Amit Shah names senior ministers as election in-charge of poll-bound states

NEW DELHI: BJP chief Amit Shah appears to have begun preparations for the forthcoming Assembly elections as he held a series of meetings at the party headquarters on Thursday and appointed senior ministers as election in-charge for Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka.

Finance and defence minister Arun Jaitley will be election in-charge of Gujarat, the state he represents in the Rajya Sabha. That Shah is taking the Assembly polls in his home state seriously is obvious from the fact that he has appointed four union ministers to assist Jaitley.

Narendra Singh Tomar, Nirmala Sitharaman, Jitendra Singh and PP Chaudhary will be co-incharge. Bhupendra Yadav will also be involved in the preparations for the polls as he is general secretary in-charge of the state.

This will be the first Assembly poll in Gujarat since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah moved to the Centre. The recent Rajya Sabha election in which Congress leader Ahmed Patel scraped through has further strengthened BJP resolve to take the polls in the state seriously.

HRD minister Prakash Javadekar will be election in-charge of Karnataka while power minister Piyush Goyal will be co-incharge. Social justice minister Thawar Chand Gehlot will be BJP in-charge of Himachal Pradesh in the forthcoming election.

BJP is likely to hold its National Council meeting from September 23-25 in Delhi. The strategy for the polls, restructuring of the organisation and other decisions are likely to be taken in the run-up to the event.