Making large-scale changes in an organisational revamp ahead of the series of state elections leading up to the Lok Sabha polls, BJP president Rajnath Singh has thrown a challenge to the party’s parliamentary board secretary Arun Jaitley by giving him the task of reviving the party in Uttar Pradesh.

The new role will find Jaitley out of Gujarat which he represents in the Rajya Sabha. Though highly regarded within the party as an election strategist, he has also been kept out of all states that will go to the polls. The next elections in UP will be for the Lok Sabha nearly two years later.

Singh introduced a dozen new faces in the list of 35 ‘prabharis’, among them seniors like Yashwant Sinha (Karnataka), Prakash Javadekar (Andhra Pradesh) and newcomers like Orissa MP Dharmendra Pradhan (Chhattisgarh) and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s niece Karuna Shukla (Jharkhand). Party Vice-President Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi has been given a permanent role as head of the election management and coordination unit, while RSS man Prabhat Jha has been “attached to the president”. BJP general secretary Ravi Shankar Prasad Singh, who had been in charge of Uttarakhand, has been shifted to Tamil Nadu, presumably to exploit his good rapport with AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa.

Before the new list of ‘pradesh prabharis’ was announced, Jaitley had a meeting with the BJP chief, who informed him of the decision to put him in charge of Uttar Pradesh. At the meeting five days ago, he tried to persuade Singh to give him Gujarat instead, but the decision on his new role had already been taken. There is also speculation that Singh gave Jaitley the UP assignment since it is his own state, and he would be able to monitor Jaitley’s role more carefully.

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