Rajnath, Jaitley deputy leaders of BJP Parliamentary Party in lS, RS respectively
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the new leader of the reconstituted BJP Parliamentary Party in both Houses of Parliament. In a continuing overhaul of the party structure, Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley have been made the deputy leaders of the party in the lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha respectively.
The party has named Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu as the Government’s Chief Whip in Parliament, besides the Chief Whip of the Government and the party in both the Houses.
Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and lok Sabha MP from Bareilly Santosh Gangwar, and I&B Minister and Rajya Sabha member from Madhya Pradesh Prakash Javadekar will be the Government’s deputy Chief Whips in the lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha respectively.
There would be two Chief Whips for the party — one each for the lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. lok Sabha MP from Bikaner Arjun Ram Meghwal will be the party’s Chief Whip in the lower House while Rajya Sabha member from Punjab Avinash Rai Khanna will be the party Chief Whip in the Upper House.
BJP has also named Ganesh Singh, an MP from Madhya Pradesh, as party secretary in the lok Sabha and Bhupendra Yadav from Rajasthan in the Rajya Sabha. PC Mohan from Karnataka is the new treasurer of BJP Parliamentary Party.
These apart, the party has also named 13 whips in the lok Sabha and three in the Rajya Sabha.
The whips named by BJP in the lok Sabha are: Suresh Angadi (Karnataka), Sanjay Dhotre (Maharashtra), Sanjay
Jaiswal (Bihar), Sunil Singh (Jharkhand), Ratan lal Katariya (Haryana), Parvesh Verma (Delhi), Kirit Solanki (Gujarat), Rakesh Singh (Madhya Pradesh), Kamla Patle (Chhat-tisgarh), Om Birla (Rajasthan), Mahendra Pandey, Ramshankar Karhuriya and Pankaj Choudhary (all Uttar Pradesh).
The three party whips in the Rajya Sabha are Bimla Kashyap Sood (Himachal Pradesh), Mansukh Mandaviya (Gujarat) and Narayanlal Panchariya (Rajasthan).
In the previous 15th lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj (current External Affairs Minister) was the leader of Opposition and late Union Minister Gopinath Munde was deputy-leader of lok Sabha. likewise, Arun Jaitley (current Finance Minister) was leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha and Ravishankar Prasad (current law and Justice Minister) was deputy-leader of the House.
BJP Patriarch l K Advani was leader of Opposition in lok Sabha from May 22, 2004 to May 18, 2009. The now expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh was leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha from 2004 to 2009.
Congress-led UPA had Pranab Mukherjee as leader of the House until his elevation in July 2012 as President of India when Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde was made leader of the House. The then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was leader of the Upper House.
As no party has the required numbers (10 per cent of the total seats) in the newly-elected 16th lok Sabha, there is, yet, no leader of Opposition in the House though the Congress with 44 MPs is staking claim to the post.