Meet Vishnu Deo Sai, the newly elected chief minister of Chhattisgarh

In the Chhattisgarh Assembly elections 2023, Sai won the polls from the Kunkuri Assembly seat in Jashpur district

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appointed Vishnu Deo Sai, a party veteran and former Union Minister, as the next chief minister of Chhattisgarh.

Sai, the fourth chief minister of the state, is the first tribal leader to hold the post. He is also the first chief minister of Chhattisgarh to hail from a region beyond the Other Backward Class-dominated central plains in Chhattisgarh's 23-year-old history.

He was the Union Minister of State for Steel in the first Narendra Modi government in 2014. He was a member of the 16th Lok Sabha, representing the Kunkuri constituency of Chhattisgarh.

Early life and family

Sai was born on February 21, 1964, in Bagia village of Jashpur district in undivided Madhya Pradesh. His father, Ram Prasad Sai, was a farmer. He completed class 11 from the Loyola Higher Secondary School at Kunkuri, Jashpur, affiliated with the Madhya Pradesh Board of Secondary Education. In 1991, he married Kaushalya Devi, a social worker. They have three children, a son, Toshendra Dev Sai, and two daughters, Smriti Sai and Nivriti Sai Kanwar.

His grandfather, the late Budhnath Sai, was a nominated MLA from 1947 to 1952. His uncle, the late Narhari Prasad Sai, was a member of the Jan Sangh (BJP's predecessor) and served as a two-term MLA (1962-67 and 1972-77) and was elected as an MP (1977-79) and also served as a Minister of State in the Janata Party government.

Political career

In the Chhattisgarh Assembly elections 2023, Sai won the polls from the Kunkuri Assembly seat in the Jashpur district. He defeated the sitting Congress MLA, Udit Minj, by a margin of over 25,000 votes.

The 59-year-old leader began his political career in 1989 as the panch of the Bagiya Gram Panchayat. In 1990, he contested and won elections for the first time from the Tapkara Assembly constituency and became an MLA of the undivided Madhya Pradesh.

Between 1999 and 2014, Deo won four consecutive Lok Sabha elections from the Raigarh constituency in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014.

From 2000 to 2004, he was a member of the consultative committee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare. In 2004, Sai was re-elected to the 14th Lok Sabha and was a member of the Committee on Information Technology.

In 2009, he was again re-elected to the 15th Lok Sabha for his third consecutive term, and on August 31, the same year, he was elected as a member of the Committee on Commerce.

In 2014, he was re-elected to the 16th Lok Sabha and appointed the central Minister of State for Steel in the Narendra Modi-led central government. On November 9, the same year, he was made the Union Minister of State for Mines. However, he was not given a ticket in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections but was fielded in the Assembly elections.

Sai also holds significant experience working within the BJP. Sai has been a member of the BJP National Working Committee. The party entrusted him with the responsibility of the state president for Chhattisgarh twice in 2006 and from 2020 to 2022. The Chhattisgarh chief minister also has close links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an Indian nationalist movement and the ideological fountainhead of the BJP.