(From left) Nitin Gadkari, Madandas Devi, Bal Apte and Rajnath Singh

New Delhi, Feb. 3: Before Nitin Gadkari can find his bearings, a senior leader from the RSS, Madandas Devi, and another from the BJP, Bal Apte, have started packing the party apparatus with their nominees.

Devi and Apte were contemporaries in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Sangh’s student front, and “share an agenda to promote former ABVP activists to important party posts”, said a former BJP official now in the Sangh.

The ongoing organisational elections apparently facilitated the Apte-Devi alliance. Apte, a vice-president, was tasked to oversee the elections started by BJP chief Gadkari’s predecessor, Rajnath Singh.

They apparently picked former ABVP leaders and workers to head the BJP’s state units in the garb of finalising the choice through “consensus” rather than elections. Although the party units in many big states have not held the elections yet, the trend in the relatively smaller ones — such as Karnataka, Goa, Kerala and Uttarakhand — indicates that the ABVP may be the RSS’s route to foster its political ambitions.

In bigger states like Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar, an effort is on to identify former ABVP candidates for top state slots. For instance, in Punjab, Kamal Sharma, a former ABVP secretary, has emerged a frontrunner. So, too, in Madhya Pradesh, where erstwhile ABVP worker Narendra Singh Tomar’s “successful” tenure is being cited to buttress the case for a successor from the student pool.

However, Apte insisted that his antecedents had no bearing on the selections. “It is incidental. Whoever is the rising star is naturally chosen and if he or she happens to be from the ABVP, well and good.”

Devi seems to have distanced himself from the exercise — officially the RSS is supposed to be “hands off” the BJP — but many recall his interventions in the affairs of the party and the government in the NDA era. He had arrogated to himself the role of a conduit between the RSS and the government or the BJP, steering them through several crises.

In the Sangh, however, his activism was viewed as “politicking”. Devi was part of an all-party delegation the Centre had sent to Srinagar when Amarnath pilgrims were attacked by militants in 2000. He was also seen to have sided with the government in the faceoffs then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

When the BJP lost power in 2004 and became embroiled in internal dissension, Devi was “advised” by the Sangh seniors to lie low. Now, however, some feel he is trying to turn active again. “It seems he can’t keep away from the BJP and he has found an ally in Apte,” a former ABVP member on the BJP’s margins said.

The ABVP has nurtured some of the BJP’s best-known leaders, such as Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi, Ananth Kumar, Sushil Modi and Dharmendra Pradhan. So while some believe the student organisation should continue as the BJP’s nursery — given the ABVP’s rapid growth and the need to raise a constituency of youths — there is some uneasiness at the way in which Apte and Devi are going about. “It looks like they are raising their own constituency of loyalists. Such an agenda must be thwarted,” a source said.