NEW DELHI, Aug 17:
In a major shake-up, the BJP today dropped Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan from its Parliamentary Board, its apex organisational body, and brought in six new members, including Karnataka leader B S Yediyurappa and Iqbal Singh Lalpura, first Sikh representative.
The party also rejigged its Central Election Committee (CEC) and named Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Union Minister Bhupender Yadav among its new members. Gadkari and Chouhan ceased to be CEC members after their ouster from the board.
All Parliamentary board members, which include Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Ministers Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh and BJP president J P Nadda, automatically become part of the CEC, which has some additional members as well.
The other new board members are K Laxman, Sudha Yadav and Satyanarayan Jatiya, three old party faithfuls but considered political lightweights.
The omission of former BJP president Gadkari (65), considered close to the RSS, and Chouhan (63) marks their diminishing stock within the party which has tried to make its key organisational bodies more socially and regionally representative by inducting members of different communities, including former cop and Punjab leader Lalpura, currently the chairman of the National Commission for Minorities.
Former Union Ministers Jual Oram and Shahnawaz Hussain have been dropped from the CEC. After these changes, the board now has the full strength of 11 members while the CEC has 15 leaders.
The new entrants to the CEC are Rajasthan leader Om Mathur and BJP women wing chief Vanathi Srinivasan besides Fadnavis and Bhupender Yadav. Srinivasan replaces her predecessor Vijaya Rahatkar as the party’s ‘Mahila Morcha’ chief as its an ex-officio member.
With Chouhan gone, there will be no Chief Minister on the board.
There was speculation that Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath may make an entry. Union Minister Piyush Goyal, who is also the Leader of the House in Rajya Sabha, Dharmendra Pradhan and Bhupender Yadav were also seen as contenders. Yadav, though, is in the CEC now.
Both Yediyurappa and Jatiya are over 75 years of age, an informal age bar within the party for holding important posts as it has gone all out to reduce the average age of its organisational leaders.
Yediyurappa’s inclusion highlights the party’s efforts to reward the Lingayat leader whose community is critical to its poll prospects in the Karnataka assembly election slated for the next year. He was replaced by Basavaraj Bommai as chief minister in 2021. Bommai met to congratulate him after the announcement. (PTI)
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