While Congress was still in the process of placating Anand Sharma, who recently resigned from all the key posts of the party, it suffered a fresh jolt today after its veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned from all posts of the party, including the primary leadership.
He sent a five-page note to party interim president Sonia Gandhi where he recounted his long association with the party and his close relationship with Indira Gandhi.
“The situation in the Congress party has reached a point of ‘no return,” Azad wrote in his detailed resignation letter, days after he resigned from the organisational posts of Jammu & Kashmir.
“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 AICC have been coerced to sign on lists prepared by the coterie that runs the AICC sitting in 24 Akbar Road,” Azad wrote.
Without mincing any word, he attacked Rahul Gandhi and said the party at the national level conceded to BJP and regional parties at the state level. “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 said.
Azad said the situation has only worsened since the 2019 elections 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. The remote control model that destroyed the UPA got applied to Congress, Azad wrote.
“While you are just a nominal figurehead, all important decisions were being taken by Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs,” he wrote.
Calling Sonia Gandhi a “nominal figurehead”, the veteran politician underscored that she had occupied the post of interim president after Rahul Gandhi stepped down as party chief “in a huff” over the Congress’s abysmal
defeat in the 2019 general elections.
“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 guards and PAs,” said Azad.
The Congress, he said, has lost both the will and the ability under tutelage of the coterie that runs the All India Congress Committee to fight for what is right for India, Azad, part of the G-23 group seeking change in party, said.
In August 2020, 23 senior Congress leaders wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi requesting immediate and active leadership and an organisational rejig. In the letter, they sought an overhaul within the party in view of frequent failures in the Lok Sabha and state elections.
Speaking about the fate of the G-23 leaders, he 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 weakness 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 extended CWC.”
Before starting a ‘Bharat jodo yatra’, the leadership should have undertaken a ‘Congress jodo yatra’, the veteran leader said in his letter.