Union minister Mahendra Nath Pandey was on Thursday appointed Uttar Pradesh BJP president in place of deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, the party said in a statement. The seasoned BJP leader, one of the better known Brahmin faces of the party in the state, had served as a minister in previous BJP governments in Uttar Pradesh. He was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2014 from Chandauli, an eastern UP constituency, and was appointed in 2016 as a minister of state for human resource development (HRD).