In a fresh setback for the Congress, veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned from all party posts on Friday. In a detailed letter addressed to interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Azad said the ‘remote control model’ demolished the institutional integrity of the UPA govt.
He called out Rahul Gandhi’s immaturity and said that he had stepped down in a ‘huff’. Criticising Rahul’s ‘childish behaviour’, Azad said he “demolished the consultative mechanism” in the party.
“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,” he wrote in the five-page letter.
“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 “new coterie of inexperienced sycophants” started running the affairs of the party, he added. The situation in the Congress has reached a point of no return, he said, adding that ‘proxies’ are now being propped up to take over the leadership of the party.
“This experiment is doomed to fail because the party has been so comprehensively destroyed that situation has become irretrievable. Moreover, the ‘chosen one’ would be nothing more than a puppet on a string,” he wrote. He also called the organisational election process ‘a farce and a sham’.
Azad, whose resignation from all positions in the party, including its primary membership, comes ahead of crucial organisational elections, accused the leadership of committing a “giant fraud” on the party in the name of “farce and sham” internal polls. He said no such exercise had taken place at any level and lists are being prepared by the coterie that runs the AICC.
Azad has been almost a constant in the party’s decision-making processes through the decades — the Sanjay Gandhi days and the tumultuous Emergency years under Indira Gandhi, the Rajiv Gandhi era, the Narasimha Rao period and eventually the tenure of Congress’ longest serving president Sonia Gandhi who he addressed his blistering missive to.
A member of the G-23 group that sought change in the Congress, he told her the party had “lost both the will and ability under the tutelage of the coterie” running the affairs of the party to fight for what is right for India.
Azad said the Congress at the national level has conceded political space available to the BJP and state level space to regional parties “This all happened because the leadership in the past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual at the helm of the party,” he alleged.
“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 that fought for and attained the Independence of India,” Azad lashed out. “Does the Indian National Congress deserve this in the 75th year of India’s independence is a question that the AICC leadership must ask itself.”
