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The BJP on Tuesday sprung a surprise by naming Ujjain South MLA Mohan Yadav as the chief minister. The party also announced that Mohan will be assisted by two deputies – Jagdish Devda and Rajendra Shukla – in running the government.
While Devda belongs to the Scheduled Caste (SC), Shukla has emerged as the undisputed Brahmin face in the Vindhya Pradesh region.
Born in Rampura village of Neemuch district, Devda (66) was finance minister in the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government before being elevated to the post of deputy CM.
He is trained to be a lawyer and holds an MA and law degree from Vikram University, Ujjain. Incidentally, it was here that CM-designate Yadav forayed into politics as a student leader.
Like Yadav, Devda too began his political career as a student leader and was president of the student union at the Government College, Rampura and a member of the senate at Vikram University. According to BJP leaders, he quickly rose up the party ranks due to his strong organisational skills.
In 1979, Devda joined the BJP’s youth wing – the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) – and served as the mandal president, district general secretary, and district president in Mandsaur district. He was also the district convenor and state president of the SC cell of the BJYM.
The deputy CM-designate is a six-time MLA and was first elected to the Assembly in 1990. Following his re-election for the third time in 2003, he was elevated as minister of state and held the home, school education, and energy portfolios. After his 2008 victory, he was made minister and given key portfolios like finance, planning, transport, jails, and economics and statistics.
He has also served as the Speaker of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly from March 24, 2020 to July 2, 2020.
As finance minister, Devda presented the state’s first paperless budget with a focus on women’s welfare with an outlay of Rs 8,000 crore for the “game changing” Ladli Behna Yojana.
Devda is also known to be a keen sportsperson and was an athletics champion in his youth.
Yadav’s other deputy Rajendra Shukla is a five-time MLA from Rewa and has emerged a strong Brahmin face of the BJP in the Vindhya Pradesh region, once considered a stronghold of the Congress. The BJP won 25 of the 30 seats of the region in the recently-concluded polls.
Shukla (59), born in Rewa, has an engineering background. He began his political career in student politics and was elected president of the student union at the Government Engineering College in 1986.
He contested his first Assembly election in 1998 and lost to Independent candidate Pushpraj Singh by a narrow margin of just over 1,000 votes. Shukla has remained undefeated since.
Shukla’s rise in Madhya Pradesh politics was made challenging due to his power tussle with party colleague Abhay Mishra, who quit the BJP, contested as a Congress candidate and lost to Shukla.
Known to be soft-spoken, Shukla earned the goodwill of people due to the development works he undertook in Rewa over the past two decades. He is credited with bringing the airport and India’s largest solar project to the constituency while he was the energy minister in Chouhan’s Cabinet.
Shukla has handled a diverse range of portfolios including public health engineering, industry, and Energy among others.
