Former Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa will head the Bharatiya Janata Party's Karnataka unit, the party announced on Friday. The 73-year-old is the only chief minister in the country to resign because he was indicted for corruption in a Lokayukta report. In 2011, a report by former Lokayukta, Justice Santosh Hegde, linked Yeddyurappa, his minister Janardhan Reddy and relatives to a Rs 16,085 crore mining scam. This resulted in Yeddyurappa spending some time in prison.

After being forced to resign as chief minister, Yeddyurappa also quit the BJP and launched his own political party, the Karnataka Janata Paksha. In the 2013 Assembly elections, Yeddyurappa's party lost, after which he merged it with the BJP ahead of the 2014 general elections. He has since received support from within the party to become state chief ahead of the 2018 Assembly elections, reported CNN-IBN.

The BJP also announced its new state chiefs for Uttar Pradesh (Keshav Prasad Maurya), Punjab (Vijay Sampla), Telangana (Dr K Laxman) and Arunachal Pradesh (Tapir Gao) to be the next BJP state president of Arunachal Pradesh.