BJP appoints Pralhad Joshi, Bhupender Yadav in-charge for Rajasthan, MP polls

PTI, Jul 7, 2023, 7:07 PM IST

New Delhi: The BJP on Friday appointed Union ministers Pralhad Joshi and Bhupender Yadav its in-charge for assembly polls in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh respectively, stepping up the party’s campaign for key state polls before the Lok Sabha contest in 2024.

Former Union minister Prakash Javadekar and another senior party leader Om Prakash Mathur was made poll in-charge for Telangana and Chhattisgarh respectively, a party statement said.

Former Gujarat deputy chief minister Nitin Patel and Haryana leader Kuldeep Bishnoi will be co-incharges for the Rajasthan polls, and Union minister Mansukh Mandaviya will be the co-incharge for Chhattisgarh.

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw will be the co-incharge for Madhya Pradesh while the party’s national general secretary Sunil Bansal has been given the same responsibility for Telangana, the statement said.

All the four states along with Mizoram are expected to go to the polls in October-November.

Soon after his appointment, Javadekar asserted that people’s mood in Telangana, where the Bharat Rashtra Samithi is in power for nearly 10 years since the state’s inception, is favouring BJP. ”We are going to the polls to win it,” he said.

The government headed by Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has failed people on all fronts, he claimed. People are very angry with it, he said, expressing confidence that the ”very energetic” team of the BJP’s organisation, including its newly-appointed state president G Kishan Reddy and his co-incharge Bansal and other office-bearers besides himself, will deliver the BJP a victory.

Bansal is a national general secretary in the party and is highly-regarded for his election acumen, more so as he has handling the organisation in Uttar Pradesh in a key role as the state emerged as a saffron fortress. Following its loss in the high-profile Karnataka polls to the Congress, the BJP has stepped up its efforts to pull off a good show in the upcoming elections before to face the national contest on a high next year.

Joshi is a veteran organisation man and was the party’s poll in-charge for the Uttarakhand assembly polls in 2022 where it humbled the Congress in what was projected as a difficult fight for the party. It, however, scored a facile victory to retain power.

The Karnataka leader was credited for his wise counsel in handling the pulls and pushes of local satraps during the Uttarakhand polls and was seen to have supported the bid to retain Pushkar Singh Dhami as the state’s chief minister despite his own loss in the elections.

Yadav has been involved as a key organisation leader in several state polls while Mathur, the most experienced leader of the lot, is also the BJP’s organisational in-charge for Chhattisgarh and will be navigating a familiar territory in this role.

The BJP’s main challenger in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan is the Congress and in Telangana the BRS is the party in power and a strong force. The Congress is also rallying its forces to regain its lost ground following its morale-boosting victory in the neighbouring Karnataka.

The BJP is in power in Madhya Pradesh and the Congress in the other two Hindi-speaking states.