BJP rejigs state in-charges; C T Ravi gets Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Goa

Ravi, who was recently appointed BJP General Secretary, will handle the party affairs in the poll-bound Tamil Nadu as well as politically crucial Maharashtra besides Goa

BJP president J P Nadda on Friday announced the list of in-charges and co-in-charges of state units as well as for the frontal organisations.

Senior BJP General Secretary Arun Singh will be the new party in-charge of Karnataka while former Karnataka Minister C T Ravi will handle three states, including the poll-bound Tamil Nadu and politically crucial Maharashtra.

In Karnataka, Singh will be replacing Murlidhar Rao, who will now handle Madhya Pradesh though he along with Ram Madhav was dropped as General Secretaries by Nadda recently. Madhav has not found a space in the list of in-charges.

BJP Telangana leader D K Aruna will be co-in-charge in Karnataka. Singh will also look after Rajasthan as well as the Other Backward Class wing of the party.

For 53-year-old Ravi, who was recently appointed General Secretary, it was a huge leg up as the party chief reposed faith in him and assigned him the poll-bound Tamil Nadu as well as Maharashtra. Besides, he will also look after party affairs in Goa as well as the Scheduled Caste Morcha.

Ravi had resigned from B S Yediyurappa government after he was appointed General Secretary.

Kailash Vijayvargiya will continue to be the in-charge of West Bengal, a crucial state for the BJP that will be going to polls with Bengal and Kerala next year. Arvind Menon, a Malayali who worked in Madhya Pradesh BJP for long, and party IT cell chief Amit Malaviya will assist the former as co-in-charges in the state.

In Kerala, former Tamil Nadu MP CP Radhakrishnan has been appointed as in-charge while Sunil Kumar will be co-in-charge. Radhakrishnan, a former MP, has a task cut out as there is a raging internal strife within the state unit over the appointment of K Surendran as state party head.

Baijayant Panda will be in-charge of Assam, which will also go to polls next year. He will also look after party affairs in Delhi.

Former Agriculture Minister Radhamohan Singh will be the in-charge of Uttar Pradesh where he will be assisted by Sunil Ojha, Satyakumar and Sanjeev Chaurasia.

General Secretary Bhupendra Yadav will continue as in-charge of Bihar, where the party had just pipped its ally JD(U) to be the single-largest bloc in the ruling coalition, and Gujarat in-charge. He will also handle the Kisan Morcha.

Pankaja Munde, who was at loggerheads with Devendra Fadnavis, will be co-incharge of Madhya Pradesh.

Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan, the only minister in the Modi government to be assigned a state, will continue as in-charge of Andhra Pradesh but his party colleague from Kerala P K Krishnadas, who heads a faction within the party against the former in the state, has been divested of his responsibilities in Telangana.

Party spokesperson Sambit has also been appointed as in-charge of Manipur BJP.