TN BJP Seeks Out Piyush Goyal’s Help To Manage Polls

The BJP leadership had to recently redeploy Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal once again for handling Tamil Nadu assembly polls. This was apparently being done on request from the Tamil Nadu BJP unit. Even NDA ally — AIADMK chief Edappadi Palaniswami – had conveyed to top BJP leader and Home Minister Amit Shah that Goyal should be in charge of the state. Initially, the party had assigned senior leader Baijayant Panda and Union Minister Murlidhar Mohol to handle the southern state. Party sources felt Goyal had been a good election manager during the Lok Sabha polls and was quite hands on. TN BJP leaders also found MoS  Mohol was too distracted and not taking interest in Chennai affairs. So TN BJP chief Nainar Nagendran rushed to Delhi and lobbied with central leadership to deploy Goyal once again so that BJP can give good results in the state. Nainar had cited the experience of state BJP during Lok Sabha polls. Yielding to local demand, the central BJP leadership tweaked its assignments for the poll-bound states. Goyal was given Tamil Nadu charge and Panda was given Assam. The responsibility of winning back Assam assembly elections will anyway largely lie with incumbent CM Himanta Biswas Sarma.