For BJP, shake-up begins from the states

With just a handful of states left unallotted, the fate of several office-bearers, who have not been given any work yet, remains uncertain. They include vice-presidents Madan Lal Khurana, Sahib Singh Verma, Gopinath Munde and Ramdas Agrawal, general secretaries Pyarelal Khandelwal, Sangh Priya Gautam and Sunil Shastri and secretaries Ram Kripal Sinha and Mansukhbhai Vasava.

Though some office-bearers acted as spokespersons and looked after the party headquarters and election work, the bulk of them oversaw states. Verma’s resignation from the party post is yet to be accepted and Khurana is without work after having given up the charge of Chhattisgarh.

Mishra has been stripped of the charge of four states — West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand. Bal Apte, a noted lawyer, has been assigned Maharashtra and Goa.

The latter was scheduled to go to the polls next month. West Bengal and Assam have been assigned to Devadas Apte. General secretary Maya Singh has been given the charge of Bihar, secretary Sanjay Paswan of Orissa and former Union minister and vice-president Devendra Pradhan of Jharkhand.

The party, for some inexplicable reason, pulled secretary Padmanabh Acharya out of the North-Eastern states and allotted him Kerala and Lakshadweep. Acharya specialises in the North-Eastern affairs and was responsible for the expansion of the organisational network in the area. Satish, a former aide of Kushabhau Thakre, replaced Acharya.

Vice-president V. Ramarao has been given Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, Sathe, Madhya Pradesh and former Tamil Nadu party president K.N. Lakshmanan, Pondicharry. Chhattisgarh has been given to former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kailash Joshi.

Secretary Om Prakash Kohli, who held charge of six states, has been left with only Himachal and J-K. Krishnamurthy is yet to allot the states relinquished by him — Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh and Rajasthan — to someone else.