AURANGABAD: Nationalist Congress Party leader Eknath Khadse on Saturday dubbed as “painful” the recent statements of BJP national secretary and former Maharashtra minister Pankaja Munde, claiming she is being ill-treated in her own party. Khadse was speaking to reporters at Gopinathgad in the Beed district where he visited the memorial of Pankaja’s father Gopinath Munde on his ninth death anniversary.
Gopinath Munde, a former deputy leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Lok Sabha, was appointed as the Rural Development Minister by Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he assumed office in 2014. He died in a road accident on June 3 of that year.
“I feel uneasy because there is a lot of difference between today’s BJP and the party it was earlier. The statements that have recently come from Pankaja Munde are painful,” Khadse said.
On Thursday, Pankaja said she belongs to the BJP but the party doesn’t belong to her. Over the past few years, there have been speculations that she has been sidelined by the state BJP.
“A family member of someone (Gopinath Munde) who served lifelong to expand the party (BJP) says that I (Pankaja Munde) will go and cut sugarcane and take sheep to graze is absolutely unfortunate,” said Khadse. Pankaja served as the minister of rural development, women and child welfare when BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis was the chief minister between 2014 and 2019.
In the last assembly elections, she lost to her estranged cousin and Nationalist Congress Party leader Dhananjay Munde on her home turf Parli.
After the first expansion of the Eknath Shinde-Fadnavis cabinet in August 2022, she had said she might not have been “qualified enough” to get a berth.
Source: Press Trust of India
