Eye on Bihar-UP, BJP creates separate wing for OBCs

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah today created a new OBC or Other Backward Caste wing to be headed by SP Singh Baghel. The move is part of BJP's preparations for the Bihar polls later this year and elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly in 2017. Baghel, a three time Samajwadi Party (SP) Member of Parliament, had crossed over to the BJP before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections but lost the Firozabad seat to SP's Akshay Yadav.

Apart from this Shah appointed five co-incharges to help UP incharge Om Mathur. The co-incharges are Virendra Khatik, Rameshwar Chaurasiya, Ramesh Bidhuri, Satyendra Kushwaha and Sunil Ojha.

In other changes, Shah replaced party’s Yuva Morcha, or youth wing, head Anurag Thakur with P. Muralidhar Rao. Thakur, son of former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal and an MP from Hamirpur, was elected the secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) in March. Among other changes, Madhya Pradesh minister Kailash Vijayvargiya replaced Siddharth Nath Singh as the West Bengal inchargei. The BJP had performed poorly in the recent civic polls in Bengal, which is due for assembly elections by mid-2016.

Singh had been wished to be relieved of his Bengal duties after the recent rapprochement between the ruling Trinamool Congress and BJP in the state. Shyam Jaju replaced Prabhat Jha as the incharge of Delhi. The BJP had suffered a humiliating defeat in Delhi assembly polls in February. Jha remains incharge of Chandigarh and Punjab. D Purandeshwari, daughter of former Andhra Pradesh CM NT Rama Rao, was appointed the head of the BJP women’s wing, Dushyant Singh Gautam was dropped as the chief of the Scheduled Caste (SC) wing.