Veteran Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad Friday quit the Congress party and resigned from all his posts. In a five-page letter addressed to party president Sonia Gandhi, Azad said the situation in the Congress has reached a point of “no return”.
“The entire 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 lieutenants of the AICC have been coerced to sign on lists prepared by the coterie that runs the AICC sitting in 24 Akbar Road,” Azad said.
He said following the entry of Rahul Gandhi into politics, especially after he was appointed the vice-president of the party in 2013, “the entire consultative mechanism which existed earlier was demolished by him”.
“The entire 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 lieutenants of the AICC have been coerced to sign on lists prepared by the coterie that runs the AICC sitting in 24 Akbar Road,” Azad said.
He said following the entry of Rahul Gandhi into politics, especially after he was appointed the vice-president of the party in 2013, “the entire consultative mechanism which existed earlier was demolished by him”.
“All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined and new coterie of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the party,” he said.
“Under your stewardship since 2014 and subsequently that of Rahul Gandhi, the INC has lost two Lok Sabha elections in a humiliating manner. It has lost 39 out of the 49 assembly elections held between 2014-2022. The party only won four state elections and was able to get into a coalition situation in six instances. Unfortunately, today, the INC is ruling in only two states and is a very marginal coalition partner in two other states.
“Since the 2019 elections, the situation in the party has only worsened. After Rahul Gandhi stepped down in a huff and not before insulting all the senior party functionaries who have given their lives to the party in a meeting of the extended Working Committee, you took over as interim president. A position that you have continue to hold even today for the past three years. 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 Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guard’s and PA’s,” Azad added.
“In the August of 2020 when I and 22 other senior colleagues including former Union Ministers and Chief Ministers wrote to you to flag the abysmal drift in the party, the coterie chose to unleash its sycophants on us and got us attacked, vilified and humiliated in the most crude manner possible. In fact, on the directions of the coterie that runs the AICC today, my mock funeral procession was taken out in Jammu. Those who committed this indiscipline were feted in Delhi by the General Secretaries of the AICC and Rahul Gandhi personally. Subsequently the same coterie unleashed its goondas to physically attack the residence of a former ministerial colleague Kapil Sibal, who incidentally was defending you and your kin in the courts of law for your alleged attacks of omission and commission,” Azad said.
“The only crime committed by the 23 senior leaders who wrote that letter out of concern for the party is that they pointed out both the reasons for the weaknesses in the party and the remedies thereof. Unfortunately, instead of taking those views on board in a constructive and cooperative manner, we were abused, humiliated, insulted and vilified in a specially summoned meeting of the extended CWC meeting.
“Unfortunately, the situation in the Congress party has reached such a point of no return that now proxies are 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,” he added. “Moreover, the chosen one would be nothing more than a puppet on a string.”
Azad also questioned where the Congress deserved this in the 75th year of India’s independence.
Azad, who recounted his years of service to the party in his letter, added that it was with “great regret and an extremely leaden heart that I have decided to sever my half a century old assocation with Indian National Congress.”
Last week, Azad had resigned from the organisational post of Jammu and Kashmir citing health issues
