Former union minister Vishnudeo Sai is new Chhattisgarh BJP chief

RAIPUR: Former union minister Vishnudeo Sai has been appointed as the president of Chhattisgarh unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Sai, who had earlier served as the state party chief when the BJP was in power, succeeds another tribal leader Vikram Usendi, a former MP, who was given charge of state party unit in March last year after BJP’s humiliating defeat in the December 2018 assembly polls.
The tribal leader was a union minister from 2014 to 2019 in the Modi ministry but he did not get a party ticket to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when the BJP leadership replaced all its sitting MPs with new faces after its defeat in the assembly polls in which BJP could win only 15 out of 90 seats in the Vidhan Sabha.
Born on February 21, 1964 at a village in tribal Jashpur district, Sai was a member of assembly of undivided Madhya Pradesh for two terms from 1990 to 1998 and was elected to the lok sabha in 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. In Modi ministry , he was the minister of state for steel.