Senior Congress Leader Jitin Prasad Joins Bhartiya Janta Party
NEW DELHI / Former Union Minister and senior Congress leader Jitin Prasada on Wednesday joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Union Minister Piyush Goyal and MP Anil Baluni have inducted him into the Party in Delhi.
After joining the BJP, he said that PM Modi was standing for the interests of the nation and BJP was the only party in the country that was being run by the organization, not a family.
Jitin’s joining into the BJP is seen as a massive gain for the party ahead of the 2022 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh.
Prasada, a prominent Brahmin face in UP politics, had been at odds with the Congress leadership for a long. Prasada in July last year launched the ‘Brahmin Chetna Parishad’ to give a voice to the Brahmin community. He had served as a Union Minister of State in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA governments. He belongs to Shahjahanpur of UP and he represented Shahjahanpur and Dhaurahra constituencies of UP in the Lok Sabha.
Prasada’s induction was a response to heavy feedback from the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJP that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s reported close identification with the Rajput community was alienating Brahmins, who form at least 12% of the vote in the State.
It is also significant that the induction comes at a time when BJP and RSS leaders have been engaged in stocktaking exercises in Lucknow and the report submitted to party president J.P. Nadda on that exercise mentioned the resentment of Brahmin leaders in the party against CM Adityanath.
Prasada’s entry into the party may unsettle some equations in the BJP, not just in the Adityanath’s camp but also those Brahmin leaders including deputy CM Dinesh Sharma and others in the party who were jockeying for position as purveyors of the interests of the community.
He was among the ‘G23’ leaders who have demanded an overhaul of the Congress following the drubbing in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Prasad’s induction into BJP is considered to a severe jolt to the Congress after Jyotiraditya Scindia joined the saffron party and collapsed Kamal Nath-led Madhya Pradesh government in March last year. Jatin was also considered a close aid to former Congress president Rahul Gandhi. Jatin was studied in Doon school along with Scindia.
He is the son of senior Congress leader Jitendra Prasad. In 2001, he had started his career with IYC Indian Youth Congress as a general secretary. In 2004, he won his first Lok Sabha election from his hometown constituency of Shahjahanpur. In his first tenure, he was inducted as MoS for Steel and was one of the youngest ministers in the Cabinet. In 2009, he fought and won the election from Dhaurara.
In 2014, he contested unsuccessfully against BJP’s Rekha Verma. He was recently appointed as the general secretary of AICC for the party’s West Bengal unit.
