Former Lok Sabha MP from Nagaur, Jyoti Mirdha, and Rajasthan Congress leader Sawai Singh Choudhary, joined the BJP at the party’s headquarters in New Delhi in the run-up to Assembly elections in the State, due to be held later this year.
Dr. Mirdha, a former Congress MP from Nagaur in Rajasthan, and Mr. Choudhary, a former bureaucrat, joined the BJP in the presence of BJP general secretary in-charge of Rajasthan, Arun Singh, and State unit president C.P. Joshi.
“With the joining of Jyoti Mirdha and Sawai Singh Choudhary, the BJP family has been strengthened further,” Mr. Singh said. “Jyoti Mirdha is a very popular leader,” he added.
State unit chief C.P. Joshi was more effusive in his welcome as he alluded to Dr. Mirdha’s political lineage — she is the grand-daughter of the late Nathuram Mirdha, who was a Rajasthan Congress chief, and served as a Union Minister. Mr. Joshi also spoke of the local support that she enjoys in Nagaur.
“Baba [alluding to the late Nathuram Mirdha] ki poti, Nagaur ki jyoti (Baba’s grand-daughter, Nagaur’s light),” Mr. Joshi said while welcoming Dr. Mirdha.
He added that her family was known to raise issues related to farmers, and the only seat the Congress had won in the post-Emergency polls in 1977 was Nagaur, when the late Nathuram Mirdha won.
Belonging to the Jat community, Dr. Mirdha is expected to get the Nagaur Lok Sabha ticket from the party in 2024, a seat currently held by the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party’s (RLP) Hanuman Beniwal, who had fought the 2019 polls as a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) candidate supported by the BJP. Mr. Beniwal is also from the Jat community and had defeated Dr. Mirdha in the 2019 polls, but has since left the NDA’s fold to go his own way. Nagaur is a Jat dominated seat.
Party sources said that the BJP was in search of a strong candidate from Nagaur, who could draw the Jat votes not just in the Lok Sabha polls but earlier still, in the upcoming Assembly polls in the State.
