The BJP leadership plans a fresh round of talks with the RSS to try and break the stalemate over the choice of the next party president, sources said.

The discussions are likely sometime next week, when the top leadership of the RSS, including its chief Mohan Bhagwat and general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale, will be in Delhi, they added.

Narendra Modi’s visit to the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on March 30 — his first during his 11 years as Prime Minister — failed to achieve a consensus on the next BJP president.

While Modi wants a party chief of his choice, the Sangh has been insisting on a “strong oganisational leader” and not a “rubber stamp” to head the party.

The BJP has embarked on a round of spadework before the fresh meeting with the Sangh.

Senior party leaders, including Modi, have been holding meetings since Tuesday to map out a generational overhaul of the organisation and pick a new set of candidates for party president.

Party old-timers have been harking back to 2009-10, when Bhagwat had forced the BJP to appoint, for the first time, a president from outside its Delhi circuit.

After taking over as RSS chief in 2009, Bhagwat had publicly declared that none
of the BJP’s then top four would become the next party president.

He overruled the senior BJP leadership — which included stalwarts like L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh — to have Nitin Gadkari, then virtually a nobody in Delhi, appointed party president in 2010. Gadkari is now the highway and transport minister.

“In 2010, the RSS insisted on a generational change after the BJP suffered two successive (general election) defeats and got Gadkari to head the party. This time, too, Bhagwat is pushing for a generational change,” a BJP old-timer said.

The BJP’s Delhi lobby, however, succeeded in denying Gadkari a second term as party chief in 2013. Gadkari was compelled to opt out of the race after corruption charges suddenly surfaced against him.

“The Sangh believes that the BJP organisation is once again in the grip of a powerful coterie, and wants to free the party of this coterie’s influence with an eye on the future,” the old-timer said.

He said that one of the reasons behind the Sangh’s suspicion about coterie rule is the removal of senior leaders Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Gadkari from the BJP’s top decision-making body, its parliamentary board, in 2022.

The upcoming discussions between the RSS and the BJP are also expected to focus on picking the party unit chiefs in key states.

The BJP has been unable to elect new party presidents in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Bengal, Gujarat, Odisha and Himachal Pradesh. Faction fights and the lack of clarity over the next national president are said to be reasons behind the delay.

The party constitution mandates that the process to elect the BJP president can be taken up only after the completion of organisational elections in at least 50 per cent of the states.

The national and state party presidents are appointed by consensus, without any contest.