New Delhi: In a setback for the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, its Uttarakhand MLA Rajendra Singh Bhandari joined the BJP here on Sunday and said that he was impressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership which motivated him to take the step.
Bhandari, a three-term Congress legislator who was also a minister in the state in the past, joined the BJP in the presence of its senior leaders, including Union Minister Piyush Goyal and the party’s national general secretary Dushyant Kumar Gautam.
Gautam is also the BJP’s in-charge for Uttarakhand.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and BJP chief spokesperson Anil Baluni, a Rajya Sabha member who will contest his first Lok Sabha election from the Garhwal seat in Uttarakhand, were also present on the occasion.
Bhandari, who is learnt to have resigned from the Congress before joining the BJP, represented the Badrinath seat in the Uttarakhand Assembly. He won the seat by defeating the BJP’s Uttarakhand unit chief Mahendra Bhatt by a small margin in the 2022 Assembly polls. Badrinath is one of the 14 Assembly segments which falls under the Garhwal Lok Sabha constituency from where the BJP’s Anil Baluni will contest the parliamentary election this time.