BJP keeps Sanjay Joshi’s chair warm

Former BJP general secretary (organisation) Sanjay Joshi may be out in the cold after the sleaze CD episode, but the party is keeping the chair warm for him.

Joshi’s room at BJP headquarter, 11 Ashok Road, has been kept vacant in the latest allotment plan, enforced under the stewardship of new president Rajnath Singh. Sources disclosed that Joshi would be rehabilitated in about two months after the Madhya Pradesh police clears his name in the sex CD scandal. Pending this exercise, Rajnath Singh is likely to divide organisational work among various office-bearers. Vice-president Bal Apte, whose name was at one stage mentioned as a possible successor to Joshi, is learnt to have excused himself for shouldering the burden of the work related to the entire organisation.

The new room-plan is an index of the swings in the fortunes of various party leaders. Apte has been moved to the room occupied by former president and vice-president Venkaiah Naidu.

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Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, who has been retained as a vice-president, but sans the twin-charge of the spokesman and the headquarters, has to move over to a smaller, non-descript room. His spacious office would be occupied by the new spokesman, Ravi Shankar Prasad, his colleague Prakash Javadekar and the media cell.

New general secretary Vinay Katiyar, a hard-core Hindutva protagonist, would sit in the room vacated by Rajnath Singh. Katiyar would be in an appropriate company having a former ‘‘pracharak’’, general secretary Om Mathur, for a neighbour.