AMN / NEW DELHI
BJP president J.P. Nadda on Saturday announced his new team of office-bearers which combined big inclusions like the appointment of first-term MP Tejasvi Surya as chief of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) to the exclusion of general secretaries like Ram Madhav, P. Muralidhar Rao, Saroj Pande and Anil Jain.
The list had been anticipated since Mr. Nadda took over as party chief in January this year, and is now being seen in conjunction with a possible Cabinet expansion in the next few weeks.
The biggest changes were seen in the most significant group of office-bearers — general secretaries. Four general secretaries from former president and current Home Minister Amit Shah’s team handling important States were dropped. They are Ram Madhav who was in charge of Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast, P. Muralidhar Rao who handled the southern States and Rajasthan, Saroj Pande who handled Maharashtra and Anil Jain who handled Haryana among other States. Senior BJP sources say a couple of them may find space in the Cabinet expansion.
If the exclusions were interesting, the inclusions were interesting too. Dilip Saikia, all of 47 years and a first-term MP from Mangaldoi in Assam, was made general secretary, a big promotion for him, as was C.T. Ravi, MLA from Karnataka. Former Union Minister in the Manmohan Singh government, D. Purandeswari from Andhra Pradesh, made a comeback into the limelight as general secretary. With D. Aruna as vice-president and K. Laxman as OBC Morcha chief, both from Telangana, the two States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana had been given decent prominence in the team.