Handing the reins to three-time Rampur Khas MLA Aradhana Mishra ‘Mona’ as the new UP unit chief, the party has also elevated Saharanpur MP Imran Masood to working president. New Delhi: Aiming to engineer a winning political combination ahead of the crucial 2027 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, the Congress has in a strategic pre-poll overhaul.
The party has made more changes in the state team. Devinder Nishad and Alok Prasad have been appointed senior vice presidents. Mishra entered electoral politics after her father moved to the Rajya Sabha. She has spent much of her political career in Uttar Pradesh. She later became the Congress Legislature Party leader in the state assembly, a position she held until her appointment as the state president. Her appointment gives the Congress a prominent Brahmin face at the top of its Uttar Pradesh unit. The move has been described as an effort to reach out to a community that had traditionally supported the Congress before a large section of its vote moved towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
She replaces Ajay Rai, who had headed the state unit since August 2023. Popularly known as Mona, she was born on April 20, 1974 and is the daughter of senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Pramod Tiwari. The Congress fielded her in the Rampur Khas by-election in 2014. She won her first Assembly contest by 67,679 votes. Before entering the assembly, she served as a block pramukh of the Congress party for three terms from 2001. She had a visible role in the Congress campaign led by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra during the 2022 assembly election. She was among the two Congress candidates who won in the 2022 election, when the party was reduced to two seats in the 403-member assembly.
Mishra travelled across Uttar Pradesh during the party’s women-centric campaign built around the slogan “Ladki hun, lad sakti hun”.
Virendra Chaudhary will now lead the Congress Legislature Party in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly, a position previously held by Mishra.
