Ex-Odisha CM Giridhar Gamang’s ‘homecoming’ with wife, son: Back to Congress via BJP, BRS

Former Odisha Chief Minister and nine-time MP Giridhar Gamang, 80, returned to the Congress fold on Wednesday, nine years after he resigned from the party.

A popular tribal leader, Gamang joined the BJP in May 2015, one month after he quit the Congress. In January 2023, he also left the BJP, citing “humiliation”, andjoined the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) as the K Chandrasekhar Rao-led party looked to expand beyond its home state of Telangana.

Given Gamang’s base in Southern Odisha — he won the Koraput Lok Sabha seat nine times between 1971 and 2009 — the BRS hoped it could have a face through which it can reach out to Telugu voters in Odisha. But the BRS’s own ambitions took a hit after it lost power in Telangana in the November 2023 Assembly polls.

Sensing no future in the BRS, Gamang has now returned to the Congress along with his wife Hema Gamang, a former MP from Koraput, son Shishir Gamang and former MP Sanjay Bhoi barely a couple of months before the simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in Odisha.

They rejoined the Congress fold at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters in the presence of senior Congress leader Ajay Maken and AICC in-charge of Odisha Ajoy Kumar.

Bhoi, a former Congress MP from Bargarh during 2009-14, switched to the BJP in December 2022. The Congress is likely to field him from the Bargarh parliamentary seat now.

In his reaction, Gamang said, “I have returned to Congress, where I had spent more than four decades of my political career. The party has accepted me and I am thankful to them. Though I had left the party, I had never left its thoughts and ideologies.”

Asked whether he would be contesting in the upcoming polls, Gamang said he would accept whatever responsibility will be given