Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje. (Express Photo: Anil Sharma)
With the impasse over the appointment of a new chief to the BJP unit in Rajasthan continuing, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje had a meeting with party vice-president O P Mathur on Friday. According to sources, Raje has been asked by the party’s national leadership to accept their decision on the choice of the new party president. The post of the state unit president is lying vacant since April this year after Ashok Parnami, considered to be close to Raje, stepped down following the BJP’s defeat in the by-elections to two Lok Sabha and one Assembly seats.
Parnami was asked to quit after the poll debacle.
Mathur, believed to be close to both party president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is said to have been upset with Raje for long. The party leadership, sources said, wanted Raje to work in coordination with Mathur, one of the seniormost party leaders in the state. In a meeting on June 13 with Raje, Mathur, party general secretary Bhupender Yadav, Union ministers Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Arjun Meghwal and C R Choudhary, Shah asked the party leaders to rise above factional differences and work for BJP’s victory in the next state elections.
On Friday, Raje’s meeting with Mathur went on for almost three hours.
Sources said the leadership is likely to appoint Shekhawat as the new state unit president and wanted Raje to accept the decision. The RSS leaders as well as senior leaders in the party are believed to have advised Raje to avoid tussle with the national leadership in the election year. However, the chief minister has been pushing for her choice, arguing that it would strengthen the coordination between the party and the government.