Chandigarh: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has declared Mohan Lal Badoli, member of the Haryana Legislative Assembly from Rai, as president of the party’s Haryana unit.
BJP national general secretary Arun Singh issued the letter of Badoli’s appointment after J.P. Nadda cleared his name for the post Tuesday. Nadda’s extended tenure as national president of the BJP ended on 30 June.
Badoli will take over from Nayab Saini, who was holding the dual charge of chief minister and state BJP president since he succeeded Manohar Lal Khattar as CM on 12 March this year. Khattar is now a minister in the Union Cabinet.
Badoli, BJP’s Brahmin face in Haryana, had contested the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from Sonipat seat, but lost to Satpal Brahamchari of the Congress, also from the Brahmin community, by a margin of 21,816 votes.
Badoli has been playing an active role in the party as the state general secretary (pradesh mahamantri) since 2021. Before this, he was district president of the BJP in Sonipat from 2020 to 2021.
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Who is Mohan Lal Badoli?
Badoli (61) started his political journey with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1989, and later became a BJP member. During the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) administration, he became the first BJP candidate to win the zila parishad polls from Murthal in 2000.
In the 2019 assembly polls, he was fielded from Rai in Sonipat, considered a Congress stronghold, and won. He was appointed BJP’s district president for Sonipat in 2020 and general secretary of the Haryana BJP the following year.
He was reappointed as general secretary for the second time earlier this year. Before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he was inducted into the party’s Haryana state election committee.
An explicit video, allegedly featuring two-time BJP MP from Sonipat, Ramesh Kaushik, had sparked a political row ahead of the elections, which led to Badoli securing the ticket for the Sonipat Lok Sabha seat instead of Kaushik this time. He secured 5,26,866 votes, but lost by a margin of 21,816 votes.
The new Haryana BJP president was born in 1963 in Badoli village, Rai tehsil in Sonipat district. His father, Kali Ram Kaushik, was a poet and admirer of Pandit Lakhmi Chand, a renowned poet from Jaunti, Sonipat. Badoli is a farmer and a businessman.
He studied till Class 10 at a government school in Khewra in Sonipat, after which he ran a shop in the cloth market near Bahalgarh Chowk.
‘No surprise’
For political analyst Hemant Atri, Badoli’s appointment as Haryana BJP president was no surprise.
“The BJP has been playing the non-Jat card in Haryana in an attempt to polarise voters into Jats and non-Jats. The party adopted this strategy first in the 2019 assembly elections and repeated it in the parliamentary elections this year,” said Atri.
He added that BJP has tried to achieve a “perfect combination” — a chief minister from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) community, a Brahmin state president and a Jat state in-charge (Satish Poonia).
“But make no mistake, the BJP is going to play a non-Jat card this time, and has tried to send across the message that it is serious about the upcoming assembly polls,” Atri told ThePrint. He said that with OBCs making up 30 percent of the population and Brahmins comprising six-seven percent, the BJP can hope to make a formidable combination if non-Jats vote for them in majority.
Mahabir Jaglan, another analyst, told ThePrint that with CM Saini already given the charge of the party’s campaign in Haryana, the BJP has tried to aim for a balanced mix of OBCs and upper castes in terms of representation.
According to him, the appointment of Badoli, a Khattar loyalist with an RSS background, has further reinforced speculation that decisions made by the BJP government and party organisation in Haryana have Khattar’s stamp on them.
Jaglan said that Badoli’s appointment also shows that the party intends to play the “same old non-Jat card” that it has been playing in Haryana since the 2019 polls.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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