Azad Quits Congress

New Delhi, Aug 26(Reporters Today Bureau): Ghulam Nabi Azad, a Congress veteran and former Union Minister, quit his party of more than five decades on Friday.

In his resignation letter he made a scathing attack on Rahul Gandhi, calling him out for “childish behaviour”, glaring “immaturity” and for “demolishing the consultative mechanism” in the party.

In his resignation letter to Sonia Gandhi, he blamed Rahul for the Congress’s defeat in the 2014 national election since when the party has been struggling to win elections.

He alleged that the Congress has reached a “point of no return.

He said Sonia Gandhi has just become nominal figurehead while important decisions were taken by “Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs (personal assistants)”.

The 73 year old Congress veteran said the Congress had conceded its political space to the BJP and regional parties “because the leadership in the past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual” at the helm of the party.

“Unfortunately, after the entry of Rahul Gandhi into politics and particularly after January 2013, when he was appointed Vice President by you, the entire consultative mechanism which existed earlier was demolished by him,” Azad wrote.

All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined, he said, and “a new coterie of inexperienced sycophants” started running the affairs of the party.

“One of the most glaring examples of his immaturity was the tearing up of the government ordinance in the full glare of the media by Rahul Gandhi,” he said.

The ordinance was incubated in the Congress core group, unanimously approved by the cabinet chaired by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and approved by the President, he said.

“This childish behaviour completely subverted the authority of the Prime Minister and the government of India. This one single action more than anything else contributed significantly to the defeat of the UPA government in 2014 that was at the receiving end of a campaign of calumny and insinuation from a combination of forces of the right wing and certain unscrupulous corporate interests,” Azad’s letter said.

He went on to list the Congress’ down spiral over the past few years.

“Under your stewardship since 2014 and subsequently that of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress has lost two Lok Sabha elections in a humiliating manner. It has lost 39 out of the 49 assembly elections held between 2014 – 2022. The party only won four state elections and was able to get into a coalition situation in six instances. Unfortunately, today, the Congress is ruling in only two states and is a very marginal coalition partner in two other states.”

Azad said since the 2019 national election the situation has only worsened.

“After Rahul Gandhi stepped down in a ‘huff’ and not before insulting all the senior party functionaries who have given their lives to the party in a meeting of the extended working committee, you took over as interim president. A position that you have continued to hold even today for the past three years. Worse still the ‘remote control model’ that demolished the institutional integrity of the UPA government now got applied to the Indian National Congress. While you are just a nominal figurehead all the important decisions were being taken by Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs.”

Notably, Azad was a leading member of the G-23 or the group of 23 “dissenters” who wrote to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 calling for a complete overhaul of the organization and a full-time, collective and visible leadership.

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