Making no bones about his displeasure over his exclusion from the Maharashtra Cabinet, a miffed The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP-AP) leader and a popular Other Backward Classes (OBC) face in the State, Chhagan Bhujbal said on Monday that he would decide on his next move after talking to his constituents and members of a Phule organisation of which he is the president.

“Yes. I am upset… I may or may not have been given a ministerial post but Chhagan Bhujbal is not finished,” Bhujbal said, when media persons button-holed him for comment on his exclusion from the State Cabinet.

Talking to media persons on the first day of the Winter Session of the State Legislature in Nagpur, Bhubal said, “I will take a call on my future course of action after consulting the people in the constituency and also the members of the Samata Parishad”. Seventy-seven-year-old Bhujbal, who is an influential leader from OBC’s Mali community, is the founder- president of  the Akhil Bharatiya Mahatma Phule Samata Parishad.

A seven-term MLA, Bhujbal represented Mazgaon constituency in south Mumbai for two terms and was elected to the State Assembly for the next five-terms from Yeola in Nashik district. He also served as an MLC for one term. Apart from being a senior minister in a Congress government in the late eighties and early eighties and Food  and Civil Supplies Minister in the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government from 2019 to 2022, Bhujbal wasd the deputy chief minister in the Congress-led Democratic Front government between 1994 and 2004.

“I may or may not have been given ministerial posts but Chhagan Bhujbal is not finished,” he told reporters in Nagpur on Monday. One of the senior most politicians in the state, Bhujbal (77) is a two-time MLA from Mazgaon in Mumbai and five-term MLA from Yeola in Nashik besides serving a term as an MLC.

Asked as to why he had not been inducted in the Devendra Fadnavis government, Bhujbal said: “Whom to induct in the ministry is the decision of the party leaders. They (party leaders) told us that senior leaders were not being included to give a chance to new people...  That being the case, I feel I have been rewarded… (for challenging Manoj Jarange-Patil)… I am an ordinary worker, what difference does it make if I am ignored or thrown out?”.

However, NCP MLC and spokesperson Amol Mitkari denied that anyone had been upset over the expand expansion carried by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Sunday :”We don’t think so ( that any one is upset)… if anyone is upset, he or she can take up the issue in a party forum. As far as Bhujbal is concerned, we heard it in the media… we also heard reports that he would be sent to Rajya Sabha.”