Nayab Singh Saini, an OBC member and Lok Sabha MP from Kurukshetra in Haryana, was named the new state unit president on October 27, 2023. He took over from Om Prakash Dhankar as the leader of the party ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections.
After Manohar Lal Khattar resign as chief minister of Haryana, Nayab Singh Saini, an MP for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from the Kurukshetra district, took over as the new leader.
As the state party head since October, Saini, who used to be close to former CM Khattar, is said to have helped the BJP strengthen its position in the state among the OBC group.
Some Point look at the new Chief Minister of Haryana's Political Career :
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha Elections, on October 27, 2023, Nayab Singh Saini, an OBC member and Lok Sabha MP from Kurukshetra in Haryana, was named the new state unit head, taking over
from Om Prakash Dhankar.
It is said that Saini’s appointment has made the BJP more powerful in the state’s OBC group. The move came at a very important time because the Jats, who make up the state’s largest group of people, were split down the middle between the Congress, the Jannayak Janta Party, and the Indian National Lok Dal.
The party said Tuesday afternoon that Nayab Singh Saini will be the new Chief Minister of Haryana. This comes just hours after Manohar Lal Khattar, a top BJP leader, and the whole cabinet, including three members of Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala’s JJP, quit.
The governor, Bandaru Dattatreya, met with Mr. Saini, who is 54 years old, to make his case for running the government
The BJP’s Lok Sabha MP from Kurukshetra, Nayab Saini, is a well-known member of the OBC (Other Backward Classes) group and was named the party’s state boss in October 2018. He also has a lot of trust in Mr. Khattar, whose second term ends this year.
He was chosen after a meeting of the BJP’s parliamentary party, which was joined by National General Secretary Tarun Chugh and Agriculture Minister Arjun Munda.
MLAs and the state unit of the BJP were said to want a new leader to bring the party back to life before the April/May Lok Sabha election and an Assembly election later this year.
Some experts say that this kind of leadership change is also something that the BJP does before state elections to protect itself from people who want to bring down the current government. Before the polls in Gujarat and Uttarakhand, for example, similar steps were taken. BJP won both times by large amounts.
For the 2023 election, the party also renamed Karnataka’s Chief Minister from BS Yediyurappa to Basavaraj Bommai. However, that didn’t work out as planned, and the Congress won in an upset.
Mr. Saini’s choice also shows that the BJP is paying attention to how race and OBC affect things in each state before the general election. After the elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh, the BJP did similar things, changing leaders or well-known candidates with OBC names that not many people knew about.
The new Chief Minister is from the Saini caste, which makes up about 8% of the population. There are large groups of people from this caste in the Kurukshetra, Yamunanagar, Ambala, Hisar, and Rewari areas.
After failed Lok Sabha seat-sharing talks, the ruling BJP-JJP partnership broke up over the weekend. The JJP, led by former Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala, wanted two of the state’s 10 seats, but the BJP would only give up one.
The JJP has now said it will run for all 10 seats by itself. On Wednesday, the party is planning a gathering in Hisar district where Mr. Chautala is likely to talk about the details of its campaign.
The BJP didn’t want to give up the second spot (they won all 10 seats in 2019) and didn’t want to fire Mr. Chautala because they thought that would upset farmers and the Jat group, which makes up about 20% of the population. Instead, they chose to dissolve the government.
Sources say that the party also wants to get as many non-Jat votes as possible in the state. They hope that cutting ties with the JJP will make this point clear. It is said that the BJP thinks that Mr. Chautala running on his own will split the Jat votes it doesn’t get between the JJP and the Congress.
Even though Haryana only has 10 Lok Sabha seats, it is a Hindi-speaking state and a key target for the BJP. It’s even more important now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party has set a goal of 370 Lok Sabha seats for itself and 400 seats with National Democratic Alliance members.
There were also rumors, which may now turn out to be true, that Mr. Khattar could now run for Lok Sabha for the first time. The spot in Kurukshetra that is now open could be open to him.