BHOPAL: The recent 66-163 seats drubbing in the assembly polls, has finally ended the five and half years old era of Kamal Nath, as he was replaced by Jitu Patwari as the state Congress president in Madhya Pradesh.
Two days after the state party and its newly elected MLAs left it to the party high command to decide the legislature party leader in MP, the grand old party’s national president made three key appointments to rejuvenate the state party with young leadership.
The national president appointed on Saturday evening, OBC leader and ex-minister Jitu Patwari as the new state party chief, tribal leader and former minister Umang Singhar as the legislature party leader (leader of the opposition) and young Brahmin MLA Hemant Katare (the son of former LoP Late Satyadev Katare) as deputy leader of the legislature party in the central Indian state.
With this, the main opposition party seems to have responded to the ruling BJP’s OBC-Dalit-Brahmin social engineering (seen in the choice of the CM and two deputy CMs) formula through the OBC-tribal-Brahmin social engineering move.
The Saturday evening appointments also signalled the party’s keenness to put forward a totally young leadership to take on the BJP in the state, with just around four months to go for the next Lok Sabha polls.
Among the three new appointees, while Singhar and Katare had won the assembly polls (Katare did the giant-killing act by defeating the state’s cooperatives minister Arvind Singh Bhadoria), the new state party chief Jitu Patwari had lost from Rau seat of Indore to BJP veteran Madhu Verma by 35,500-plus votes.
While the new state Congress president Jitu Patwari and LoP Umang Singhar (Singhar is the nephew of former deputy CM Late Jamuna Devi) hail from the 66 assembly seats-strong Malwa-Nimar region, which was swept by the BJP with 47 seats, the new deputy leader Hemant Katare hails from 34-seats strong Gwalior-Chambal region where the Congress could win 16 seats against BJP’s 18.
Singhar, while the forest minister in the 15-month-old Kamal Nath government, had made major allegations of corruption against ex-CM and MP Digvijaya Singh in July 2019. He, however, had recently regretted making those remarks.
Importantly, while the state Congress chief Kamal Nath had reportedly offered to the national party leadership to quit as state Congress chief after the assembly polls debacle, the former Leader of Opposition and seventh-time MLA Dr Govind Singh had suffered a shock defeat from his pocket-borough Lahar.