User:Amitjogi

Amit Jogi is the America-born son of the Indian politician Ajit Jogi. Like his father he is equally- if not more- controversial. More than anybody else under 30 in India, Amit can boast that he has seen it all and done it all. His detractors- both from his father's party Congress as well as the opposition BJP- see him as an incarnation of Sanjay Gandhi who was reputed to have been the high-handed extra-constitutional authority during the Emergency. This isn't entirely true. Nobody doubts Amit's intelligence: after all he has studied in some of India's finest educational institutions including the somewhat elitist St Stephen's College and the Marxist bastion JNU. Infact it was at JNU that Amit began to dabble in politics: during the period of his post-graduation, NSUI's- the Congress party's student wing- vote-share increased from a shameful 17 to over 500 (out of a total of 3000). He was instrumental in causing the defection of two former presidents of JNUSU- both from the SFI- to Congress. Amit used this training when he masterminded the first- and only- full-scale vertical split of the BJP in Chhattisgarh when 12 MLAs joined the Congress party during his father's chief ministership. Amit's alleged role in causing the dramatic defection of Leader of Opposition's daughter right in the middle of a BJP national convention presided by the then PM AB Vajpayee was seen directly as an attempt to humiliate him. Needless to say this evoked the BJP's ire. A systematic propaganda campaign was orchestrated particularly in the state's urban areas and through the media to portray him as power-hungry and corrupt. However Amit- the man at the centre of the storm- remained stoically silent. He came under the gaze of the national media when top leaders of the BJP accused him of being behind the Dilip Singh Judeo expose in the Indian Express newspaper during Chhattisgarh's assembly election in 2003. Less than a month later another he and his father were accused of trying to buy BJP MLAs to destabilize the newly-formed Raman Singh government. Since then Amit had been keeping a low-profile before the CBI arrested him for allegedly conspiring to murder Ram Avtar Jaggi, who was shot dead in June 2003 at Raipur. After having spent sixteen months in Raipur Central Jail, he was acquited in Jaggi murder case. But his worries are far from over: the CBI has filed another chargesheet naming him in the Judeo case as well. There is a strong possibility that he will enter direct politics now, entering the state Assembly from Marwahi, the assembly seat vacated by Ajit Jogi when he was elected to Parliament from Mahasamund. As of now, Amit has neither confirmed nor denied this. Instead he's busy giving final shape to his eagerly awaited jail dairies.