Have to be spineless to survive in Congress: Ghulam Nabi Azad

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, April 5

Veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad has said Rahul Gandhi is the reason that he and many other leaders are not in the Congress today, noting that leaders have to be “spineless to survive in today’s Congress”.

In a freewheeling discussion on the state of the Congress, a party he quit last year on a bitter note after the ‘G23’ wrote to then party chief Sonia Gandhi demanding the outfit’s overhaul, Azad said the UPA-II Cabinet should have stuck to the 2013 ordinance, which then Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had trashed as “nonsense” publicly.

“It was a very weak Cabinet. It should have stuck to the decision. Then PM should not have bowed before Rahul. No outsider except the President can overrule a Cabinet decision. The Cabinet took a wrong decision. That ordinance would have saved him today,” the former J&K CM said.

Rahul’s disqualification as MP was wrong, Azad said, adding the party “should not issue a whip to leaders to accompany Rahul to the ED’s office or the Surat court. Former PM PV Narasimha Rao appeared before the Jain Commission, but never asked any leader to accompany him”.

He was speaking after the launch of his autobiography “Azaad” by former Union Minister Karan Singh, who praised Azad’s two-and-a-half years of J&K chief ministership as “the best period of J&K governance”.