BJP gets new list of national office-bearers; focuses on next gen

There has been a major overhaul among national general secretaries with many significant names dropped and new faces given a chance. The list of eight general secretaries has five new faces with Bhupender Yadav, Arun Singh and Kailash Vijayvargiya being retained.

New Delhi: The much-awaited new team of the BJP's national office-bearers has been announced here by party president J P Nadda, who accommodated three ex-chief ministers as vice presidents of the saffron party.

Raman Singh, Vasundhara Raje Scindia and Raghubar Das are three former chief ministers among the 12 national vice presidents. Mukul Roy and Radha Mohan Singh figure in the list from poll-bound states of West Bengal and Bihar respectively.

There has been a major overhaul among national general secretaries with many significant names dropped and new faces are given a chance. The list of eight general secretaries has five new faces with Bhupender Yadav, Arun Singh and Kailash Vijayvargiya being retained.

However, Ram Madhav, P Muralidhar Rao, Saroj Pandey and Anil Jain have been replaced with new faces. Dushyant Kumar Gautam, D Purandareshwaei, C T Ravi, Tarun Chugh and Dilip Saikia are new choices of Nadda as general secretaries.

Piyush Goyal, who held the post of party's treasurer, has been replaced with Rajesh Agarwal.

Tom Vadakkan who moved to the BJP from Congress will be BJP's spokesman from Kerala.

Poonam Mahajan, who was president of the party's youth wing, has been replaced by MP Tejasvi Surya, a fiery speaker. Nadda has given a chance to many young Turks, with strong articulation skills, to prove their mettle.

The party has also expanded its list of spokesperson to 23, with MP Anil Baluni being elevated as the chief spokesperson and remaining its media head.

(with inputs from agencies)