O P Choudhary. (Photo: Facebook)

RAIPUR: Ahead of the upcoming assembly polls, a 37-year-old 2005 batch IAS officer O P Choudhary has resigned from service and is all set to join the BJP which plans to field him to contest the election from his home district.

Choudhary, who is now district collector of Raipur, belongs to Other Backward Classes (OBC) Aghariya caste and indications are that he might be fielded from Kharasia assembly segment in Raigarh district.

BJP is yet to make a formal announcement about the young bureaucrat’s entry into electoral politics. However, political circles said the young bureaucrat’s entry into the party attains significance as the saffron party could project him as a youth leader from among the OBCs.

Choudhary’s initiatives during his stint as collector of Maoist affected Dantewada to set up an ‘education city’ for providing education to the children from Left Wing extremism (LWE) affected areas and victims of Maoist violence was well acclaimed. He is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration.

Choudhary is expected to formally join the BJP at a function soon in the presence of BJP president Amit Shah. The talk in political circles is that Choudhary could be fielded from Kharasia constituency which has been a traditional stronghold of the Congress. This seat is now being represented by Umesh Patel, son of former state Congress president Nandkumar Patel, who was among 27 people were killed in a deadly Maoist ambush that had eliminated frontline Congress leaders in Bastar in May 2013.

BJP has been scouting to find a suitable candidate to field to wrest the traditional Congress stronghold of Kharasia, from where the then chief minister of undivided Madhya Pradesh Arjun Singh had won a by-election, defeating Dilip Singh Judeo in a high-profile contest. Later Nandkumar Patel, a former home minister of undivided Madhya Pradesh and later in Chhattisgarh, continued to win the seat for Congress for long.

Opposition Congress reacted sharply to O P Choudhary resigning from IAS to join the BJP with state Congress president Bhupesh Baghel saying that “BJP and its government had always banked on bureaucrats instead of their party workers. BJP wants to win the elections with the help of bureaucrats”.

