The BJP on Sunday evening appointed BL Santhosh, an RSS man credited with building the party’s base in Karnataka, as its national general secretary (Organisation). Some party insiders in the state say the low-profile organiser could in time be projected as a successor to BS Yeddyurappa.

The appointment

The announcement came in a brief three-line note from party headquarters while public attention was on the World Cup and Wimbledon finals and the countdown to India’s second moon mission. Bommarabettu Laxmijanardhana Santhosh takes over from Ramlal, who held the organisational general secretary’s post for more than 13 years.

An engineering gold medallist, Santhosh gave up his job to join the RSS in the late eighties. The RSS lent him to the BJP as Karnataka organising secretary in 2006, around the time Ramlal became the party’s national organisational general secretary. A native of Udupi in coastal Karnataka, he first worked mainly in the Mysore and Shimoga regions. He steered the state party when Yeddyurappa left six years ago to start his own outfit. Since becoming joint organisational general secretary in 2014, he has looked after the Gorakhpur region during the 2017 UP Assembly elections and has worked in the northeast, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

How colleagues describe him

Party members describe a media-shy organiser who works largely from his room in the BJP office in Bengaluru’s Malleshwaram and prefers promising grassroots workers to leaders with caste backing. He concentrates on the party’s weak areas, keeping in touch with thousands of workers in districts such as Kolar and Gulbarga. Bengaluru MLA S Suresh Kumar called him a voracious reader with a sharp memory who knows functionaries at hobli and taluk level by first name. State general secretary CT Ravi credited this focus on weak spots with turning the BJP into a party with a presence across Karnataka, and said the 52-year-old “could even be a PM candidate in the future”. Santhosh is also credited with spotting new candidates such as Janardhan Swamy, Pratap Simha and Tejasvi Surya.

Implications for Yeddyurappa

The BJP was trying to come to power in Karnataka on the back of the defection of 16 MLAs, and has always presented Yeddyurappa as its chief ministerial face. But he is past 76, the age beyond which the BJP does not usually give its leaders positions of power, so any return as chief minister might be brief. A BJP MLA, speaking anonymously, said there was a feeling Santhosh could become chief minister a year or two from now. Relations between the two men are cool: months before the 2018 election, Yeddyurappa publicly blamed Santhosh for a rebellion led by KS Eshwarappa through the Sangolli Rayanna brigade, while insiders say Santhosh was only trying to curb caste-based party appointments.

What happened next

The Congress-JD(S) government led by HD Kumaraswamy, which had taken office on 23 May 2018 with Congress support, fell in July 2019, and BS Yeddyurappa returned as Chief Minister.

See also: BJP | Political leaders

Originally published on 16 July 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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