Chandigarh: In a jolt to the Congress in Haryana where Assembly polls are due in October, senior leader Kiran Choudhry and her daughter Shruti Choudhry quit the party and will join the ruling BJP on Wednesday.
Both Kiran Choudhry and Shruti Choudhry resigned from the primary membership of the Congress on Tuesday.
Shruti Choudhry was also the working president of the Haryana unit of the Congress.
Kiran Choudhry, who is also a sitting MLA, told PTI that both she and Shruti, a former MP, will be joining the BJP on Wednesday.
Kiran Choudhry snapped her four-decade long association with the Congress. Their joining is likely to come as a big boost to the BJP in Haryana with few months remaining for the polls.
Kiran Choudhry, daughter-in-law of former Haryana chief minister Bansi Lal, is considered as bete noire of senior Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda. She and her daughter sent separate resignation letters to Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge in which they took a veiled dig at Hooda.
While Kiran Choudhry, 69, wrote that Haryana Congress is being run as a "personal fiefdom", Shruti Choudhry, in an apparent reference to Hooda, alleged that the state unit centres around one person who has compromised the interest of the party for his own "selfish" and "petty interests".
“It is most unfortunate that the Congress party in Haryana is being run as the personal fiefdom leaving no space for sincere voices like mine, who have been stifled, humiliated and conspired against in a most well-orchestrated and systematic manner, thus, significantly hampering my diligent efforts to represent our people and uphold the values, I have always stood for,” wrote Kiran Choudhry in her letter
to Kharge.