String of new BJP entrants puts focus on headhunter

The BJP picked Vinod Tawde in January to head a committee set up to screen applicants wanting to join the party in the run up to the Lok Sabha polls.

Headhunter, recruiter, induction and orientation specialist, are perhaps not the roles one would associate with a national general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party, but they are ones Vinod Tawde, 61, has played with aplomb.

In the past month, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has rolled out the red carpet for a bevy of new entrants, including some who have for long been associated with its opponents . A sitting lawmaker from Aam Admi Party, Sushil Kumar Rinku, a former minister in the Congress government, Preneet Kaur, Biju Janta Dal lawmakers Bhartruhari Mahtab and Siddhant Mahapatra are among them. And at nearly all of these inductions, running into double digits, there has been one constant face from the BJP, that of 61-year-old Tawde.

The party picked Tawde in January to head a committee set up to screen applicants wanting to join the party in the run up to the upcoming Lok Sabha polls. His role, party leaders said, has not only been that of a gatekeeper, but also of a headhunter, reaching out to potential recruits and of a HR manager welcoming new hires.

His affability, sharp political sense and persuasive skills came in handy as the party set out to scout and court leaders who would make it easier to chase the seemingly impossible goal of winning 370 out of 543 Lok Sabha seats.

HT spoke with three new recruits who explained why the former Maharashtra minister’s personality was so crucial to this goal.

“I’d never met Vinod Tawde ji before I joined… He didn’t even know me, but I’ll always remember that at the press conference, he told the media that when he’d hear my statements in the Congress, he’d have to think about who to choose to counter me,” said former Congress spokesperson, Gourav Vallabh, who joined the BJP last week. Vallabh credited Tawde’s friendly demeanour for helping anyone “feeling nervous or uncomfortable”, feel right at home.

The induction of new leaders is a long-drawn process, carried out in secrecy and away from the media’s glare. The process is usually not revealed even after the inductions are carried out, but the photo ops are designed to be a psychological blow aimed at the opposition camp.

A dyed-in-the-wool BJP worker, Tawde does not give out a sliver of a clue on his role, or how he handholds leaders switching sides. A state leader who joined recently, recalled how Tawde patiently walked him through the process. “My joining got the nod from the top bosses, but Tawde ji called me the night before and just made me feel comfortable. The next morning too, he just called me again. It meant a lot to me,” he said on condition of anonymity.

Tawde’s stint as national general secretary since 2021 is perceived as a resurrection of the BJP’s Maratha face after his critics wrote him off. Not being repeated as the party’s candidate from Borivali in the 2019 assembly polls was read as a snub to the leader who cut his teeth in politics as a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student’s wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He won the seat in 2014, his maiden election.

“He was the national secretary of the ABVP between 1993-94; once his term as a full timer got over, Pramod Mahajan, who had spotted his talent, and organisational abilities sought his parents’ permission to bring him into the BJP,” said a party leader who from Maharashtra’s who has watched Tawde’s rise in the state and the organisation.

While senior RSS leader Madan Das Devi taught him about the indispensability of building a rapport with party workers in every distric, Mahajan’s masterclass in realpolitik saw Tawde rise to the post of party general secretary in 1995, within a year of joining the BJP. In 1999 he became the youngest president of the party’s Mumbai Region.

“Although he’s from the Konkan region, he grew up in Mumbai and has a strong network of ABVP supporters. Mahajan and the central leaders groomed him to be BJP’s Maratha face; this was also when the BJP was thought to lack leaders from the community,” said the leader quoted above, who asked not to be named.

His streetfighter spirit, leadership skills and political acumen saw him help the BJP  improve its performance in the 2002 corporation polls. “For the first time the BJP won 36 of 227 seats. Earlier we fought as an ally of the Shiva Sena, but our seats were limited to 20-25. He studied the wards, assessed our strength and weakness , convinced Bala Saheb Thackeray to allow us to contest a seat that was in their quota, and persuaded a Janata Dal candidate to switch sides,” said a second leader from Maharashtra, who has also worked closely with Tawde in the state.

This leader said it is Tawde’s work with the then president, Nitin Gadkari and Ashish Shelhar that set the stage for the party’s expansion in the state.

“His organisational skills are exemplary…he created a flutter when he got the late film designer Nitin Desai to design a blooming lotus stage for the then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s rally in Shivaji Park in 2003. The rally itself was massive and gave him a chance to work closely with Modi ji.”

Tawde’s skills at negotiating with allies and opponents and his keen understanding of ground issues has helped him overcome setbacks such as intra-party feuds with senior leaders. It also helped him get a toehold in national politics allowing a chance to work closely with Modi and former president and union minister Amit Shah.

“His fall out with the late Gopinath Munde (BJP’s OBC face and former union minister) was not a secret, nor is the discomfort between him and (deputy CM) Devdendra Fadnavis. Yet, even when he faced obstacles from within the party, he managed to help the party win …he is tenacious,” said the second Maharashtra leader.

The tenacity saw him through another low phase post the 2019 setback when the party did not give him the ticket to contest the assembly polls to defend the seat he won in 2014 (he served as education and sports minister in the Fadnavis government). For two years, till he was appointed as the national secretary in 2020 and the general secretary shortly after in 2021, Tawde went back to doing what he was taught by Devi. He toured extensively, reading and reacquainting himself with the issues on the ground.

His stint as minister was not without controversies. He was accused of graft and irregularities, but his party colleagues dismiss it as political vendetta. “Why did the opposition not file any complaints if they thought the complaints were serious…” the second leader said.

As part of the national team, his role is more than just a head-hunter. He is in charge of Bihar, a state with the most complex matrix of caste and overseen polls in Haryana. A self-confessed foodie, he had the difficult task of overseeing the leadership transition in Rajasthan after the party defeated Congress in 2023. A lingering image of the change in Rajasthan is of defence minister Rajanth Singh slipping a piece of paper to former CM Vasundhara Raje, who then announced the name of the new CM. What was seen as a paper with the name of the CM written on it, was in fact three Hindi words dictated by Tawde to describe the new CM, Bhajanlal Sharma. The words “Samarpit, Karmath and Mehnati” (dedicated, hardworking and diligent) are perhaps a fitting description of the man himself.

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