Sticking with the Brahmin-OBC combination for deputy chief ministers, Brajesh Pathak and Keshav Prasad Maurya took oath on Friday as deputies of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Pathak replaces Dinesh Sharma who was deputy chief minister in the first term of the Adityanath government and represented the electorally crucial Brahmin community in the state.
Pathak had served as law minister in the previous Yogi Adityanath government, and was credited with having worked to consolidate its support base among Brahmins in the run-up to the assembly elections.
A prominent Brahmin leader of the party, he won the assembly polls from Lucknow Cantonment in the recent state polls.
In 2017 Pathak jumped ship from the Bahujan Samaj Party and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in the presence of Home Minister Amit Shah and Union Minister Mahesh Sharma.
In the 2017 assembly elections that followed, he became an MLA from Lucknow Central.
On August 21, 2019, after the first cabinet expansion by Yogi Adityanath. he was given charge of legislative, justice, and rural engineering service departments.
He was a member of Parliament from the Unnao Lok Sabha seat from 2004 to 2009.
Pathak started his political career in student politics in 1989 and became the president of Lucknow University in 1990 from where he did his LLB.
Brajesh Pathak was born on June 25, 1964, in Hardoi district of UP and is a lawyer by profession.
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