The Congress removed former chief minister Digambar Kamat from the post of Permanent Invitee to the Congress Working Committee with immediate effect.
“Honourable Congress President (Sonia Gandhi) has removed Shri Digambar Kamat from his current position as Permanent Invitee to Congress Working Committee with immediate effect,” the party said in a press release.
This comes days after parry accused the then Leader of Opposition (LoP) Michael Lobo and Kamat of “conspiring and hobnobbing” with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to engineer a split in the grand old party’s legislative wing.
The party had earlier removed Lobo from the post of LoP in the 40-member Goa assembly.
Lobo, who is a former BJP leader, had joined the Congress ahead of the 2022 state assembly polls, while Kamat is also a former leader of the ruling party.
The Congress party, which could not form the government in the coastal state despite emerging as the largest party in the 2017 state Assembly election with 17 MLAs, is on the brink of collapse as its MLAs are keen to join the saffron party.
Recently, the Congress party in Goa suspected that two-thirds of its members would join the BJP, repeating the history of 2019 when 10 Congress MLAs had joined the saffron side.
On July 10, the party claimed that the ruling side was trying to get two-thirds legislators on its side. With 11 MLAs, a minimum 8 MLAs had to leave the party.
“The BJP was trying for a two-third split in the Congress, so a minimum 8 MLAs had to leave the party,” Congress Goa desk in-charge Dinesh Gundu Rao had said, as he attacked the BJP for allegedly offering money to the MLAs.
