After he was chosen as the new Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Tribal leader and former Union Minister Vishnu Deo Sai said that Bharatiya Janata party will work with honesty to gain everyone’s faith and vowed to fulfil guarantees given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“With all honesty I will work for ‘Sabka Vishwas’ and the promises made to the people of Chhattisgarh under ‘Modi Ki Guarantee’ will be fulfilled. As a CM of the state, we will try to fulfil the promises,” Vishnu Deo Sai said.
He further said that the first work that will be done is to give 18 lakh ‘Awas’ to the people.
“Today, I have been unanimously chosen as the leader of the legislative assembly. I am thankful to PM Modi, Union HM Amit Shah and BJP national president JP Nadda for showing trust in me,” he added.
Sai won the recently concluded assembly polls from Kunkuri in north Chhattisgarh, a region the BJP has swept.
Sai is a prominent figure in the BJP and has held various positions, including being the former state chief and former union minister.
Sai hails from the influential Sahu (Teli) community which has a sizable presence in the Durg, Raipur and Bilaspur divisions.
He served as State President of the party for Chhattisgarh from 2020 until 2022. He was the Union Minister of State for Mines, Steel in the first PM Modi cabinet. He is highly regarded among tribal voters.
Earlier, BJP central observers Sarbananda Sonowal and Arjun Munda held a meeting in Raipur.
The polling in the state was held in two phases, with the first on November 7 featuring 223 candidates and the second seeing 958 candidates put their electoral fates to the test on November 17.
Of the 90 assembly constituencies in Chhattisgarh, the BJP bagged 54 while the Congress won 35.
On the other hand, Vishnu Deo Sai, the BJP’s new tribal Chief Minister in Chhattisgarh, will have two deputies — part of the party’s efforts to balance the caste equation in the state.
The deputies are state BJP chief Arun Sao — a leader from the Other Backward Classes and Vijay Sharma — a Brahmin.
The party also could not ignore Raman Singh, who has the experience of running the government for 15 years and is expected to play a crucial role in the BJP’s campaign for 2024. Mr Singh, a Rajput, who was also a contender for the top post this time, will be the Assembly Speaker.
Along with Singh, Arun Sao was also in the running for the top job in the state and the BJP is hoping that the extra prominence will help keep factionalism at bay.
Vijay Sharma is a general secretary of the party — and along with the new Chief Minister — also very close to Raman Singh. In the recently concluded assembly election, he defeated powerful minister Congress leader and state minister Mohamad Akbar from Kawardha Constituency by around 40,000 votes.
The BJP team selection for Chhattisgarh was made after a week of deliberations along the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s idea of having a tribal leader as the Chief Minister of the tribal-dominated state. The BJP has won all 14 assembly seats in the tribal-dominated Surguja region and eight of the 12 seats in Bastar this time.
For the representation of OBCs — the other huge chunk of the state’s population — an OBC Deputy Chief Minister was named, sources said.
The BJP claims that Sai is the first tribal Chief Minister of the state.
The party has always contradicted former Chief Minister Ajit Jogi’s status as a tribal. His Scheduled Tribe status was challenged in the Chhattisgarh high court, which ordered that a committee be set up to examine the issue.
In 2019, a case was filed against him after his tribal status claim was rejected by a government-appointed committee.
Who is Vishnu Deo Sai?
1. Vishnu Deo becomes Chhattisgarh’s first tribal chief minister as Ajit Jogi’s ST status was ruled out.
2. Coming from a strong political background, the new chief minister started his political career as a village sarpanch. In 1989, he was elected as a ‘panch’ of Bagia village panchayat and next year became the sarpanch unopposed. His grandfather late Budhnath Sai was a nominated MLA from 1947 to 1952. His ‘bade pitaji’ (elder brother of his father) late Narhari Prasad Sai was a member of the Jan Sangh (BJP’s predecessor) and served as a two-term MLA (1962-67 and 1972-77) and was elected as an MP (1977-79) and served as a minister of state in the Janata Party government.
3. From a village sarpanch, Vishnu Deo Sai rose to the rank of the Union minister of state for steel in the first Cabinet of PM Modi.
4. BJP’s Dilip Singh Judev (late) encouraged Vishnu Deo Sai to enter electoral politics in 1990. In the same year, Sai was elected as MLA for the first time on a BJP ticket from Tapkara (in Jashpur district) in undivided Madhya Pradesh.
5. In 1998, he was defeated in the assembly polls from Pathalgaon seat.
6. In the just-concluded assembly election in Chhattisgarh 2023, Vishnu Deo Sai won from north Chhattisgarh’s Kunkuri constituency defeating UD Minj, the sitting Congress MLA.
7. Vishnu Deo won four consecutive Lok Sabha elections from the Raigarh constituency from 1999 to 2014. 4.
8. Vishnu Deo was not given a ticket in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
9. Vishnu Deo Sai was born in Jashpur. Before joining politics, he was an agriculturist by profession.
10. Vishnu Deo Sai is from the Kanwar tribe. He studied in a government school in Kunkuri and went to Ambikapur for graduation but quit studies midway and returned to his village in 1988.
