Ghulam Nabi Azad quits Congress, says immature Rahul has destroyed party | India News

NEW DELHI: In the most sensational exit from Congress in the continuing post-2019 exodus, veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned from the party on Friday, accusing Rahul Gandhi of reducing to “ruins” what was once a “national movement” that won the country independence.
He traced the decline of Congress to the induction of the Gandhi scion in politics in 2004 and specifically to his appointment as vice-president of AICC in 2013 – mocking him for “immaturity”, “childish behaviour”, and calling him a “non serious” politician who is surrounded by “a coterie of sycophants”.
Azad, who severed his over half-century association with Congress with a five-page resignation letter to Sonia Gandhi, said the party has been “comprehensively destroyed” and the situation is “irretrievable”. He alleged the upcoming party election consists of a plan to foist “proxies” as the Congress president – “puppet on a string”. He called the internal polls a “farce and sham” and a “giant fraud” as no election had taken place in any block, district or state.

In his no-holds-barred letter, Azad said Rahul has demolished the “consultative mechanism” that existed in the party, and now the decisions are taken by his “security guards and PAs”. He told Sonia that Rahul has propped up a “remote control model” after resigning as party chief in 2019, and she is “just a nominal figurehead” for the last three years in her capacity as interim president. Targeting Rahul, Azad said, “The remote control model demolished the institutional integrity of the UPA government.”

Sniping at Rahul Gandhi, he said Congress has lost the political space at the national level to BJP and in states to regional parties, because “the leadership in past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual at the helm of the party” – a not so subtle jibe at the Gandhi scion.

Sensational though it sounds, Azad’s distancing from Congress has been brewing for last two years, which first erupted when he led a group of 23 partymen who shot off a letter to Sonia in August 2020, expressing concern over the drift in the party and demanding urgent reforms and collective leadership to rejuvenate the organisation. Since then, he was not renominated to Rajya Sabha where he was Leader of the Opposition. While the ginger group continued its activities, Azad found himself isolated further. The last straw was possibly the refusal of RS nomination this May, after raising his hopes. Rahul is said to have put his foot down though Sonia apparently was favourably inclined towards the veteran and one-time close aide. Rahul wanted Azad to go back and take the reins of J&K Congress, which he declined.

While narrating his association with the Gandhi family since 1970s starting with Indira Gandhi, the former J&K chief minister told Sonia that while her role in the formation of UPA governments in 2004 and 2009 was “sterling”, a key reason behind her success was “that as president, you heeded the wise counsel of senior leaders, besides trusting their judgement and delegating powers to them”.
He said under Rahul, “all experienced leaders were sidelined and new coterie of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the party”. He said Rahul’s action of publicly tearing up a government ordinance (about disqualification of convicted MPs) subverted the authority of the Prime Minister and the government, and was the principal reason behind UPA’s defeat in 2014.

He said the suggestions for revitalising the organisation, made in Panchmarhi, Shimla and 2013 Jaipur ‘Chintan Shivirs’, were never implemented, despite repeated reminders.
Not sparing Sonia either, Azad painted the party’s decline in stark terms by noting that Congress has suffered two humiliating defeats in Lok Sabha elections, and lost 39 of 49 assembly polls, under her and Rahul Gandhi’s leadership. He said the situation has only worsened since 2019 when Rahul quit as party president in a “huff” after “insulting in a CWC meeting all the senior party functionaries who have given their lives to the party”. He said the party now rules in just two states and is a marginal partner in two others.
He lamented that “under the tutelage of the coterie that the runs the AICC”, the party has “lost both the will and ability to fight for what is right for India”.
Making light of the proposed nationwide ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, Azad said the party should have first undertaken a “Congress Jodo” exercise.
He said the letter by 23 Congressmen (G-23) was aimed at flagging the “abysmal drift” in the party, but “the coterie chose to unleash its sycophants on us and got us attacked, vilified and humiliated in the most crude manner possible”.