Five-time MP and Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh's brother Lakshman Singh is set to return to the Congress nearly nine years after he left it to join the BJP.

Congress sources said all formalities in this regard have been completed at the state level and an announcement was expected anytime soon after the central clearance.

The move comes months ahead of the 2013 assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh where the Congress lost power to BJP in 2003. It is also learnt that Lakshman's son, Aditya Pratap Singh, is going to contest the Raghogarh municipal elections on a Congress ticket.

Lakshman was expelled by the BJP in July 2010 for demanding an apology from party chief Nitin Gadkari for his comments against the Congress on the Afzal Guru issue.

Before his defeat in 2009 Lok Sabha elections, Lakshman, known as 'Chote Raja' or 'Chunnu Raja', had represented the Rajgarh parliamentary constituency in Madhya Pradesh five times - four on the Congress ticket and once as a BJP candidate.

There are also murmurs that Digvijaya's son Jayvardhan and late Arjun Singh's daughter Beena Singh too might join the Congress before the assembly elections. Beena had contested the 2009 Lok Sabha polls from Sidhi as an independent candidate after the Congress denied her ticket from Satna.