Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya on Thursday said the suspense over chief ministers in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan will end on Sunday.
When asked about how long will the suspense over new CMs in states where the BJP won the assembly elections will last, Vijayvargiya replied,”Ravivar ko khatm ho jaayega (It will come to an end on Sunday).”
Vijayvargiya’s remark comes at a time when hectic parleys are being held in Delhi and the three Hindi heartland states where the saffron party had won the elections.
The saffron party won Madhya Pradesh by clinching 163 out of 230 seats, dashing Congress’s hopes of staging a comeback after it had run the state for 15 months after the 2018 elections.
The party shrugged off any anti-incumbency despite having ruled the state for 18 of the last 20 years. The BJP’s welfare schemes like Ladli Behna and Kisan Samman Nidhi programmes are believed to have helped it win the voters’ trust.
There were immense speculations that Chouhan, who has been the CM for a long time, would get another term. But the BJP veteran in a video message said he was ‘never a CM contender’.
“Neither was I the CM contender earlier nor now. I am just a party worker and whatever post or duty the party will give I will fulfil that,” he said.
The other names doing rounds include Jyotiraditya Scindia, Narendra Singh Tomar, Prahlad Patel, VD Sharma and Kailash Vijayvargiya.
The desert state lived up to its tradition of not re-electing an incumbent government and voted then BJP to power. Like MP, Rajasthan is too gripped with the suspense as to who will helm the state for another five years.
The probable frontrunners for the top job include two-time CM Vasundhara Raje, Jaipur royal family member Diya Kumari, Rajyavardhan Rathore, Baba Balaknath, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat among others.
The BJP stunned everyone after it wrested Chhattisgarh from the Congress by winning 54 seats in the 90-member assembly. The state born in 2000 is too witnessing hectic parleys over the selection of the new chief minister.
Besides Raman Singh, the other names doing rounds include Renuka Singh, Arun Sao, OP Chaudhary among others.