PM Modi to be Leader of BJP Parliamentary Party in Lok Sabha, Rajnath Singh Deputy

The BJP Parliamentary Party Executive Committee was on Wednesday constituted with Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the leader of the party in the Lok Sabha. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will be his Deputy in the Lower House of the Parliament.

The BJP has also decided to make Sanjay Jaiswal, the party's Lok Sabha MP from Bihar, its chief whip in the house. He will succeed Anurag Thakur, who has become a minister in the new Modi government. 

BJP Parliamentary Party Executive Committee has been constituted with PM Narendra Modi as the leader of the party,Rajnath Singh as Deputy leader of the party (Lok Sabha), Thawar Chand Gehlot as leader of party in Rajya Sabha&Piyush Goyal as Deputy leader of party in Rajya Sabha). pic.twitter.com/QsK2aifC04

— ANI (@ANI) June 12, 2019

Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Thawar Chand Gehlot, a prominent Dalit face of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been chosen as the Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha. He will succeed former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who opted to stay out of the second term of Narendra Modi government due to ill health. 

The 71-year-old leader from Madhya Pradesh has almost four decades of legislative experience. He was a member of the state assembly for several terms and has served in the Lok Sabha as well as the Rajya Sabha. 

Piyush Goyal will be Deputy leader of the party in the Upper House. 

Goyal, two-time Rajya Sabha MP, will be succeeding Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who has been elected to the Lok Sabha.

He is currently a Rajya Sabha member from of Maharashtra. He was formerly the National Treasurer of the BJP.

In Rajya Sabha, special invitees are J P Nadda, Om Prakash Mathur, Nirmala Sitharaman, Dharmedndra Pradhan and Prakash Javadekar.

BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya has been reappointed as in-charge of the party's parliamentary office and Balasubrahmanyam Kumarsu as secretary.

The newly constituted BJP parliamentary party executive committee marks generational shift in the party as perhaps for the first time L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi are not part of it, as both are not MPs. Besides them, Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj are also not its members.

The first meeting of the executive will be held on June 16 at 3:30 pm, a day before the commencement of the session. The government has also called an all-party meeting on the same day in the morning which will be chaired by the prime minister.