India / Varun Gandhi dropped from BJP's National Executive Committee

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party dropped Chaudhary Birendra Singh, Varun Gandhi, Maneka Gandhi, SS Ahluwalia and Subramanian Swamy from the 80-member national executive committee it announced on Thursday.

Both Varun Gandhi and Chaudhary have been critical of the government’s handling of the farm agitation. While Chaudhary, a former union minister, had joined in a protest in Rohtak district of Haryana last year; Gandhi has been tweeting about adopting a more humane approach to deal with the farmers’ agitation. On Thursday, he tweeted a video from the protest site in Lakhimpur Kheri, which shows a car running over a group of people who were protesting against the farm laws.

The BJP’s national executive committee includes party patriarchs LK Advani and MM Joshi apart from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union defence minister Rajnath Singh and Union home minister Amit Shah. The central decision making body of the party also includes 50 special invitees and 179 permanent invitees, including chief ministers, deputy chief ministers of BJP ruled states, leaders of the legislative assemblies and state presidents among others.

As per the party’s constitution, the committee lays down rules for carrying out functions of all units and organs of the party and frames rules for the maintenance of party funds which have to be audited and approved annually. The committee also has the mandate to allocate powers to all other units and organs, to frame rules, to create machinery for holding elections and for settlement of disputes.

The party’s constitution also requires the national executive and state executive to meet once every three months. Although owing to the Covid pandemic, the national executive has not met in the last two years.

Among the new inclusions in the 80-member list are Union ministers Jyotiraditya Scindia from Madhya Pradesh; S Jaishankar and Meenakshi Lekhi from Delhi; Anurag Thakur from Himachal Pradesh and Ashwani Vaishnaw from Odisha.

Actor turned politician Mithun Chakraborty and former railway minister Dinesh Trivedi who quit the TMC and joined the BJP ahead of the West Bengal election have also been included in the committee. Khushbu Sundar has been included in the list of special invitees from Tamil Nadu; she had quit the Congress to join the BJP.