In a significant development, though on expected lines, senior Congress leader and former legislator Ashish Deshmukh has been expelled by the grand old party for his statements against party leader Rahul Gandhi and Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) President Nana Patole - for a period of six years.
Deshmukh and Patole, both of whom hail from the Vidarbha region, had been at loggerheads for quite some time now.
Deshmukh (48) is the son of former Maharashtra Congress President Ranjeet Deshmukh, who had been a minister in the erstwhile Congress-NCP Democratic Front government.
Deshmukh is also the nephew of former Maharashtra Home Minister and senior NCP leader Anil Deshmukh.
The Deshmukh family wields influence in the Nagpur-Vidarbha region of the state.
In 2014, Deshmukh had contested and won the Katol seat from the BJP and defeated NCP’s Anil Deshmukh, however, in 2019, he rejoined Congress and unsuccessfully contested the Nagpur South West seat against BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis, then Chief Minister and now Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra.
The MPCC’s Disciplinary Action Committee, chaired by former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, had issued a showcause notice to him on April 7, the reply to which was found unsatisfactory.
“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,” Chavan said in a letter to Deshmukh on Wednesday.
In a TV interview, Deshmukh had recently said that Gandhi should apologise to the OBC community - days after the Wayanad MP was suspended from Lok Sabha after a Surat court convicted and sentenced him for two years in a defamation case failed against him for his references to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the OBC community.
He had also alleged that Patole received money from Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.
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