THE JHARKHAND STORY DESK
Jaipur, Nov 11: The Congress party in the state faced a double blow as former minister Ram Gopal Bairwa, former MLA Ashok Tanwar, and numerous other leaders joined the Bharatiya Janata Party with just two weeks to go before the Rajasthan Assembly elections.
At the party office in Jaipur, the new leaders were inducted in the presence of Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, a member of the Lok Sabha, and CP Joshi, the president of the Rajasthan BJP.
Joshi welcomed the new leaders into the party and remarked, “It seems that we will make Jhotwara ‘Congress-mukt’. I express gratitude to all of you for reposing faith in the BJP under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.
Jhotwara, a constituency in the Legislative Assembly, is a suburban locality situated within Jaipur.
Tanwar, who left the Congress in 2019, has since engaged in multiple switches between political parties and, in February 2021, established his own party named ‘Apna Bharat Morcha.’
In November 2021, he joined the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
He was formerly recognized as a close associate of Rahul Gandhi, the former head of the Congress party, during Gandhi’s tenure as the head of the Indian National Youth Congress (INYC). Tanwar has also served as the chief of INYC.
However, Tanwar left the Congress in October 2019 ahead of the state Assembly elections following a protracted turf war with the former chief minister of Haryana, Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
In the Haryana Assembly elections of 2019, Tanwar backed Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) and actively campaigned against the Congress party.
In 2009, he emerged victorious in the Lok Sabha elections from Sirsa in Haryana as a Congress candidate. Nevertheless, he faced defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
In the 200-member assembly, the Congress secured 99 seats and the BJP 73 in the 2018 Rajasthan assembly elections.
Rajasthan is scheduled for elections on November 25, and the results, along with those of four other state assembly elections, will be counted on December 3.