In his 4th party switch, Ashok Tanwar now joins saffron fold
Tanwar joined the BJP in the presence of Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar among other leaders and lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, saying the country has changed in the last 10 years
Days after quitting the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Former Haryana Congress president Ashok Tanwar on Saturday joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi.
Tanwar joined the BJP in the presence of Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar among other leaders and lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, saying the country has changed in the last 10 years.
“We are influenced by the work done by PM Narendra Modi and the country has transformed in the last ten years. I am feeling fortunate to have joined the BJP two days ahead of the Ram Lalla Pran Pratishtha ceremony. We will work together with CM Khattar and Nayab Saini (BJP state chief) to ensure that the party wins 400 seats in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls,” he added.
Welcoming Tawar, CM Khattar said, “I felt pain when Tanwar was targeted by Congress workers when he was the party’s state chief. He wanted to join the BJP after parting ways with Congress but his train took a wrong track and joined AAP in April 2022, but now he has rectified his mistake by joining BJP.”
Tanwar, who was chairman of Aam Aadmi Party’s state election campaign committee had quit the party, opposing AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal’s decision to join hands with the Congress in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
With Tanwar’s inclusion into the BJP, the saffron party is trying to mobilise the Dalit voters ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha and assembly polls.
Sources close to Tanwar say that he was displeased with AAP after he was not nominated by the party for the Rajya Sabha seat and since then has been incommunicado for the past few weeks.
Tanwar, a Dalit leader, is a former Sirsa MP and a former Haryana Congress president who had resigned from the party in 2019. He had switched over to the Trinamool Congress in November 2021 and embraced AAP in April 2022.
AAP Haryana unit senior vice-president Anurag Dhanda said that Tanwar had joined the BJP with a fear of Enforcement Directorate raids. “ He had bowed down before BJP as he was afraid of ED raids,” he said.
Rohtak-based political analyst Satish Tyagi said, “Tanwar was keen to fight the Lok Sabha polls from Sirsa and now he joined BJP in the hope of getting a reserved ticket from Ambala or Sirsa. This time, he joined a new outfit under the leadership of Khattar. In Congress, Tanwar used to call himself a CM aspirant, and today while joining BJP he called himself a ‘mazdoor’, which reveals that he is just trying to win an electoral battle.”
However, sources reveal that Sirsa BJP MP Sunita Duggal was said to be unhappy over Tanwar’s inclusion into the BJP. A day earlier, when reporters asked about BJP’s candidate from Sirsa in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, Duggal said the party’s high command would decide the ticket.
Electoral history of Tanwar
In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, as a Congress candidate, Ashok Tanwar had defeated INLD nominee Sita Ram by 35,499 votes from Sirsa (SC) seat. In the next parliamentary elections in 2014, INLD candidate Charanjeet Singh Rori defeated Tanwar from Sirsa by 1.15 lakh votes. Tanwar was defeated again in 2019 by BJP’s Sunita Duggal in Sirsa by over 3 lakh votes.