NEW DELHI, Dec 2: The BJP has assigned new roles to several turncoats who recently deserted the Congress to join the ruling party.
The BJP on Friday appointed the former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh and the former Punjab unit Congress president Sunil Jakhar as members of the national executive along with its former Uttar Pradesh unit chief Swatantra Dev Singh.
The former Congress national spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill will now be the BJP’s national spokesperson, the BJP statement said. Madan Kaushik, Vishnu Deo Sai, its former presidents of Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh respectively, Rana Gurmit Singh Sodhi, also a Congress deserter, Manoranjan Kalia and Amanjot Kaur Ramoowalia, all three from Punjab, have been made special invitees to the national executive, it added.
Shergill has been rewarded just three months after walking out of the Congress with scathing remarks against the Gandhis. In his acrimonious exit from the Congress, Jaiveer Shergill had slammed the Gandhis, saying the “vision of the party’s decision-makers is no longer in sync” with the aspirations of the youth and that sycophancy was “eating the Congress like ‘termites.”
All three Gandhis had denied him a meeting for over a year, he told reporters, adding that he had “severed all ties” with the party. The 39-year-old lawyer was among the youngest and most prominent spokespersons of the Congress. His resignation was the third in August after two veterans, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma, quit party posts in their home states.
Amarinder Singh had resigned from the Congress in November last year and floated a new party ahead of this year’s Punjab elections, before eventually merging it with the BJP earlier this year. Sunil Jakhar quit the party in May about a year after he was removed from the president’s post in preference to the former cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu who also had running feud with Amarinder Singh causing his removal as the chief minister.
The Congress has lost several leaders while struggling with election defeats and an organisational drift over the past few years. An exodus started in 2020 with the exit of Jyotiraditya Scindia, who is now a Union Minister, and UP minister Jitin Prasada. This year, former Union Ministers Kapil Sibal, Ashwani Kumar and RPN Singh quit the party.
(Manas Dasgupta)
