The Maharashtra Congress has expelled former MLA Ashish Deshmukh from the party for six years over his anti-party statements against the party leadership.
Mr. Deshmukh, a former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator from the Katol Assembly segment (2014-2019) in Nagpur district during the erstwhile Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra, has raised eyebrows with his statements highlighting the schisms within the Congress’ leadership in the State, particularly in the Vidarbha region.
The order of expulsion was issued to Mr. Deshmukh by senior Congress leader and former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, chairperson of the State Congress disciplinary committee, in a letter dated May 22.
The letter said the committee had discussed Mr. Dehmukh’s reply submitted on April 9 to a show cause notice issued to him last month.
“We found the reply regarding your public utterances against the party unsatisfactory. You are expelled from the primary membership of the party for six years with immediate effect,’” reads the letter.
Known for his controversial comments against the State Congress leadership, Mr. Deshmukh, the nephew of senior Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and former Home Minister Anil Deshmukh had trained his guns on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi recently.
He had said that Mr. Gandhi ought to apologise to the Other Backward Class (OBC) community over his remarks on the Modi surname.
Mr. Deshmukh has also alleged State Congress president Nana Patole was in cahoots with Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, while opining that the two rival Shiv Sena factions — led by Mr. Uddhav Thackeray and Mr. Shinde — could come together in the near future.
The son of former Maharashtra Congress chief Ranjit Deshmukh, Ashish Deshmukh had termed the show cause notice issued to him last month as “unfortunate” while claiming it was part of a “larger conspiracy” to discredit him as he had been questioning the style of functioning of the Maharashtra Congress’ top brass.
Mr. Deshmukh had resigned from the BJP in 2018, citing the failure of the Fadnavis government in the State and the Modi government at the Centre to resolve “people’s problems”.
He was the Congress’ nominee against BJP leader and now Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis from the Nagpur South West seat in the 2019 Assembly polls, where he was defeated by the latter.
According to observers, Mr. Deshmukh is attempting to increase his influence in the Katol and Saoner Assembly constituencies in Nagpur, particularly following his uncle Anil Deshmukh’s arrest in late 2021 after the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) probe in a money laundering case.
Mr. Anil Deshmukh, a five-time MLA from Katol, was the dominant figure there for nearly two decades. The NCP leader had lost to his own nephew in the 2014 Assembly election after the latter, contesting on a BJP ticket, defeated him by a little over 5,000 votes.
However, after Mr. Ashish Deshmukh defected to the Congress in 2018 and lost to Mr. Fadnavis, the former has found himself adrift in the Congress. According to the political grapevine, Mr. Ashish Deshmukh could rejoin the BJP following his expulsion from the Congress.
