Making his first official address to the BJP cadre after taking over as the BJP president, Amit Shah on Saturday said that it was due to the Gujarat model that BJP was able to gain the trust of the people across India.

Shah said his appointment as the party chief shows the respect given to the common BJP worker, adding that he could not have achieved this in any other party.

Analysing the party’s unprecedented victory in the recent Lok Sabha elections, Shah said people have established prime minister Narendra Modi as the most credible national leader, who alone is capable of translating into reality the nation’s mounting aspirations for development.

He congratulated Team Modi for the success in the Lok Sabha elections and asked the ministers in Modi’s cabinet to keep focus on promises made in the election manifesto and work on fulfilling them.

He said the Lok Sabha mandate was so decisive in BJP’s favour that it reduced the Congress tally below the required mark to become a recognised opposition party in the lower House. “Our historic victory marks the beginning of the end of the Congress era,” he said.

Earlier, top BJP leaders officially ratified Amit Shah as the party president at the party’s national council meeting in New Delhi. Shah, 50, was unanimously appointed to the top party post at the BJP parliamentary board meeting on July 9.

Specifying that the party’s focus should be to keep up the momentum achieved in the general elections, Shah said, “Our foremost commitment should be to return BJP to power in the election-bound states of Maharashtra, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand. Besides, there are eight more states where we need to recapture power. We must form our governments whenever elections are held in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Arunanchal Pradesh and Meghalaya.

“Also, we will have to make special efforts to win elections and form our governments in states like Assam, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala and Tamil Nadu where we have polled significant percentage of votes. To realise this objective, we should make BJP’s effective presence felt in each and every village panchayat, zilla parishad, municipal corporations and other elected bodies.”

Appreciating the performance of the NDA government under Modi, Shah said many fresh policy initiatives on several fronts – including those in matters of external affairs, economic management, agriculture sector and infrastructure development – have been launched within the first 75 days.

He also thanked people for extending their support to the party through social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.

Read Amit Shah’s full speech here.