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By India Today News Desk: Senior tribal leader Nand Kumar Sai joined the Congress in the presence of Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel in Raipur on Monday.
This comes a day after the tribal leader resigned from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), ending an association of more than four decades ahead of the Assembly elections scheduled at the end of the year.
Sai (77), a former two-time Lok Sabha MP and three-time MLA, had served as the party’s state president in both Chhattisgarh and undivided Madhya Pradesh in the past.
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In his resignation letter, Sai said his colleagues were hatching conspiracies and levelling false allegations to tarnish his image, which had left him deeply hurt.
“I am resigning from the primary membership of the BJP and all posts. Whatever responsibilities the party gave me I discharged them with full dedication. I express my gratitude to the party for it,” he said.
Chhattisgarh Congress communication wing chief Sushil Anand Shukla said a “knowledgeable, polite and tolerant leader” like Sai leaving the party was a sign that the BJP was humiliating and neglecting tribal leaders.
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“If he has left the party it means BJP is neglecting this very big class (tribals), which Sai could not tolerate,” Shukla said.
Sai, a prominent tribal face of the party who hails from north Chhattisgarh, was first elected as a Janata Party MLA in 1977 from Tapkara seat (now in Jashpur district) in Madhya Pradesh.
In 1980, he was elected as BJP’s Raigarh district unit chief. He was elected as BJP MLA from Tapkara in 1985 and 1998 for the second and third time.
(With PTI inputs)
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