Former Goa chief minister and senior BJP leader Laxmikant Parsekar announced on Saturday that he will resign from the ruling party after being denied a ticket for the state Assembly elections.
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The 65-year-old politician stated that he does not want to be in the party and that he will formally leave by this evening.
Parsekar is a member of the BJP’s core committee and the party’s manifesto committee for the 2018 Goa elections.
Dayanand Sopte, a sitting MLA from the Mandrem Assembly segment, which Parsekar represented from 2002 to 2017, has been nominated by the BJP. Sopte had defeated Parsekar in the 2017 state elections as a Congress candidate, but he and nine other leaders joined the ruling party in 2019.
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Sopte, he claimed, has been neglecting the original BJP workers in Mandrem, causing widespread animosity among them.
Between 2014 until 2017, Parsekar served as Goa’s chief minister. After the then-chief minister, Manohar Parrikar, was appointed to the Union cabinet as the Defence Minister, he was chosen to lead the state.
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The BJP has released its first list of 34 candidates for the Goa Assembly elections on February 14. The state legislature has a total of 40 seats.
