India, Dec. 21 -- The selection of the Bharatiya Janata Party's new president, 45-year-old Nitin Nabin, was the outcome of a tightly structured analytical exercise spread over three months, in which the leadership decided at the outset that the party would be headed by a younger leader, signalling a calibrated generational shift within the organisation.

The process began with the preparation of a long list of around 100 young leaders drawn from across the party. This was followed by the constitution of a dedicated internal research team whose sole mandate was to identify, observe and systematically evaluate potential leaders against a clearly defined organisational framework. Age was not treated as a standalone criterion but as part of a...