Ghulam Nabi Azad resigns from Congress; says all decisions were being taken by Rahul Gandhi or his 'security guards' and 'personal assistants'

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, August 26

Things came to a head in the Congress on Friday with veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad calling it quits after tearing into Congress president Sonia Gandhi for letting the party go adrift and applying UPA’s remote control model to the Congress.

In a five-page letter to Sonia, Azad, 73, resigned from all posts including primary membership of the Congress, ending his 50-year-old association with the party.

He slammed the ongoing organisational elections as a sham, describing it as a “giant fraud on the party to perpetuate its hold on the ruins of what once was a national movement that fought for and won India’s independence.”

Just ahead of the September 7 Bharat Jodo Yatra, Azad, in a jibe at Sonia, said she should have first undertaken a ‘Congress jodo’ exercise across India.

Azad said the Congress had reached a point of no return with Sonia Gandhi serving as a nominal figure head since 2019 and all decisions being taken by Rahul Gandhi or “worse still his security guards and personal assistants”.

For the first time, Azad, a former minister in the UPA, slammed Rahul Gandhi’s act of publicly tearing an ordinance approved by the then cabinet chaired by PM Manmohan Singh and later by then President and noted, “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 recalled his association with past prime ministers and how he served in the cabinet of all Congress PMs and said to Sonia that under her stewardship since 2014 and subsequently that of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress had lost two Lok Sabha elections in a humiliating manner.

“The party has lost 39 out of 49 assembly elections held between 2014 and 2022. It has won only four state elections and was able to get into a coalition situation in six instances. Unfortunately, today, the Congress is ruling only in two states and is a marginal coalition partner in others. Since the 2019 elections, the situation has only worsened,” said Azad.

He noted how Rahul Gandhi stepped down “in a huff and not before insulting senior party functionaries who had given their lives to the party in a meeting of the extended working committee Sonia took over as interim president”.

‘Worse still the remote control model that demolished the institutional integrity of the UPA government now got applied to the Congress,” said Azad.

He lamented that the Congress had reached a point of no return now as proxies were being propped up to take over the leadership of the party.

The reference was to a possible nomination of Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot as party president with the CWC to meet this Sunday to approve the party chief’s election schedule. Azad questioned the organisational poll process saying it was doomed to fail because the party had been so comprehensively destroyed that the situation had become irretrievable.

“The chosen one would be nothing more than a puppet on a string….Unfortunately at the national level we have conceded the political space available to us to the BJP and state-level space to regional parties. All this happened because the leadership in the past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual at the helm of the party,” Azad wrote, adding that he and other senior leaders were heaped with crude humiliations when they wrote a letter to Sonia in August 2020 in larger party interest.

The former minister said the Congress organisational election process is a farce and a sham.

“At no place anywhere in the country have elections been held at any level of the organisation. Handpicked lieutenancy of AICC has been coerced to sign on the list prepared by the coterie that runs the AICC sitting in 24 Akbar Road. The AICC leadership is squarely responsible for perpetrating a giant fraud on the party to perpetuate its hold on the ruins of what once was a national movement,” said Azad asking AICC to introspect if this is what the Congress deserved in the 75th year of India’s independence.

In the letter, he said, “While undoubtedly as the president of the Congress you played a sterling role in the formation of both governments, one of the major reasons for this success was that as president you heeded the wise counsel of senior leaders, besides trusting their judgment and delegating powers to them. However, unfortunately after the entry of Rahul Gandhi into politics and particularly after January 2013 when he was appointed vice president, the entire consultative mechanism which existed earlier was demolished by him. All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined and a new coterie of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the party. One of the most glaring examples of this was the tearing up of a government ordinance in the full glare of the media by Rahul Gandhi.”

Azad hinted at forming a new party with “colleagues” saying, “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 Congress.” Meanwhile, many senior Congress leaders of J&K have resigned from the party is support of Ghulam Nabi Azad. These include GM Saroori, Haji Abdul Radhid, Mohd Amin Bhat, Gulzar Ahmad Wani and Choudhary Mohd Akram.

Sources said more leaders of the G-23 could quit.

The Tribune had reported in its columns this week that the G-23 was regrouping and had warned Congress top brass not to construe their silence as surrender.

Earlier this week, Anand Sharma resigned as Himachal Congress steering committee chairman.

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