Uma Bharti, the firebrand sanyasin, has been suspended from the primary membership of the Bharatiya Janata Party by the party's parliamentary board, which met at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi on Wednesday.
Briefing newsmen, Arun Jaitley, BJP general secretary, said, "The activities and utterances of Ms Bharti in the last couple of days amount to anti-party activity. The (BJP) parliamentary board has decided to suspend her from the party's primary membership with immediate effect."
Bharti will be served a show cause notice on Wednesday and given 72 hours to explain her conduct and why she should not be expelled from the party, Jaitley said.
He refused to answer questions about the anti-party activities of other BJP leaders.
The BJP parliamentary board meeting was presided over by former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, BJP president L K Advani, general secretaries Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley, and senior leaders like Jaswant Singh, M Venkaiah Naidu, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh and Sanjay Joshi.
Three days after she stormed out of the Madhya Pradesh legislature party meeting along with over a dozen supporting MLAs protesting the nomination of Shivraj Singh Chouhan as Madhya Pradesh chief minister, the party top brass took a stern view of her actions with Vajpayee terming it the 'height of indiscipline'.
Last November, she was suspended from the party for daring party chief Advani to take action against her in the full glare of the media.
On Tuesday, BJP had suspended six of her supporters, including former Union minister Prahlad Patel, for 'violent and unruly' incidents outside the venue, where the MLAs gathered to elect Chouhan as the chief minister.
A defiant Uma is now undertaking an Ayodhya padyatra, asserting that she was the 'real BJP' and she would not accept any disciplinary action.
With PTI inputs
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