality cult around Modi, saying “one should not claim to be a god”. A few months earlier, during the election campaign, Modi had claimed he had been “sent by God” and was not “biologically born”.
The cooling of ties between the RSS and the top BJP leadership soon translated into a prolonged tussle over the appointment of a new party president.
J.P. Nadda’s term had formally ended in January 2023 but the leadership transition remained frozen as the Sangh pushed for a strong organisational figure rather than someone handpicked by Modi and Shah.
The months of deadlock were broken only after the NDA’s emphatic victory in Bihar late last year.
By then, the Modi-Shah combine had already regained some political momentum through successive Assembly victories in Haryana, Maharashtra and Delhi. But the Bihar win was seen within the BJP as the decisive moment that restored their authority.
It was after the Bihar triumph that he duopoly is learnt to have secured RSS consent for Nabin’s appointment as BJP chief. He was projected as a young leader with an independent organisational identity rather than being just an extension of the top leadership.
Now, the BJP’s landslide victory in Bengal has altered the balance of power again. Party insiders describe it as a watershed moment not only for the BJP but for the entire Sangh Parivar, effectively ending speculation about friction at the top.
“After Bengal, even the RSS will find it difficult to push back against Modi-Shah’s decisions. The duo are back in complete control and the perception of drift or internal unease has been decisively erased,” a senior BJP leader said.