Hours after the senior BJP leader Manohar Lal Khattar and his entire cabinet stepped down, Nayab Singh Saini will be the new Chief Minister of Haryana, the party said.
An influential figure within the OBC, or Other Backward Classes, community, Nayab Saini is the BJP’s Lok Sabha MP from Kurukshetra and was appointed the party’s state chief in October last year.
He was selected after a meeting of the BJP’s legislative party, which was attended by Agriculture Minister Arjun Munda and National General Secretary Tarun Chugh.
The BJP’s observers were reportedly told MLAs and the state unit wanted a new hand at the helm, to revitalise the party before the April/May Lok Sabha election and an Assembly election later this year.
The change in leadership, analysts have pointed out, is also what the BJP tends to do now ahead of state elections – a swap at the top to ward off anti-incumbency. Similar measures were taken before the Gujarat and Uttarakhand elections, for example. In both cases the BJP scored big wins.
The party also changed its Chief Minister in Karnataka – replacing BS Yediyurappa with Basavaraj Bommai for the 2023 poll. That, however, backfired with the Congress recording a surprise win.
Saini’s selection also represents the BJP’s focus on caste and OBC equations in each state before the general election. The BJP made similar moves after the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh polls, replacing incumbents or high-profile choices with little-known OBC faces.
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