Three Congress MLAs likely to join NCP, one suspended for six years

MUMBAI: Three Congress MLAs—Hiraman Khoskar, Zeeshan Siddique and Sulabha Khodke—are likely to join the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) just before the Maharashtra assembly elections. Among them, Khodke was suspended by the Congress on Saturday, as she is expected to be officially inducted into the NCP on Sunday. Khoskar and Siddique will join the party in the coming days.
With this, the number of MLAs leaving the Congress will touch four, as Jitesh Antapurkar, an MLA from Nanded district, has already quit to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Antapurkar was expelled by the Congress on August 30, hours before he made the switch.
Interestingly, all four Congress MLAs were accused of cross-voting, along with three others, in the legislative council elections earlier this year. The Congress had identified seven MLAs who violated the party’s whip and voted for candidates from the ruling parties. The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition had fielded three candidates in the polls, of whom only two won.
On Friday, NCP leader Amol Mitkari announced that four MLAs would be joining the party in the next few days. Khodke, who openly participated in Ajit Pawar’s ‘Jan Sanman Yatra’ in Amravati on September 27, will be the first to officially enter the party. “She will join in the presence of deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar in Amravati on Sunday,” revealed a senior NCP leader. An NCP insider affirmed that Khoskar and Siddique too had decided to join the party and had got the go-ahead from the leadership.
The order suspending Khodke was issued by state Congress president Nana Patole on Saturday. “We have received several complaints for anti-party activities during the Lok Sabha elections and also after that,” it read. “Considering them, you have been suspended for a period of six years, following the directives of Maharashtra-incharge Ramesh Chennithala.”
Khodke represents the Amravati assembly constituency in Vidarbha. She is not new to the NCP, having represented the party as an MLA from the Badnera assembly constituency from 2004-09. She lost the seat in 2009 to independent MLA Ravi Rana. In 2014, she contested the seat as a Congress MLA but lost to Rana once again. In 2019, she won from Amravati. Her husband, Sanjay Khodke, was the general secretary of the NCP and went with Ajit Pawar when the latter split the NCP in 2023. He is considered to be Pawar’s confidante.
Hiraman Khoskar represents the Igatpuri constituency in Nashik. He was accused of cross-voting, along with three other MLAs, during the legislative council elections held on July 12 though he has been claiming since then that he was not involved. Recently, he met NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar with a request to convince the Congress leadership that he was innocent. Later, he also met Shiv Sena president and chief minister Eknath Shinde twice.
Like Khodke, Siddique too, despite being in the Congress, openly participated in Ajit’s ‘Jan Sanman Yatra’ in Mumbai on August 19. His father and former Congress minister Baba Siddique joined the NCP in February this year. Siddique was elected from Vandre (Bandra) East assembly constituency for the first time in 2019. Khoskar and Antapurkar are also first-term MLAs of the Congress.
The NCP is looking to revive its fortunes after its drubbing in the recently held Lok Sabha elections, where it could win only one of the four seats it contested. One of the seats it lost was the Baramati Lok Sabha constituency, where Ajit Pawar’s wife, Sunetra Pawar, was put up against Sharad Pawar’s daughter and sitting MP Supriya Sule.