Defence Minister and senior parliamentarian Rajnath Singh has been retained as Deputy Leader of the BJP in the newly constituted 17th Lok Sabha while Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal is the new Deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha.
BJP’s Dalit face and Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thaawar Chand Gehlot has been appointed as Leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha replacing senior lawmaker Arun Jaitley while Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi will be the government chief whip, an announcement said here on Wednesday.
BJP Parliamentary Party Executive Committee has been constituted on directions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president and Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday. Mr Modi will be the Leader of the BJP Parliamentary Party.
Government Deputy Chief whip will be MoS Parliamentary Affairs Arjun Ram Meghwal in the Lok Sabha while the same task has been assigned to MoS for External Affairs V Muraleedharan in the Rajya Sabha.
Party Chief Whip will be Mr Sanjay Jaiswal in the Lok Sabha and Narayan Lal Panchariya in the Upper House.
Secretaries appointed in the Lok Sabha were Mr Ganesh Singh in the Lower House and Bhupendra Yadav in the House of Elders.
Mr Gopal Shetty was appointed Treasurer.
In the Lok Sabha, whips statewise are Tripura lawmaker Pratima Bhaumik (10 MPs of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur and Tripura); Delhi West MP Parvesh Verma (9 MPs of Delhi and Uttarakhand), Kirit Bhai Solanki (20 MPs of Gujarat), Jugal Kishore Sharma (19 MPs of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana), Nalin Kumar Kateel (21 MPs of Karnataka) and Sudhir Gupta (13 MPs of Madhya Pradesh), the statement said.
Santosh Pandey will be whip for 15 MPs of MP and Chhattisgarh, Kapil Moreshwar Patil (15 MPs of Maharashtra), Suresh Pujari (9 MPs of Odisha, Manipur and Telangana), Kanakmal Katara (ST) (18 MPs of Rajasthan).
In Uttar Pradesh, Ajay Mishra will be whip of 16 MPs, Bhanu Pratap Singh Verma of 15 MPs and Pankaj Choudhary of 16 lawmakers.
North Malda MP from West Bengal Khagen Murmu is the whip of 16 MPs of West Bengal.
For women MPs in the Lok Sabha, Ranjanaben Bhutt, Shobha Karandlaje and Locket Chatterjee will be whip for 12 MPs each.
In the Rajya Sabha, whips will be Amar Shankar Sable, Shamsher Singh Manhas, Shwait Malik, Chunnibhai Gohel, Ajay Pratap Singh and Dr Ashok Bajpai.
Special invitees in the BJP Parliamentary Party Executive Committee from the Lok Sabha will be Nitin Gadkari, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Arjun Munda, Narendra Singh Tomar, Smriti Irani and Jual Oram.
In the Rajya Sabha, special invitees are Mr J P Nadda, Om Prakash Mathur, Nirmala Sitharaman, Dharmendra Pradhan and Praksh Javadekar.
General Secretary and Incharge West Bengal Kailash Vijayvargiya is Prabhari BJP Parliamentary Office while Balasubrahmanyam Kamarsu is Parliamentary Party Office Secretary, the release said.
