Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje (Express Photo by Rohit Jain Paras/File)
The head of Bharatiya Janata Party’s OBC wing in Kota district has written to party president Amit Shah seeking that Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and state party chief Ashok Parnami be replaced ahead of the state assembly polls due this year.
The BJP lost two Lok Sabha seats and one Assembly seat in the recently held bypolls in Rajasthan, the results of which were declared on February 1.
Choudhary wrote to Shah the next day on his official letterhead, saying, “The people of the state are not happy with Chief Minister Vasundhra Raje’s style of functioning. The morale of party is waning due to her working style.”
Describing Parnami as a “slave” of Raje, Choudhary said Parnami is damaging the organisation and is losing his grip on the organisation.
The ground-level party workers like him were well aware that the bypoll results would not go in the saffron party’s favour, Choudhary added.
Claiming that Raje had fallen into the bureaucracy “trap (IAS, IPS, RAS, RPS)”, he said the CM was leading the party on to a path that headed nowhere but towards defeat.
There was anger against the Raje government among all sections of the society, including the farmers, Choudhary said, adding that the general opinion among the BJP workers was that the state leadership should immediately be changed to infuse energy into the organisation.
Kota is known as a BJP bastion. The saffron party had lost in only one of the 17 seats in the district in the 2013 state Assembly polls. When contacted, Choudhary admitted that he had written the letter to Shah. Maintaining that he had put forward the plight of the workers to the party’s national head, he said, “Each and every word in the letter is that of the party workers.”
Meanwhile, BJP MLA from Ramgarh in Alwar, Gyan Dev Ahuja, also questioned the government in the Assembly over bribes by police, accusing Alwar SP Rahul Prakash of corruption. He asked how many policemen or officials were caught by the Anti-Corruption Bureau.