Chandigarh: Apparently livid at the cross-voting by senior Haryana leader Kuldeep Bishnoi in the June 10 Rajya Sabha election, Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Saturday expelled him from all party posts and scrapped his status as special invitee to the Congress working committee.
Bishnoi, a four-time MLA and two-time MP, is the younger son of the former chief minister late Bhajan Lal.
Bishnoi was annoyed with the party high command for neglecting him and was sulking for some time. In all fairness, he had tried in vain to meet Rahul Gandhi after the party’s state body was constituted a few weeks ago. Then, the appointment of Udai Bhan, a confidante of former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, as the state party chief, did not go down well with Bishnoi.
He had also stopped attending party meetings and programmes and also did not go to Raipur, where all the party MLAs were flown ahead of the Rajya Sabha polls.
He had also announced ahead of the RS polls that he would cast a conscience vote.
Congress candidate Ajay Maken might have won had Bishnoi not cross-voted in favour of the BJP-JJP-backed independent candidate Kartikeya Sharma. This, besides the fact that a vote was declared invalid, had nullified a victory that was in the party’s grasp.
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