The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday appointed its senior leaders as in-charges for the upcoming state assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. The party, which suffered heavy defeats in the Lok Sabha elections in several states, has appointed Union Minister Bhupender Yadav as its election in-charge for Maharashtra.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan will oversee the party’s election campaign in Haryana, while Agriculture Minister Shivraj Shig Chouhan has been appointed as Jharkhand’s election chief.
In Jammu and Kashmir, where the Supreme Court has directed elections to be held by September, the BJP has fielded Union Minister G Kishan Reddy.
The party has also appointed joint in-charges for these states — Ashwini Vaishnav in Maharashtra, Biplab Kumar Deb in Haryana and Himanta Biswa Sarma in Jharkhand.
Elections are due to be held in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana later this year.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP suffered major setbacks in Maharashtra and Haryana. While the Indian National Congress emerged as the largest party in Maharashtra by winning 13 of the 17 seats, the BJP could only win 9 of the 28 seats it contested. The MVA won 30 of the 48 seats in the state, while the NDA managed just 17.
While the BJP’s seat losses are significant, its Maharashtra state president Chandrashekhar Bawankule said the difference in vote share between the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) and the NDA was just 0.3%. He said people would vote for the BJP and its alliance in the state assembly elections as they know that giving the MVA power would stagnate welfare projects.
In Haryana too, the BJP could win only five of the 10 Lok Sabha seats. In 2019, the party had won all 10. The Indian National Congress is confident of wresting back the state from the BJP. “This is just the beginning, the real fight is yet to come. We should neither stop nor succumb but keep moving forward till our goal is achieved,” Indian National Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda said on Sunday. He asked party members to “expose the failures of the BJP governments” over the past decade.
