Uttar Pradesh Legislature Party leader Aradhana Mishra has been appointed the party’s state chief, replacing Ajay Rai. Imran Masood, Congress MP from Saharanpur, has been appointed working president.

The changes are part of the Congress’s restructuring of its organisational strategy in the state months before the Assembly elections.

Aradhana is the MLA from Rampur Khas in Pratapgarh district. 

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She is the daughter of veteran UP Congress leader Pramod Tiwari, who had made a record of sorts by winning Rampur Khas constituency 9 times from 1980 to 2012. In 2014, when he became the MP, Aradhana had won this seat in a bypoll.

In the 2017 polls, she won the seat for the second consecutive time, defeating the BJP’s Nagesh Pratap Singh by nearly 17,000 votes. The Congress then made her its Legislature Party leader in the state Assembly.

Considered to be close to Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi, Aradhana had accompanied her during her visits to the houses of women and other victims of various atrocities in several districts – including Hathras, Unnao, Umbha, Sidharthanagar and Lakhimpur Kheri – in recent years.

In the run-up to the 2022 Assembly polls, she had accompanied Priyanka across the state on her women-centred campaign, called “Larki hun, lar sakti hun (I am a girl, and I can fight)”.

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She has a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce and Master’s in Business Administration, and had served as a block pramukh for three terms since 2001.

Rai, a Bhumihar leader from eastern UP, was appointed in August 2023. He had replaced Dalit leader Brijlal Khabri ahead of the 2024 elections. Rai contested the last two parliamentary elections against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Varanasi. In 2024, he succeeded in reducing Modi’s victory margin.

Series of changes

In July, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) had replaced Avinash Pande as the general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh with Rajendra Pal Gautam, the national chairman of the party’s Scheduled Castes Department and a prominent Dalit leader.

Last month, the Congress appointed Kunwar Singh Nishad as chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee’s Media and Publicity Department.

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According to party sources, Nishad, who hails from Mathura, was earlier associated with the BJP, and joined the Congress during Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s campaign in Uttar Pradesh in 2022. He had since been serving as a Congress spokesperson in the state.

These two appointments came as the Congress seeks to expand its outreach among Dalits and Most Backward Classes (MBCs).