The Yogi Adityanath government on Friday appointed a new minority commission comprising of 8 members, including a chairperson to the UP State Minority Commission, after getting approval on the names by Governor Anandiben Patel. The commission includes two Jain members.
The recently nominated commission will be valid for three years as per the government order released by the state minority welfare department.
The commission will be headed by Agra based Ashfaq Saifi, who is also a committed member of the BJP and has been associated with the party for the last 32 years. Saifi has also served as a national secretary of the minority morcha at the BJP.
After being appointed the head of the minority commission of Uttar Pradesh, Saifi said, “I am grateful to the BJP for entrusting such a big responsibility to a small worker like me. I will work with full sincerity and hard work to realise the plans in the interests of the minority communities. I will for providing them employment, education and for the overall development of the minorities in Uttar Pradesh.”
Besides Saifi, other members of the minority commission include Varanasi resident Haider Abbas Chand, Meerut resident novelist Suresh Jain Rituraj who is, Navendu Singh from Shahjahanpur, Samman Afroz Khan from Aligarh, Bakshish Ahmad Warsi from Gorakhpur, Lucknow’s Rumana Siddiqui and Anita Jain.
It is worth noting that the Yogi Adityanath government has diversified the representation of minorities in the new commission. In the last minority commission that was elected in 2018, there were nine members, including the chairperson of the commission, Md Usmani.
The other eight members included Sukhdarshan Bedi from Muzaffarnagar, Suresh Jain Rituraj from Meerut, Manoj Kumar Masih from Budaun, Kunwar Syed Iqbal Haider from Lucknow, Kunwar Afzaal Chowdhary (Ghaziabad), Mohammad Aslam (Fatehpur), Sophia Ahmad (Kanpur) and Rumana Siddiqui from Lucknow.
The last minority commission included 1 Jain and 1 Punjabi member in addition to others. However, this year around, the UP government has increased the representation of Jains with 2 members in the eight-member minority commission.