india

Updated: Jul 17, 2019 00:26 IST

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday named Swatantra Dev Singh and Chandrakant Dada Patil as the presidents of its Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra units, respectively.

Samajwadi Party leader Neeraj Shekhar, who quit as the party’s Rajya Sabha member on Monday, also joined the BJP during the day. Son of former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, Neeraj Shekhar was purportedly upset with the SP president Akhilesh Yadav after he was denied ticket to contest the Lok Sabha election from Ballia, his family bastion.

Maharashtra public works minister Patil takes charge of the party ahead of the state assembly elections which are due in September-October this year.

Mangal Prabhat Lodha, BJP legislator from Malabar Hills, has been appointed to lead the party’s Mumbai unit.

Swatantra Dev Singh, an other backward classes (OBC) leader who hails from Mirzapur, is UP’s transport minister. He replaces Mahendra Nath Pandey, a Brahmin who was inducted into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s council of ministers in May this year as the skill development minister.

The decision comes a day after chief minister Yogi Adityanath met party chief Amit Shah and working president JP Nadda in Delhi.

UP and Maharashtra are among the states where the BJP had been looking for a new face after the state BJP chiefs — Danve Raosaheb Dadarao of Maharashtra and Mahendra Nath Pandey of UP — were inducted as union ministers after the Lok Sabha polls.

There is no word yet on the third state, Bihar, whose state president Nityanand Rai, considered a close confidant of the Union home minister Amit Shah, was appointed as a minister of state for home.

Rai, also an OBC leader, was given charge of the state in November 2016.

Although the BJP’s constitution allows two consecutive terms for its presidents, the party has decided to follow the “one-person-one-post” rule strictly, according to party leaders.

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance had stormed back to power by winning 352 of the 541 Lok Sabha seats in the April-May general elections.