Bhubaneswar: The Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC) has asked Barabati-Cuttack MLA Sofia Firdous to resign from the party if she has any plan to fight the 2029 Assembly polls from any other political outfit.

OPCC president Bhakta Charan Das asked Firdous to resign from the primary membership of the party on Monday, a day after her father and former legislator Mohammed Moquim announced that the Barabati-Cuttack MLA will contest the next Assembly elections as a candidate of newly-formed Odisha Janata Congress (OJC).

“If Firdous has decided to contest the 2029 Assembly elections from any other party, then she should resign from the Congress. She won the 2024 polls on Congress ticket. So, she should quit the Congress party before announcing her candidature from another party,” said the OPCC president.

Moquim had announced that Barabati-Cuttack MLA Firdous will not contest the next Assembly polls from the Congress party.

“Sofia will not contest the 2029 Assembly polls on Congress ticket. She will fight the elections from Barabati-Cuttack seat on OJP ticket,” said Moquim, the founder of the newly-formed regional party in Odisha.

According to the former legislator, the Congress party has drifted away from its core ideology and it has ‘no future’ in the state as well as in the country.

It is worth mentioning here that Firdous got elected from the prestigious Barabati-Cuttack Assembly seat on a Congress ticket in 2024 by defeating her nearest BJP rival Purnachandra Mohapatra by around 8,000 votes. 

However, Firdous and two other Congress MLAs—Ramesh Jena and Dasarathi Gomango—were suspended from the party in connection with the alleged cross-voting during the March 16 Rajya Sabha elections in Odisha.