BJP MP PP Choudhary, who has been chosen to head the crucial joint parliamentary panel looking into the One Nation, One Election Bills, has risen through the ranks of the party.
A member of the RSS since childhood, the 71-year-old Choudhary entered politics only after the Congress won the Pali Lok Sabha seat in Rajasthan in the Modi wave elections in 2014.
Earlier, the son of a farmer, Chaudhary worked as a senior advocate in the Supreme Court and the Rajasthan High Court.
Chaudhary won the Pali seat for the third time in a row in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year.
During his first term in 2016, after he was part of several parliamentary panels – including chairman, Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Offices of Profit – Pali was inducted into the Modi government as Union Minister of State, Law and Justice, and Minister of State. He held the responsibility of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology until 2019.
During his second term, he was a member of several panels and chairman of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 2021, he was appointed Chairman of the Joint Committee on Public Trust (Amendment of Regulations) Bill, 2022 and Chairman of the Joint Committee on Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019.
Chowdhury from the border district of Pali was an advocate from Jainarayan Vyas University in Jodhpur and before going to the Supreme Court, he advocated in the High Court.
A local Pali leader, who did not want to be identified, said while Chaudhary was not very active on the ground, he was a prominent presence at BJP events. “Usually, it is his team members who interact with the public,” the leader said.
In an opinion piece written for The Indian Express earlier this year, Choudhary supported One Nation, One Election as a means of saving “Indians’ hard-earned money”. He also wrote that “recurrent elections require continuous involvement of resources by the state machinery and the ECI (Election Commission of India), which negatively affects governance, development and welfare activities in the constituencies”.
Choudhary noted that in July 2019 he introduced a “Private Member’s Bill seeking to insert a new Article, 324A, to direct the ECI to conduct simultaneous elections to the People’s Assemblies and Legislative Assemblies of all States”.
Citing the example of the general election and the four assembly elections held in 2019, he also dismissed the argument that the simultaneous elections meant regional parties could not take up local issues strongly. What did you get in the general election? This means that those who voted for the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections did not vote for the BJP when the state government was elected. This can be seen in the elections of all four states that year and in 2014 as well.
The two bills pending before the joint panel headed by Chaudhary are the Constitution (129th Amendment) Bill, 2024 and the Union Territories (Amendment) Bill, 2024 to initiate One Nation, One Election.
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