The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday, August 17, appointed BS Yediyurappa and five other new faces to its parliamentary board. The party has dropped Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and has included BS Yediyurappa and Iqbal Singh Lalpura. Yediyurappa has been appointed to the board keeping in view the 2023 Assembly elections in Karnataka. Iqbal Lalpura will be the first Sikh to have a seat in the BJP parliamentary board as a person from a minority community.
Union Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, K Laxman, Sudha Yadav and Satyanarayan Jatiya are the other new members of the BJP's apex organisational body — an attempt by the party to make the parliamentary board more socially and regionally representative.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union ministers Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh and BJP president J P Nadda are among its members. Eleven members of the reconstituted Parliamentary Board are: Party president Nadda, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah and Sarbananda Sonowal, former Karnataka chief minister BS Yediyurappa, OBC Morcha national president K Laxman, Iqbal Singh Lalpura, Sudha Yadav, Satyanarayan Jatia and national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh.
The party also rejigged its Central Election Committee and included former Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, Union Minister Bhupender Yadav, Om Mathur and its women wing chief Vanathi Srinivasan. Former Union minister Shahnawaz Hussain and Jual Oram have been dropped from the CEC, whose members also include all parliamentary board members.
The omission of Gadkari and Chouhan marks their diminishing stock within the party which has tried to make its key organisational bodies more socially and regionally representative by bringing in members of different communities, including the first Sikh in Lalpura, currently the chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, in the board.
This is the first time the board has been rejigged under Nadda, who took over as the party president in 2020. The board had several vacancies caused by the death of Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj while Venkaiah Naidu and Thaawarchand Gehlot had to leave it after becoming Vice President and state governor respectively.
When Shah was the party president, veteran leaders L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi were eased out of the crucial party body in 2014 and made members of 'Margdarshak Mandal', as the party on Modi's watch worked to make the organisation and government more youthful.
Among the new board members, Sudha Yadav and Laxman are from the Other Backward Classes while former Union minister Jatia is from the Scheduled Castes. Sonowal is tribal.
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. Party sources said the exercise shows how the party "rewards" old workers and values their experience.
Yediyurappa, Jatia and Laxman have given their lives to the party, building it brick by brick from the start, they said.
"There is also an emphasis on diversity. Sonowal is from the Northeast, Laxman and Yediyurappa hail from the South. In Lalpura, there is a Sikh representing minorities," a leader said.
He described Sudha Yadav as a self-made political leader whose husband was martyred in Kargil.