Sports minister Sarbananda Sonowal is BJP’s chief ministerial candidate for Assam

The announcement was made at the committee’s meeting in New Delhi on Thursday where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP national president Amit Shah were present. “I am confident that the BJP will defeat the Congress in the coming assembly election and will make history in Assam”, he told PTI, hours after the BJP Parliamentary Board announced the decision.

The parliamentary board also felicitated Shah who was elected unopposed for a fresh term as the party chief on January 24. “BJP is going to form its government in Assam”, said Union Minister JP Nadda, accompanied by the party’s national secretary Shrikant Sharma.

Of these states, all of which are likely to head for polls in April this year, the BJP has pinned its hopes of winning on Assam, where it has set a target of 84 seats, two-thirds seats, in the 126-strong assembly.

The decision to name a chief ministerial candidate was taken after getting feedback from the ground, he said, adding that coalition talks were on with several parties and groups, including the Asom Gana Parishad. Kiran Bedi in the Delhi Assembly polls was the lone exception. He was the head of the party’s Assam unit before he was made a Minister in the Narendra Modi government. He was All Assam Students Union’s president and an AGP leader before joining BJP in 2011.

A similar meeting of the leaders tasked with the campaign in West Bengal was also held.

The decision, according to sources, was taken after the party realised that “too much exposure” of the Prime Minister in the state elections, in the absence of a face for the state polls, would damage his image.

All the board’s members, including union ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Nitin Gadkari, M Venkaiah Naidu, Ananth Kumar besides Modi, Shah and Nadda among others attended the meeting.