Uttarakhand lawmaker Ajay Bhatt has been included in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s council of ministers, sources said.
The Nainital-Udham Singh Nagar MP is considered one of the seniormost leaders of the party in Uttarakhand and has served as MLA from Ranikhet legislative assembly in the past.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he defeated former chief minister and Congress leader Harish Rawat by a margin of over three lakh votes in Nainital, helping the BJP retain all five seats in the state. Bhatt defeated Rawat by 3,39,096 votes and squashed Congress’s hopes of regaining the lost ground after the rout of 2014 Lok Sabha and 2017 assembly polls.
Bhatt served as the leader of Opposition in the Uttarakhand legislative assembly before state elections in 2017. He held portfolios like Parliamentary Affairs, Health, Disaster, Excise as Cabinet Minister in the state government. He also served as Health Minister of Uttarakhand and was in 2017 elected unopposed as the chief of BJP’s state unit ahead of the state Assembly polls. He was elected unopposed as all three sets of nomination papers filed by the party leaders favoured him.
In March 2021, he gave a statement saying he is not in the race to become the chief minister of the state. “I am not in the race to become the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand. I will join the Legislature Party meeting whenever it is held next. We will abide by whatever our ‘Sangathan decides. We all are workers of the BJP party. We will follow the decision of the party,” he was quoted as saying.
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