BJP Parliamentary Board meeting to discuss CMs for UP, Uttarakhand begins

NEW DELHI: BJP Parliamentary Board meeting is underway at party headquarters here to discuss the probable names for the post of Chief Minister in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where it has won comfortable majority in the assembly elections.

• Meeting of BJP Parliamentary broad begins
• The board will also work on the strategy for Goa and Manipur, where the Bharatiya Janata Party has propelled itself in the game of government formation, though it has failed to get majority.
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also attending the meeting.
• In addition, the board will also declare names of observers who will hold meetings with the elected members of assemblies in the respective states.

• With four former chief ministers -- Bhuvan Chandra Khanduri, Bhagat Singh Koshiyari, Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank and Vijay Bahuguna -- waiting im the wings, the choice of leader in Uttarakhand could be a tricky affair.
• BJP won a record 56 out of a total of 70 seats in Uttarakhand yesterday reducing ruling Congress to a meagre 11 seats.
• In UP,  for some, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh is also a probable candidate for the top post in the state. The names of state BJP chief Keshav Prasad Maurya, Union Minister Manoj Sinha and even Yogi Adityanath are doing the rounds.
• Rajnath Singh has been the Chief Minister for a little over one year between 2001 and 2002. The Thakur leader, however, may not be a favourite since he is not seen as "too cosily" by Narendra Modi-Amit Shah team.
• Maurya is from a Most Backward Caste and Bharatiya Janata Party's Lok Sabha MP from Phoolpur in Allahabad.
• Maurya led from the front in the 2017 assembly polls in the most populous and politically significant state in the country. He criss-crossed the state in the last one year and is credited to have brought the most backward castes to the BJP camp.
• BJP President Amit Shah, sources say, "designed the poll strategy in such a way that Maurya's naming as the state unit chief pepped up the MBC voters".