India's Hindu nationalist opposition party was set on Friday to replace its elderly long-serving leader with a 57-year-old woman, relatively young by the country's political standards. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) parliamentary leader L.K. Advani, a former deputy prime minister, was to be shifted to a ceremonial position as the group makes changes after being trounced in elections this year.
Party spokesman Prakash Javadekar told Advani would be elected "supreme leader" of the parliamentary party, a position created for him, at a meeting expected late Friday. The BJP would then likely appoint Sushma Swaraj, 57, to take his role in the lower house. Advani, known as a Hindu nationalist hard-liner, "will be elevated and is not stepping down," he added.
Swaraj is the most prominent female face of the BJP and is currently deputy leader in the lower house. She held several cabinet positions in previous governments and also served briefly as the chief minister of Delhi.
The BJP has been wracked with infighting over who is to blame for its disastrous showing in national elections in May, when, combined with allies, it won just 159 seats in the 543-member parliament. Finger-pointing over the loss between the party's militant ideological wing, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps) and more centrist followers erupted into a very public spat played out in the media.
Commentators have suggested Advani's new post will enable him to leave the limelight gently while bringing in a fresher face to reinvigorate the party. Advani has been a dominant political figure for decades and one of the key players in the success of the BJP, which ruled briefly along with allies for the first time in 1996 and then held power from 1998 to 2004.
His role as head of a movement that led to the destruction of a northern Indian mosque in 1992 hardened his image as the hawkish face of the party, compared to former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, under whom he served. Party president Rajnath Singh, whose term will come to an end this year, will also pass the baton to Nitin Gadkari, the BJP chief in the western state of Maharashtra.
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