Nagpur, Sep 13 (IANS): The BJP suffered a rude shock ahead of the Maharashtra Assembly elections when a senior Vidarbha leader Gopaldas S. Agrawal quit to make a return to the Congress after five years, here on Friday.

As a Congressman, Agrawal had won the Gondia seat in 2004, 2009 and 2014, but just before the 2019 assembly elections, he switched over to the BJP and lost the elections to an independent, Vinod S. Agrawal.

The Gondia seat in a tribal belt has been a traditional bastion of the Congress which has bagged it continuously 12 times since 1952 – barring 1995, 1999 and 2019.

Recently, Agrawal, 73, tendered his resignation to BJP President J. P. Nadda and his departure is seen as a huge blow to the party’s influence in the Vidarbha region.

The BJP also suffered huge reverses in the May 2024 elections when it bagged just one out of 10 seats in Vidarbha when Union Minister Nitin Gadkari retained the Nagpur constituency.

Agrawal was welcomed back to the Congress fold in the presence of AICC General Secretary Ramesh Chennithala, state party President Nana F. Patole, Leader of Opposition (Assembly) Vijay Wadettiwar, ex-CM Prithviraj Chavan, ex-ministers Nitin Raut, Sunil Kedar, Shivajirao Moghe, MPs and MLAs.

“We heartily welcome Agrawal to the Congress… The people of Vidarbha have always supported us and we are confident that they will back us again in the upcoming Assembly elections,” said Chennithala.

Patole said that Gondia city is famed as the ‘rice city’ of the country with a large number of rice mills, but the BJP government destroyed the business owing to its wrong policies.

Wadettiwar expressed optimism that Vidarbha is a Congress-land and the party “would bury the BJP” here in the upcoming assembly elections, and again hoist the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) flag at the state headquarters in Mumbai.

Chavan slammed the ruling MahaYuti, accusing it of being the most corrupt regime ever witnessed by the state and it did not spare even the recently-crashed statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in Sindhudurg of graft.

The leaders attacked the BJP for running a fake campaign and false narrative against the Congress’ Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, warning that the people will teach them a lesson.

Agrawal and other bigwigs assured that after the MahaYuti is voted out of power, the Congress-MVA alliance would again push forward the stalled development of Gondia and surrounding regions by implementing minimum support prices to paddy farmers and other positive initiatives.