BJP’s Rajya Sabha picks signal sharp political messaging ahead of 2026 battles

Former foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla, lawyer Ujjwal Nikam, historian Meenakshi Jain and senior Kerala BJP leader C Sadanandan Master were nominated by President Droupadi Murmu to the Rajya Sabha on Sunday (July 13). While the nominations have been made in accordance with powers vested in the President under Article 80 of the Constitution, the political messaging in choosing the four nominees is significant.

Article 80 empowers the President to nominate, understandably at the behest of the ruling party at the Centre, 12 individuals with “special knowledge or practical experience” in the fields of literature, science, art and social service to the Rajya Sabha. It would, however, be naive to suggest that these criteria alone and not the ruling BJP’s Machiavellian political calculations have propelled these four individuals to the Council of States.

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An unambiguous signal from the nominations is that the Centre continues to place a premium on confrontation over conciliation, be it in dealing with its political adversaries or larger social engagement with the country. Simultaneously, the nominations also indicate that Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to keep an Argus Eye on the BJP’s electoral concerns and his government’s engagement with the issue of counter-terrorism, especially in the aftermath of the unflattering press India received during and after its four-day armed conflict with Pakistan following Operation Sindoor.

Push for historical revisionism

Tapping Meenakshi Jain, a historian closely aligned with the RSS-BJP’s ongoing campaign of historical revisionism and negationism, comes at a time when the Sangh Parivar’s three-pronged crusade against India’s syncretic traditions, legacy of the Sultanate era and Mughal rulers and Islamic places of worship is at an all-time high.

Among the favourite historians of the Hindu right-wing ecosystem, Jain has been a vociferous champion of demonising Muslim rulers and has authored numerous books, papers and articles that propagate theories about destruction of ancient temples to build Islamic structures over them, gloss over excesses and failures of India’s Hindu kings or glorify regressive Hindu practices of the past.

Sources say it was these “credentials”, which sit well with the BJP's ideology that helped Jain become a government-nominated member to the Indian Council of Historical Research back in 2014 when Modi had first become the prime minister and then secure a Padma Shri in 2020.

Ideological alignment with RSS

Incidentally, Jain’s father, former Times of India Editor late Girilal Jain, too, was a vicious votary of reclaiming India for Hindus; a narrative that is hard to ignore in his posthumously released 1994 book The Hindu Phenomenon.

The foreword to The Hindu Phenomenon, written by Meenakshi Jain, is enough demonstration of her ideological alignment with the Sangh Parivar and its project of “Hindu self-renewal”. While hailing her father as one among the “minority of Indian intellectuals” who welcomed the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement, Jain writes in her foreword: “It was not an accident that the battle between aroused Indians and the Indian state had been joined on the question of the Ram Temple. For Ram was the exemplar par excellence for the Hindu public domain. In historic terms, therefore, the proposed temple was another step towards that goal. The proper English translation of Hindu Rashtra would be Hindu Polity and not Hindu Nation.”

That Jain’s nomination to the Rajya Sabha comes at a time when the culmination of the Sangh Parivar’s Ram Temple project in Ayodhya has spurred belligerent Hindutva campaigns for razing mosques and shrines across Varanasi, Mathura, Sambhal and other Indian cities in egregious disregard of the Places of Worship Act, all of which has also been publicly backed by several BJP MPs. Jain’s nomination has, of course, come from the President, but it perhaps also signals that the BJP is augmenting its ranks to justify bigoted campaigns with a dose of historical revisionism.

Bolstering BJP’s narrative on terror

If Jain helps the BJP’s Hindutva cause, Nikam brings in added ammunition for another key theme of the BJP, or rather, Narendra Modi, bombastic jingoism. As a lawyer, Nikam earned his spurs in Mumbai as a relentless crusader whom successive governments, regardless of party, including the Congress, relied on to prosecute ‘Islamic terrorists’ involved in major terror cases, from the 1993 Bombay blasts to the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

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It was during the trial of Ajmal Kasab that Nikam had come up with the claim that the lone surviving perpetrator of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack was being “treated to biryani” in prison. Though Nikam later admitted publicly to having “made up” that claim, the assertion was used by Modi for years, as it continues to be used by many others in the BJP, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah, to taunt the Congress for being soft on terror and terrorists.

The upcoming monsoon session of Parliament is expected to see the Opposition leading an aggressive charge against the Modi government for its failure to prevent the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack by Pakistani terrorists and questioning the Centre about its tall claims, made over the past 11 years, about “breaking the back” of terror in India.

By bringing Nikam to the Rajya Sabha, a year after he lost his debut electoral contest to Congress’s Varsha Gaikwad from the Mumbai North Central Lok Sabha seat, the BJP has secured a wily talking head familiar with handling terror cases not just during BJP rule but also under Congress regimes.

Bid to address foreign policy issues

The inclusion of former foreign secretary Shringla in the nominees takes care of another flank linked with counter-terrorism, that of India’s engagement on the issue with the world. Shringla may not be as high-profile or eloquent as his predecessor and current external affairs minister S Jaishankar but he brings with his nearly four decades of experience as a diplomat, who has discharged crucial diplomatic assignments in America and Bangladesh and is also well networked among the G20 nations that Modi has assiduously sought to win over.

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The Modi regime is still trying to undo the PR nightmare that India faced globally during and after the four-day conflict with Pakistan following Operation Sindoor when an impression gained ground that despite the prime minister’s campaigns about India emerging as both, a Vishwaguru (mentor to the world) and Vishwa Bandhu (friend to the world), the country could secure few allies in its information and diplomatic war against Pakistan. Shringla was among the diplomats that the government had also included in its multi-party delegations that visited various countries to present India’s case in the wake of Operation Sindoor.

Those close to the former foreign secretary say his nomination to the Rajya Sabha had been on the cards for a while. “Even during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, he was among the probable candidates the BJP was looking at to field from the Darjeeling seat (in Bengal) but things didn’t work out then. His views on foreign policy and even political issues are closely aligned with the prime minister’s, and he also shares a good rapport with (National Security Advisor) Ajit Doval,” a diplomat who has worked closely with Shringla in the past told The Federal.

Sources say Shringla’s elevation to the Rajya Sabha could also be to serve a wilier political end. “There is a feeling in a section of the Sangh and BJP that Jaishankar seems to be running a parallel PR machinery to prop himself up as an indispensable part of the Modi cabinet, while his work as Videsh Mantri, especially after Sindoor, has often left Modi and the government embarrassed. With Shringla, the PM may be trying to send Jaishankar a message that ‘you are not indispensable’,” a senior cabinet minister told The Federal. The minister also noted that “there is no constitutional bar on nominated Rajya Sabha members being included in the Union Council of Ministers, though this doesn’t necessarily mean that Shringla will get a ministerial berth”.

Eyeing electoral gains in Kerala

The last of the four nominees, C Sadanandan Master, may have come as something of a surprise to many in the BJP, including his colleagues from Kerala. However, considering that the southern state, in which the BJP has consistently been trying to make electoral inroads but with very limited success, goes to the polls early in 2026, the choice isn’t entirely unexpected.

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Sadanandan, called Master as he worked as a school teacher, also brings with him a personal tragedy that the BJP can marshal politically. Back in 1994, Sadanandan had allegedly been attacked by CPM members in his home district of Kannur, which has been notorious for violent political clashes between cadres of the Left and the RSS. Although his family was communist, Sadanandan had switched over to the Sangh, working with the RSS and the BJP’s student wing, the ABVP, in the 1980s.

The attack on him in 1994 came when he was working as the sahkaryavah of the RSS’s Kannur unit. The attackers, according to Sadanandan, “hacked both my legs below the knee and threw them away”. Despite the limitations posed by his prosthetic legs, Sadanandan has been an unwavering BJP campaigner in Kerala, and the RSS-BJP combine has tirelessly projected his image as that of a “living martyr”.

Only last week, the BJP had appointed him as one of the vice presidents of the party’s Kerala unit. His elevation to the Rajya Sabha also comes at a time when the saffron party is facing a factional feud between former Union ministers Rajeev Chandrasekhar and V Muraleedharan.