India's governing party rebuilt its national office on Monday, and the part of it that Indian readers went to was one name.
The Bharatiya Janata Party announced a new set of office bearers under its president, Nitin Nabin. Smriti Irani returned as a national general secretary — her first place in the party's central structure since June 2024, when she was dropped from the union cabinet after losing her Lok Sabha seat in Amethi, in Uttar Pradesh, to the Congress candidate Kishori Lal Sharma. The commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, was made national treasurer.
The list is long and the changes in it are not all of one kind. Ram Madhav, a former general secretary, was named one of thirteen national vice-presidents, six of them women; the former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje is also among them. Twelve women are on the new team, which the Indian Express reports being read as an approach to women voters before next year's state elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat. Amit Malviya was dropped as head of the party's IT cell after eleven years in the job. Sandeep Pathak, who crossed from the Aam Aadmi Party to the BJP in April, is one of sixteen national secretaries. BL Santosh stays as general secretary for organisation.
Irani's position in Uttar Pradesh is what the coverage keeps returning to. She first contested Amethi in 2014 and lost. In 2019 she took the seat from Rahul Gandhi, who had held it since 2004, by 55,120 votes — 468,514 to 413,394. In 2024 she lost it back to Congress by more than 1.67 lakh. The Times of India notes that the state assembly election is expected in early 2027, and that in the 2024 general election the opposition INDIA bloc won 43 of Uttar Pradesh's 80 Lok Sabha seats against 33 for the BJP.
Why it is on the board
Today is the first day this board can see what India reads. Until this morning our Indian lenses were YouTube and search trends only — no reading list — and that is why the Indian column has been the thinnest on the board. We added two: the Times of India most-read list for the past twenty-four hours, and the Indian Express most-read page.
The reshuffle is what those lists show. Four separate items about it were on them at once — three on the Times of India list and one on the Indian Express — and the item that ranked highest was not the list of appointments but the piece about Irani alone.
확인: Times of India · Indian Express