In a major shake-up, the BJP on Wednesday dropped Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan from its Parliamentary Council, its apex organizing body, and brought in six new members, including Karnataka leader BS Yediyurappa and Iqbal Singh Lalpura. , the first representative of the Sikhs. The party also reshuffled 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 members of the CEC after their expulsion from the board.
All members of the Parliamentary Council, which includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Ministers Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh and BJP president JP Nadda, automatically become part of the CEC, which also has some other members. The other new board members are K Laxman, Sudha Yadav and Satyanarayan Jatiya, three old party stalwarts but considered political top brass. The omission of former BJP president Gadkari, 65, considered close to the RSS, and Chouhan, 63, marks their diminishing stake in the party, which has sought to make its core organizational bodies more socially and regionally representative by including members of various communities, including a former police officer and Punjab leader Lalpura, currently chairman of the National Commission for Minorities.
Former Union ministers Jual Oram and Shahnawaz Hussain were dropped from the CEC. Following these changes, the council now has a full strength of 11 members, while the CEC has 15 leaders. Rajasthan leader Om Mathur and BJP women’s wing chief Vanathi Srinivasan besides Fadnavis and Bhupender Yadav are the new entrants to the CEC. Srinivasan replaces his predecessor Vijaya Rahatkar as the ‘Mahila Morcha’ party chief as its ex-officio member. After Chouhan’s exit, there will be no chief minister on the board.
It was speculated that Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath might apply. Union Minister Piyush Goyal, who is also the Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha, Dharmendra Pradhan and Bhupender Yadav were also considered as contenders. However, Yadav is now in the CEC. Both Yediyurappa and Jatiya are over 75, the informal age limit in the party for holding important posts, as it has made every effort to lower the average age of its organizational leaders.
Yediyurappa’s inclusion underscores the party’s push to reward a Lingayat leader whose community is critical to its electoral prospects in the Karnataka assembly elections scheduled for next year. He was replaced as Chief Minister by Basavaraj Bommai in 2021. Bommai gathered to congratulate him after the announcement. Fadnavis’ induction into the CEC is seen as a nod to his importance after the party asked the former Maharashtra chief minister to become deputy chief minister in the Eknath Shinde-led government, a position he was initially reluctant to take up.
This is the first time the board has been reshuffled under Nadda, who took over as party president in 2020. The board had several vacancies due to the deaths of Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, while Venkaiah Naidu and Thaawarchand Gehlot had to leave after they became Vice President and Governor of the State, or When Shah was the party president, in 2014 veteran leaders L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi were released from the key party body and became members of the “Margdarshak Mandal” as the party on Modi’s watch worked to make the organization and government more youthful.
Among the new board members are Sudha Yadav and Laxman from Other Backward Classes, while former Union Minister Jatia is from the Scheduled Castes. Sonowal is tribal. Party sources said the exercise shows how the party is “rewarding” old workers and valuing their experience. Yediyurappa, Jatia and Laxman gave their lives to the party and built it brick by brick from scratch, they said. “The emphasis is also on diversity. Sonowal is from the northeast, Laxman and Yediyurappa are from the south. There is a Sikh representing the minorities in Lalpura,” said one of the leaders. He described Sudha Yadav as a political leader whose husband was martyred in Kargil.
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