Ghulam Nabi Azad, one of the Congress party's senior-most leaders who had been demanding sweeping organizational changes, has resigned from the primary membership of the party that has seen several high-profile exits over the last three years. In a scathing letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the Jammu and Kashmir stalwart wrote that the party has lost the will and the ability under the tutelage of what he called the coterie.
Referring to Rahul Gandhi's planned nationwide political campaign, he said the party must carry out the Congress Jodo exercise (fix Congress) rather than Bharath Jodo Yatra (Unite India campaign).
"The Indian National Congress has lost both the will and the ability under the tutelage of the Coterie that runs the AICC to fight for what is right for India. In fact, before starting Bharath Jodo Yatra the leadership should have undertaken a Congress Jodo exercise across the country. It is therefore with great regret and an extremely laden heart that I have decided to sever my half-a-century-old association with the Indian National Congress," Azad in his letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
The senior leader called the internal elections a sham and attacked Rahul Gandhi for his role in the party.
"After the entry of Shri Rahul Gandhi into politics and particularly after January 2013 when he was appointed as Vice President by you, the entire Consultative mechanism which existed earlier was demolished by him," he wrote.
"One of the most glaring examples of this immaturity was the tearing up of a government ordinance in the full glare of the media by Shri Rahul Gandhi. The said ordinance was incubated in the Congress Core Group and subsequently unanimously approved by the Union Cabinet presided over by the Prime Minister of India and duly approved even by the President of India. This childish behavior completely subverted the authority of the Prime Minister and Government of India," he added.
He also claimed the action was responsible for the party's defeat.
"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 the forces of the right-wing and certain unscrupulous corporate interests," he added.
He alleged that Sonia Gandhi had run the UPA-1 in what he called the remote control model.
"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 Shri Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs," she alleged.
Azad's resignation came days after he quit the post of Jammu and Kashmir's Congress unit chief on the same day he was appointed. His colleague Anand Sharma, another Congress dissident, later resigned from the Himachal Pradesh unit of the party citing exclusion and insults.
“I have resigned with a heavy heart from the Chairmanship of the Steering Committee of the Congress for the Himachal Elections. Reiterating that I am a lifelong congressman and remain firm on my convictions. Committed to Congress ideology that runs in my blood, let there be no doubts about this! However, given the continuing exclusion and insults, as a self-respecting person- I was left with no choice,” Sharma wrote in his tweets.
Azad further wrote: "Some of my other colleagues and I will now persevere to perpetuate the ideals for which we have dedicated our entire adult lives outside the formal fold of the Indian National Congress."
Azad and Sharma were part of the 23 Congress politicians who had written an explosive letter to Sonia Gandhi after the party's debacle in the 2019 general elections, demanding sweeping changes in its organizational structures to promote intra-party democracy. Among their many demands were the appointment of a full-time Congress president and more transparency in the appointments to the Congress Working Committee, the party's highest decision-making body.
Both the demands of the dissidents have not been fulfilled yet even though the party has been piling up embarrassing losses in Assembly elections over the last three years.
Since the 2019 debacle, Congress has lost senior leaders like Jyotiraaditya Scindia, Jitin Prasad, and Kapil Sibal who became the Rajya Sabha MP from the Samajwadi Party.
