Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, July 29: BJP President J P Nadda rejigged the list of the party’s central office-bearers on Saturday by adding Bandi Sanjay Kumar, the former chief of Telangana’s unit, as a national general secretary and a Pasmanda Muslim from Uttar Pradesh as one of the vice presidents.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has dropped C T Ravi, a politician from Karnataka, Dilip Saikia, an Assamese Lok Sabha MP, as its general secretaries, and Vinod Sonkar, Harish Dwivedi, both Lok Sabha MPs from UP and Sunil Deodhar as secretaries.
One of the two new names on the list of nine general secretaries, seven of whom are still in their positions, is Radha Mohan Agrawal, a Rajya Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh.
The new secretaries include Asha Lakra from Jharkhand, Rajya Sabha MPs from UP and Assam, Surendra Singh Nagar and Kamakhya Prasad Tasa respectively as well as Anil Antony, son of renowned Congressman A K Antony.
While Tasa has long been the representative of the tea tribes in the northeastern state, Nagar is a powerful Gurjar leader from western Uttar Pradesh.
On the list, there are 13 vice presidents, 9 general secretaries, including B L Santhosh as the organization’s in-charge and 13 secretaries.
Radha Mohan Singh, a former Union minister and a Lok Sabha MP from Bihar, has been removed from the position of party vice president.
Laxmikant Bajpai, a Rajya Sabha MP and former BJP president for Uttar Pradesh, is one of the two new vice presidents.
Now that Mansoor has been appointed as a vice president of the party, there are two Muslims in that position. Abdulla Kutty, a leader in Kerala, is another person on the list who belongs to a minority community.
The appointment of Mansoor, a former vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and current MLC for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, is perceived as a part of the party’s outreach to Pasmanda (backward) Muslims.
Some people believe that Ravi’s exclusion from the list of general secretaries—who, in contrast to vice presidents, who are mostly figureheads, drive the party’s policies and agenda on a national and state level is a result of the BJP’s significant loss in the most recent Karnataka assembly elections.
In the recently concluded Karnataka assembly polls, the four-term MLA narrowly lost his seat.
A party leader, however, stated that not much should be inferred from the dropping of a number of office holders because many of them, including Ravi, may run for office in the Lok Sabha elections in 2024 and will be concentrating on their likely constituencies.
Bandi Sanjay’s appointment as Telangana BJP president a few weeks after his dismissal from that position sends a message to the party’s cadres that the national leadership still values him and that his removal was a tactical decision made in light of the political circumstances in the southern state, according to sources.
The new list includes seasoned leaders like former chief ministers Raman Singh, Vasundhara Raje and Raghubar Das as vice presidents.
Additionally continuing in their roles as general secretaries are Arun Singh, Kailash Vijayvargiya, Dushyant Kumar Gautam, Tarun Chugh, Sunil Bansal and Vinod Tawde.
The BJP extended Nadda’s term as president in January of this year so that he could lead the party during the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
