Five Congress members sacked for ink attack on party president

BHUBANESWAR: Five Congress members in Odisha, including a woman, were expelled Sunday for alleged involvement in an ink attack on state unit president Sarat Pattanayak on Friday. Pattanayak had accused BJP of engineering the attack because of Congress protests against the alleged NEET-UG paper leak. BJP denied the charges and blamed Congress infighting.
Those expelled are Prakash Mishra, Shriyasmita Panda, Sandip Routray, Amaresh Parida and Aryan Samal.Mishra was state Congress general secretary, Panda general secretary of the party’s women’s wing, Parida secretary of Youth Congress, while Routray and Samal were NSUI secretaries. “Their indisciplined act damaged the image of the party,” Santosh Singh Saluja, chairman of Congress’s disciplinary committee, said.
Pattanayak was in the middle of a meeting with party colleagues in his chamber at the Congress Bhawan on Friday when a group hurled ink at him.
Saluja denied the ink attack had any links with the party’s dismal show in the recent elections. He pointed out that an AICC committee of senior members Ajay Maken and Tariq Anwar was already analysing the reasons. “The committee will visit Odisha soon and take feedback of state unit members,” Saluja said.
Ahead of the elections, the Congress set an ambitious goal of increasing its seat count in the 147-member assembly from 9 in 2019 to 90 this time. While the party managed to improve its tally slightly to 14 assembly seats in the recent election, its vote share declined from 17% in 2019 to 13.26%. In the Lok Sabha election, the Congress succeeded in retaining its single seat in Koraput, which it had won in 2019.