While Nitin Gadkari seems likely to get another term as the BJP national president, his Maharashtra chief, Sudhir Mungantiwar too may get another shot.
A senior BJP leader told DNA that Mungantiwar was likely to get another term as the state party chief. As the Maharashtra BJP chief for the next three years, Mungantiwar, who has a Sangh Parivar background, will face the formidable challenge of steering the party and the Shiv Sena-BJP-Republican Party of India alliance to stand up against the ruling Congress regime in the Centre and state, in the polls scheduled for next year.
He will also face the task of keeping the warring factions in the state BJP, which owe loyalty to leaders like Gopinath Munde and Gadkari together.
Mungantiwar, a four-term MLA from Ballarpur in Vidarbha’s Chandrapur district, was formally elected as the Maharashtra BJP president in the party’s state executive held in Jalgaon in April 2010. Vidarbha has 19 of the BJP’s 47 MLAs.
A BJP leader said the Maharashtra unit was also likely to undergo a reshuffle for next year’s polls. He admitted that the state BJP lacked pan-Maharashtra mass leaders to steer the state unit.
Apart from Gadkari, Gopinath Munde, who is the BJP’s tallest mass leader in the state, has moved into national politics as of now and is the Lok Sabha MP from Beed and the party’s deputy leader in the lower house.
Other senior leaders like Eknath Khadse and Vinod Tawade are leaders of the opposition in the state legislative assembly and the legislative council respectively.
Though the name of Nagpur MLA Devendra Fadanvis — one of the party’s young turks and an aggressive orator — was doing the rounds as the state BJP chief he is a Bramhin and hails from Nagpur, like Gadkari.
