The decision came barely 11 days before the upcoming November 20 Maharashtra Assembly elections, taking the SS(UBT) circles by surprise.

A terse notification signed by the party Secretary Vinayak Raut was issued this morning on a day when the SS(UBT) President Uddhav Thackeray is expected to address an election rally in Hingoli on Saturday.

A party leader in Nagpur said that Wankhede was reportedly attempting to sabotage the prospects of the official MVA candidates in and around Hingoli and making efforts to help the nominees of rival parties.

He was also accused of other alleged irregularities, after which the SS(UBT) hit back with the expulsion orders late on Friday night.

Earlier with the (undivided) Shiv Sena, Wankhede, 63, served as a MLA thrice from the Hadgaon Assembly seat in 1995, 1999, 2004 and then as Lok Sabha MP from 2009, but lost the Lok Sabha polls in 2014.

After the Shiv Sena split in June 2022, Wankhede chose to remain with the Thackeray-led faction and was hopeful of getting a party ticket in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, but the party fielded Nagesh B. Patil-Ashetkar who trounced the rival Shiv Sena’s contender Hemant S. Patil.

The MVA alliance of Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (SP)-Shiv Sena (UBT) is going full steam in the Maharashtra Assembly polls hoping to unseat the Mahayuti of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party-Nationalist Congress Party, under drastically changed circumstances compared with 2019.

That year (2019), after a fractured mandate, the MVA alliance took power with Thackeray as the CM.

However, after a vertical split in his party, he was unseated and Eknath Shinde took over.

A year later in July 2023, the NCP founded by Sharad Pawar also split and one faction headed by his nephew Ajit Pawar joined the Mahayuti regime, presenting challenges for all the parties in the 2024 Assembly polls, with voting scheduled on November 20.