Congress seeks to disqualify Alpesh Thakore as MLA
Gandhinagar: In a stern action, the Gujarat Congress here on Thursday made a representation to the State Assembly to disqualify rebel legislator Alpesh Thakore, who had resigned recently from all the posts of the party.
Congress Chief Whip Ashwin Kotwal and another legislator Baldevji Thakore met the Secretary to the State Assembly and submitted the party’s representation addressed to Speaker Rajendra Trivedi.
Ashwin Kotwal told IANS that, “Alpesh Thakore had resigned from all posts of the party and is no longer a Congress member. With this, he ceases to be a Congress legislator”.
He added that he had contested the state Assembly elections in 2017 from the Radhanpur constituency in North Gujarat’s Banaskantha district on a Congress mandate and won from there. “Now that he is not with the Congress party, he cannot continue to be an MLA,” Kotwal said.
He went on to say that Alpesh Thakore was also indulging in anti-party activities by campaigning for independent candidates from his Thakore Sena during the Lok Sabha elections, the polling for which concluded in Gujarat on Tuesday.
OBC leader and convenor of the Gujarat Kshatriya-Thakore Sena Alpesh Thakore had joined the Congress amid much fanfare in the run-up to the assembly elections in 2017 in the presence of party President Rahul Gandhi.
He resigned earlier this month claiming that the party’s state leadership had sidelined him and that he felt humiliated.
State Congress president Amit Chavda maintained that the party had done its best for Thakore, right from giving him an assembly ticket soon after he joined, to making him an AICC Secretary and a co-incharge of the party affairs in Bihar as well as appointing him on all the key committees of the party in Gujarat.
