Lucknow, December 13: The Uttar Pradesh Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is about to get a new state president. Union Minister of State for Finance and seven-time MP from Maharajganj, Pankaj Chaudhary, filed his nomination for the post of state president at the party headquarters in Lucknow on Saturday.
He submitted his nomination papers to party’s organisational election officer Dr Mahendra Nath Pandey and the BJP National General Secretary Vinod Tawde. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, both Deputy Chief Ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak, State President Bhupendra Singh Chaudhary, and several senior leaders were present.
Pankaj Chaudhary is the only candidate to file nomination for the post of state BJP chief, making party’s state chiefdom poll almost certain. The formal announcement of the new state president will be made on Sunday at the Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar Auditorium of the Lohia National Law University. Union Minister Piyush Goyal, the Central Election Officer for the election of the state president, has also arrived in Lucknow. He will complete the election process tomorrow and conduct the election of the state president.
State Cabinet Minister Swatantra Dev Singh stated that Pankaj Chaudhary has been nominated for the post of Uttar Pradesh BJP president. The new president will be formally announced during a grand ceremony on Sunday. The Bharatiya Janata Party is making elaborate preparations to welcome the new state president. Lucknow Metropolitan workers have been assigned the responsibility of welcoming the new president. Names of workers have been finalized for various arrangements.
Will the SP’s PDA plan be thwarted? If Pankaj Chaudhary becomes the UP BJP state president, the BJP leadership will be giving him this responsibility very carefully. The party leadership has already realized that the main opposition party, the Samajwadi Party (SP), was taking the PDA (Backward, Dalit, Minority) plan lightly, resulting in the BJP losing out on a full majority in the central government. The BJP is now preparing for the upcoming 2027 assembly elections and the 2029 Lok Sabha elections. While Pankaj Chaudhary, who hails from the Gorakhpur region, will strengthen the BJP in Purvanchal, it will also weaken the SP’s PDA plan. Purvanchal is the region where the BJP suffered the most losses in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Regarding the SP’s PDA, 32 of its current MPs belong to the PDA, and seven of them are from the Kurmi community. In such a scenario, Pankaj Chaudhary, who hails from the Kurmi community and enjoys strong influence across all sections of society in Purvanchal, could be successful in disrupting the SP’s PDA plan.
Seven-time Member of Parliament (MP) Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Pankaj Chaudhary has been elected seven times as a MP from the Maharajganj Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh. He currently serves as the Minister of State for Finance in the Central Government. He was born on November 20, 1964, in Gorakhpur.
Coming from the Kurmi community, Chaudhary’s family has a political background. His mother, Ujjwal Chaudhary, served as the Maharajganj District Panchayat President. Chaudhary began his political career in 1989 as a councilor in the Gorakhpur Municipal Corporation and also served as Deputy Mayor. Joining the BJP in 1990, he won the Lok Sabha elections from Maharajganj for the first time in 1991. He subsequently won in 1996, 1998, 2004, 2014, 2019, and 2024, although he faced defeat in 1999 and 2009. He is the Minister of State for Finance in the Central Government and has been active on various parliamentary committees.
Chaudhary, who has a strong hold on the Kurmi and OBC vote banks in Purvanchal, is considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.