Know Your Turncoats, Part 5: A ‘Brahmin voice’ joins the BJP, a Congressman quits over a ticket

Out of a total of 18 turncoats contesting in phase one of Lok Sabha polls – eight are in Tamil Nadu, three in Rajasthan, two in Meghalaya, and one each in Assam, Mizoram, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh. 

This is part five of Know Your Turncoats, a Newslaundry series on all the candidates who have jumped ship. We’re wrapping up our list of defectors in phase one of polling with two candidates from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, both of whom abandoned the Congress for greener pastures.

Let’s take a look at their political trajectory.

Jitin Prasada: Ex-Congress man, Brahmin voice, ‘idolised’ Rajiv Gandhi 

Jitin Prasada is the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidate from Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit.

Prasada, 50, comes from a family of Congress loyalists. At 27, he stepped into politics when he joined the Congress youth wing after the death of his father and Congressman Jitendra Prasada in 2001.

A graduate of Shri Ram College of Commerce with an MBA from the International Management Institute, Prasada worked at DSP Merrill Lynch and BPL Net before entering politics. And once he got in, his rise was swift. Within three years, he won a Lok Sabha seat for the Congress from Shahjahanpur. He also secured a cabinet seat in the Manmohan Singh government. In the second term of the UPA government, Prasada was made the minister of state for the human resources department. 

He was also known to brand himself as a Brahmin voice who raises Brahmin “issues”, organises “Brahmin Chetna Yatras”, and works to “unite” Brahmins.         

Before his exit from Congress, he was among the leaders who demanded an overhaul of the party following the 2019 polls debacle. His father too was known to challenge Sonia Gandhi’s ascendence in the party; however, he remained a Congressmen till the end.   

Prasada quit the Congress and joined the BJP months ahead of the 2021 assembly polls. At the time, the BJP was being criticised for not giving Brahmins their due. The community has 12 percent vote share in the state, and commands influence on other voter groups. Three months after Prasada joined the BJP, he was made the state cabinet minister. 

Prasada then said the BJP was the “only national party”, and claimed he felt “surrounded by politics” in Congress. But only a few years earlier, he had named Rajiv Gandhi as his “idol” and accused the Yogi government of “systematically targeting” the Brahmin community. 

The politician whose wealth grew from Rs 9 crore in 2017 to about Rs 21 crore in 2024 has been given several titles by the media, including the “chocolate boy of Shahjahanpur”, “Rahul's point man for Uttar Pradesh”, and his team’s “Young Turk”. Now, he is known as the Brahmin face of the Yogi government, which is accused of favouring the Thakurs and of anti-Brahmin bias by Brahmin forces within the party and outside.     

Locals refer to Prasada’s ancestral home in Shahjahanpur as the “Bare Baba ki Kothi” (big man’s bungalow), owing to his connection to the Kapurthala royal family (his grandmother was a member) and Rabindranath Tagore (his great-grandmother was Tagore’s niece).

Umred Raju Parwe: From independent candidate to Congress to Shiv Sena

Umred Raju Parwe is the Shiv Sena (Shinde)’s candidate from Maharashtra’s Ramtek. 

The 54-year-old was recently in the headlines when he left the Congress to join the Shinde group just weeks before the polls, after he was denied a ticket to contest the Lok Sabha poll from Ramtek. 

The businessman, who reportedly owns a petrol pump and a bar, had first contested the assembly polls in 2014 as an independent candidate from the reserved constituency of Umred in Nagpur. He was defeated by the BJP’s Parwe Sudhir Laxman but managed to get a vote share of 12.5 percent, making him the second runner-up. 

In 2019, he was offered a Congress ticket from the same constituency, and he won by 91,000 votes with a 50 percent vote share.

The Shinde faction reportedly picked Parwe over incumbent MP Krupal Tumane after internal surveys indicated that the latter lacked a connect with voters.

The Indian Express earlier reported that the BJP was unwilling to concede Ramtek while hammering out seat-sharing arrangements with the Sena group and Ajit Pawar’s NCP because its local unit claimed “all these years, the undivided Shiv Sena’s candidate won from the seat because of the BJP’s organisational base and hard work”.

Parwe has two pending cases against him– with charges of “provocation”, “wrongful restraint”, using “obscene words”, and “threat of injury to any public servant”.

As of 2024, his assets stand at Rs 6.6 crore – up from Rs 2 crore in 2014. He has listed farming as his source of income, besides revenue from his businesses.