Hamirpur/Shimla, Mar 26 (PTI) Sensing fissures in the party after Congress turncoats got tickets to contest their respective assembly seats on a BJP ticket in Hamirpur district, the saffron party has formed a coordination to ensure unity among its ranks ahead of the upcoming elections.

BJP leader Ranjit Singh who contested the assembly polls in 2022 from Sujanpur has announced that he will contest the byelections as an Independent against the party's nominee, Rajinder Rana, a Congress turncoat.

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The BJP's state unit chief Rajeev Bindal urged the party cadre to remain united and work towards winning both the Lok Sabha and assembly polls.

The coordination committee is headed by BJP leader Narendra Atri.

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Nine non-BJP MLAs – six disqualified Congress legislators and three Independents – voted in favour of the BJP's candidate for the Rajya Sabha poll in the state. All nine of them joined the BJP on Saturday.

Three of these leaders, Congress rebels Rajinder Rana (Sujanpur), Inder Dutt Lakhanpal (Barsar) and Independent Ashish Sharma (Hamirpur) are from Hamirpur district.

While the Congress rebels, now BJP leaders, were given tickets by the party, the Independents have also resigned from the assembly, paving the way for byelections in these three assembly seats.

However, the resignations have not been accepted by the assembly speaker yet.

BJP leader Singh insisted that he will work to support the party's candidate, Union minister Anurag Singh Thakur, for the Lok Sabha polls in Hamirpur.

“But in the byelections (assembly), I will contest as an Independent candidate," Singh said.

In the 2022 assembly polls, Singh lost to Rana, who was a Congress leader then, by a margin of 399 votes. Rana, a three-time legislator from Sujanpur assembly seat, had defeated former chief minister and BJP leader Prem Kumar Dhumal in the 2017 assembly polls.

Himachal Pradesh BJP chief Bindal was here to talk to party leaders in the district regarding the recent developments since the Rajya Sabha election and the party's decision to give tickets to the Congress rebel MLAs.

Bindal urged party leaders to ensure that Narendra Modi is the prime minister again, and that a BJP government is formed in the state as well.

The state government is failing to fulfil its primary responsibility of maintaining law and order and is busy protecting the culprits, he said.

Speaking to the media persons here, the BJP leader demanded that an FIR be immediately lodged against NSUI – Congress' student wing – activists who barged into a restaurant in Shimla on Tuesday and disrupted a BJP press conference. One of the six disqualified Congress MLAs was present at the presser.

“There was a time when the Congress party used to have 450 Lok Sabha seats, but now it has been reduced to 40 and has been wiped out from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. But Himachal Congress has not learned from this,” he said.

He said big leaders are joining the party due to the work that the BJP has done under PM Modi's leadership.

The Congress has formed the government on false guarantees and its failure to fulfil the guarantees has led to contradictions within, which is why its MLAs have rebelled and resigned, the BJP leader said.

He added that the rebel leaders will soon file a defamation claim against Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu.

On the electoral bonds issue, Bindal said the Modi government brought transparency to something that was done “under the table” “for the last seventy years during the Congress rule”. The order of the Supreme Court on it is paramount, he added.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)