Ravneet Singh Bittu, Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) candidate for the Lok Sabha seat in Ludhiana, Punjab has reportedly been camping in Delhi for 3 days. According to reports, Bittu has reached 7 Lok Kalyan Marg (LKM), residence of PM-designate Narendra Modi for a tea meeting along with several other ministers such as Amit Shah, JP Nadda, BL Verma, Pankaj Chaudhary, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Annapurna Devi, Arjun Ram Meghwal. This has sparked the speculation that Bittu is likely to be part of Modi 3.0 Cabinet of Ministers.
Just before the Lok Sabha elections, Bittu had left the Congress while being Ludhiana’s MP and joined the BJP. He contested the elections but lost to Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring after a close battle with a margin of about 20 thousand votes. Not only this, no BJP candidate secured even a single parliamentary seat in Punjab. However, according to reports, Ravneet Bittu is likely to join PM Modi’s cabinet of ministers after he is sworn in today. In such a situation, here is all about the former Member of Parliament:
Who is Ravneet Singh Bittu?
Ravneet Bittu is the grandson of former Punjab CM Beant Singh, and was MP for 3 consecutive terms. He was the head of Youth Congress, was also a close aide of Rahul Gandhi in Congress.
He won Lok Sabha elections from Sri Anandpur Sahib on Congress ticket in 2009 and won Lok Sabha elections from Ludhiana seat on Congress ticket in 2014 and 2019. Ravneet Bittu left Congress on March 26 and went to Delhi and joined BJP in presence of Vinod Tawde and Vishal Singh.
Bittu was arrested earlier this year after he locked the main offices of the Ludhiana Municipal corporation in protest of the “inefficiency of ruling AAP government” and “widespread corruption in Ludhiana’s civic body.”
His inclusion in the cabinet likely plays to BJP wanting to play aggressive in Punjab after it was found that the saffron party enjoyed a higher vote share than Shiromani Akali Dal. Moreover, Ludhiana is the commercial capital of Punjab, and BJP is likely looking to capitalise on Beant Singh’s legacy in Punjab. Ex-CM Beant Singh was assassinated in a bomb blast at the secretariat complex in Chandigarh on 31 August 1995.