Just a day after calling quits with the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), veteran tribal leader Nand Kumar Sai joined the ruling party in Chhattisgarh viz. Congress on Monday. This development comes ahead of the Assembly polls which are scheduled to take place towards the end of this year. The 77-year-old leader is a former two-time Lok Sabha MP and a three-time MLA. He has also served as BJP's state president in both Chhattisgarh and undivided Madhya Pradesh. He is known to have significant influence in the tribal-dominated parts of the Surguja division (Northern Chhattisgarh), as reported by news agency PTI.
Sai joined the Congress on Monday in the presence of Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, the party's state chief Mohan Markam and ministers at Rajiv Bhawan, the party's state headquarters.
Sai submitted his resignation to BJP on Sunday to state president Arun Sao and claimed that his colleagues were hatching conspiracies and levelling false allegations to tarnish his image. He said that this had deeply hurt him, reported PTI.
He is believed to be a prominent tribal face of the party who hails from north Chhattisgarh, he was first elected as the Janata Party MLA in 1977 from the Tapkara seat (which is now in Jashpur district) in Madhya Pradesh.
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In 1980, he got elected as the BJP's Raigarh district unit chief. He was then elected as the BJP MLA from Tapkara in 1985 and 1998.
He got elected to the Lok Sabha from Raigarh in 1989, 1996, and 2004 and Rajya Sabha in 2009 and 2010.
Sai was the BJP state (Chhattisgarh) president from 2003-05, and MP BJP chief from 1997 to 2000. He was the first leader of the opposition in the Chhattisgarh Assembly after the state was excluded MP in November 2000.
He was also appointed as the chairperson of the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes in 2017.