Gurugram: Sonia Doohan, a Sharad Pawar loyalist from Haryana who earned the sobriquet of “Lady James Bond” for her actions five years ago, quit the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) and joined the Congress Tuesday, citing differences with NCP (SP) working president Supriya Sule.
Doohan was in the limelight in 2019 for retrieving four NCP MLAs from a Gurugram hotel when Devendra Fadnavis of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was trying to form a government in Maharashtra with the support of Ajit Pawar.
The 32-year-old joined the Congress at MP Deepender Hooda’s official residence on Talkatora Road in the national capital in the presence of Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the leader of the Opposition in the Haryana Legislative Assembly, the party’s state president Udai Bhan, and Haryana in-charge Deepak Babaria.
“Supriya tai is an insecure person. She feels insecure if she sees leaders around her within the party. She likes personal assistants and salaried staff around her. She is happy to field her assistants, who are being paid Rs 15,000 as a monthly salary from her, as candidates in the elections, but she can’t see leaders in her party. If any leader of her party starts growing in stature, she feels insecure,” alleged Doohan while speaking to ThePrint about why she quit the party.
A native of Petwar village of Hisar district who currently lives in Gurugram, Doohan has been active in the Narnaund assembly seat of Haryana for the past couple of months and wants to contest the upcoming assembly elections from the constituency.
Doohan had telegraphed her intentions of quitting the NCP(SP) in May this year when she criticised Baramati MP Sule after the national president of the youth wing, Dheeraj Sharma, who was with Doohan during her operation to extract the MLAs in 2019, quit the party to join the Ajit Pawar-led faction.
Doohan confirmed to ThePrint Tuesday that she had made up her mind in May when Sharma left the NCP(SP) over problems with Sule, who is the daughter of Sharad Pawar, but made it clear that she had no plans to join any other party at the time.
She said that she and some other party leaders had tried hard to find a solution to the problem and had sought a meeting with Sule after the polling in the parliamentary elections in May this year.
“However, the day we were to meet she called me up and said certain things which left no scope for a solution. That day, I decided that I had to eventually leave the party. I don’t have any problems with Pawar saheb (Sharad Pawar) whose blessings are still with me, but it had become impossible to get along with Supriya tai,” she said.
Sule and her PA, Siddheswar Shimpi, did not respond to ThePrint’s calls and messages for comment.
When ThePrint drew Doohan’s attention to the fact that posts on her X (formerly Twitter) page showed that she was already active in Congress programmes and even attended Deepender Hooda’s public meeting at Narnaund under his campaign “Haryana Mange Hisaab”, she said went to the Congress MP’s meeting as a member of the INDIA opposition bloc.
“My village, Petwar, is part of the Narnaund assembly constituency. When Deepender Hooda visited, I attended the meeting in the capacity of an INDIA bloc co-convener for the party,” she said.
Who is Sonia Doohan?
Doohan was born in Petwar village, Hisar, in a farming family on 13 September, 1992. After completing her initial education in the Hisar area, she moved to Ambala to pursue a BSc at Kurukshetra University. It was here that she first became involved in politics, ultimately deciding to join the undivided NCP at the age of 21.
Doohan quickly rose through the ranks within the party. She initially led the NCP’s student wing in two elections at Delhi University, serving first as the party’s state president and later as national general secretary. She was subsequently appointed as national president of the NCP’s student wing. (The NCP split in July 2023 with Ajit Pawar getting the party name and symbol and the Sharad Pawar faction becoming the NCP (SP).)
It was in 2019, during Fadnavis’s short-lived attempt to form a government with Ajit Pawar’s support, that Doohan made headlines. Four NCP MLAs — Narhari Zirwal, Daulat Daroda, Anil Patil, and Nitin Pawar — had gone missing after Ajit Pawar was sworn in as Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister.
Doohan, along with Dheeraj Sharma, led a mission to ‘rescue’ these missing MLAs from a hotel in Gurugram, where they were allegedly being held by the BJP. The operation involved NCP workers maintaining surveillance of the hotel and waiting for the right moment to act. Once reconnaissance was conducted, they extracted the MLAs through a rear exit that was not covered by CCTV cameras. The group was then safely transported to the residence of NCP president Sharad Pawar at 6 Janpath, New Delhi.
In a separate incident in July 2022, Doohan attempted a similar covert operation in Goa. She tried to access a hotel where rebel Shiv Sena MLAs were being put up during the conflict between then Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and senior leader Eknath Shinde. Using fake identity cards, Doohan booked a room at the heavily guarded hotel. Though she was arrested, she was later granted bail by a court.
On 26 January 2023, Doohan disrupted an event of Sandeep Singh, then a minister of state in the Manohar Lal Khattar’s government in Haryana, when he was unfurling the tricolour at Pehowa in Kurukshetra on the Republic Day.
The Republic Day event had come just after an FIR was filed against Singh for sexual assault on the complaint of a junior athletics coach.
“Sahab, rukiye! Aap dhwajaarohan nahi kar sakte. Aap apavitra hain (Sir, stop! You can’t unfurl the flag. You are a tainted person),” Doohan allegedly told him as she rushed Singh. The police took her from the event venue in a jeep.
She later told ThePrint that the police had wanted to book her under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code, but refrained after khap panchayats warned of them of an agitation.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
Also read: Multiple parties, trust deficit: Why ‘meet and greets’ are making waves in Maharashtra politics