No seat for Mr Choubey
Senior BJP leader and former Buxar MP Ashwini Kumar Choubey is going through tough times. At the party’s state working committee meeting in Patna last week, he walked up to the stage but left after he did not find a place to sit, it is learnt. The meeting, convened to chalk out a strategy for the Bihar polls, was opened by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh.
Nearly 900 BJP leaders, MLAs, ministers and state functionaries were in attendance.
Choubey, the former Union minister who was left out of Modi 3.0, left many party colleagues stunned last May when, on the first death anniversary of the late Sushil Modi, he said the former deputy CM “died early due to ill-treatment by a senior party leader”.
Akhilesh & Jayant no longer friends?
On 1 July, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav received birthday wishes from leaders across party lines, including Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi, Apna Dal (Soneylal) chief Anupriya Patel, and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) president O.P. Rajbhar.
However, conspicuously absent from the list of names was Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) chief Jayant Chaudhary, once a close friend of Akhilesh.
The two fell out after Jayant, who was elected to the Rajya Sabha, walked out of INDIA bloc and joined hands with the BJP, for which he was rewarded with a berth in PM Modi’s Council of Ministers.
Akhilesh, SP insiders say, feels betrayed by Jayant. The two have even stopped communicating with each other these past few months. The unease also extended to SP ally Pallavi Patel of Apna Dal (Kamerawadi) who wished Akhilesh a happy birthday, but did not receive a response on ‘X’. In contrast, her sister and Union Minister Anupriya Patel, despite being an NDA ally, received an official ‘thank you’ from the SP handle.
Dinner party sets off speculation
A dinner hosted by Union Minister Rao Inderjit Singh at his daughter Arti Rao’s official residence in Chandigarh recently has set political circles abuzz in Haryana. The gathering was attended by 12 MLAs, including 11 from the BJP and one from the Congress. They were mostly from the Ahirwal region.
The Congress MLA was Manju Chaudhary from Nangal Chaudhry, who defeated former minister Abhe Singh Yadav, a close aide of former chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, in the 2024 Assembly elections. Chaudhary had publicly claimed Rao’s support during her campaign, as she did in 2019, adding intrigue to her presence.
As the news of the dinner became public, some of these MLAs, including Sunil Sangwan, Mukesh Sharma, Krishan Kumar and Om Prakash Yadav, promptly paid a visit to CM Nayab Singh Saini’s residence in Chandigarh. Rao later said his daughter had been allotted an official residence in Chandigarh and he invited people close to him for a dinner to mark the occasion. Rao, whose chief ministerial ambitions remains unfulfilled to this day, has been frequently taking jibes at Khattar, who is now a Union minister, and his successor Saini.
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