'Situation irretrievable,' Ghulam Nabi Azad snaps ties with Congress after 5 decades, to float party

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, August 26

In the severest blow to the Congress in recent times, former Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad quit the party on Friday after tearing into its president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi for letting the organisation go adrift and running it with the “UPA-like remote control model”.

Azad, 73, resigned from all party posts, including its primary membership, slamming Rahul Gandhi for “demolishing the internal consultative mechanisms, sidelining seniors, spawning a coterie of inexperienced sycophants and letting security guards and personal assistants take decisions”.

Editorial: Azad’s parting shot

Ties with Cong turned bitter in recent years

• Azad was a constant fixture in CWC’s decision-making process
• A Sonia loyalist since Sitaram Kesri’s exit as party chief in 2000
• Known for his ability to negotiate, was often sent by the leadership on fire-fighting mission
• But it was never the same after 2020 when he headed G23, seeking leadership change
• The ties broke irretrievably after Sonia denied Azad a renomination to the RS last year
• Eyebrows were raised when PM Modi praised Azad in his speech during his farewell in 2021
• When the Modi govt conferred Padma Bhushan on Azad, senior leaders called it a political decision
• Recently, Azad quit as head of the J&K Cong campaign committee hours after he was appointed

Not joining BJP

I will float my own party. Will see if the party can also take a national shape. I am not joining the BJP. I have friendly ties with all parties in J&K. —Ghulam Nabi Azad

The move, on the eve of the Congress Working Committee’s Sunday meeting to approve the final schedule for the election of the new party president and Bharat Jodo Yatra commencing on September 7, stunned the party, which accused Azad of “betrayal”. AICC communication chief Jairam Ramesh said, “GNA’s DNA had been Modi-fied”, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s heartfelt farewell to Azad on his retirement from the Rajya Sabha last year, the Padma Bhushan honour and the permission to retain government accommodation beyond the term. Azad, who joined the party in 1970s and also served as J&K Chief Minister, in a stinging five-page resignation letter to Sonia, termed the ongoing organisational elections a “giant fraud to perpetuate the party’s hold on the ruins of what once was a national movement….” He said the exercise was doomed to fail as the party “had been comprehensively destroyed and the situation had become irretrievable”.

“The Congress has reached such a point of no return that now proxies were being propped up to take over the leadership of the party…. The chosen one would be nothing more than a puppet on a string…. 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 place a non-serious individual at the helm of the party,” Azad said, attacking Rahul and lamenting that G-23 leaders were “crudely vilified” for flagging the party’s shortcomings and suggesting remedies.

Once a Sonia confidant, Azad said under her leadership since 2014 and later under Rahul the Congress lost two Lok Sabha elections; 39 of the 49 Assembly elections between 2014 and 2022; 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 has a very marginal coalition partner in others. Since the 2019 elections, the situation has only worsened,” Azad said, noting that Rahul stepped down in May 2019 “in a huff and not before insulting senior party functionaries.”

Also in a first, the former UPA minister said Rahul’s “childish” act of publicly tearing up a Cabinet approved ordinance in 2013 “more than anything else contributed significantly to the defeat of the UPA government in 2014.” In a veiled jibe at Sonia, the G-23 leader said the AICC should have undertaken a Congress jodo exercise before embarking on Bharat Jodo Yatra.

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