Former UP Minister Mairajuddin Ahmed joins Congress

Meerut (UP), Oct 18 (PTI) Former Uttar Pradesh minister Mairajuddin Ahmed joined the Congress party on Friday, over a month after resigning from the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
     Ahmed said he took membership of the Congress in the presence of the party's national general secretary Avinash Pandey and state president Ajay Rai at the 'Samvidhan Bachao Sankalp Sammelan' held in Ghaziabad Friday.
     "Work will be done to strengthen the Congress party in the fight to save the Constitution. I have an old relationship with the Congress party," Ahmed told PTI.
     Reiterating the reason for leaving RLD, Ahmed said that the image of the Rashtriya Lok Dal that Chaudhary Ajit Singh had created, which had a campaign to take along people of all classes including farmers, Dalits and Muslims, is looking one-sided.
     "In such a situation, their trust has been broken and to a large extent people have started separating from the Rashtriya Lok Dal," he added.
     The RLD, led by party president Jayant Chaudhary, had joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and drifted away from the INDIA bloc, comprising Congress, Samajwadi Party, among others.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)