GN Azad Quits Congress: “Decisions Taken By Rahul Gandhi, Or His Guards”
In a long resignation letter, Ghulam Nabi Azad praised Sonia Gandhi while blaming her son Rahul for the Congress's defeat in the 2014 national election.
New Delhi:
Ghulam Nabi Azad, one of the Congress’s tallest leaders, quit the party today with a scalding attack on Rahul Gandhi, blasting him for “childish behaviour”, “glaring immaturity” and for letting a “coterie of inexperienced sycophants” run the party.
In a lacerating five-page resignation letter to Sonia Gandhi, he blamed her son Rahul for the Congress’s defeat in the 2014 national election – a turning point for the party that has been struggling to win elections since.
The Congress is “comprehensively destroyed” and has reached a point of no return, he declared, and slammed a “remote control model” in which Sonia Gandhi is “just a nominal figurehead” while important decisions are taken by “Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs (personal assistants)”.
Mr Azad, 73, is the senior most leader to quit the Congress, which has seen several big exits over the past few years. There are reports of another senior leader exiting soon.
Honoured with the Padma Bhushan this year, Mr Azad has been accused by a section of the Congress of cozying up to the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who describes him as a good friend.
Mr Azad, a Congress man for over five decades, dropped the bombshell at a time all three Gandhis are abroad.
In his parting shot, Mr Azad said the Congress had conceded its political space to the BJP and regional parties “because the leadership in the past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual” at the helm of the party.
“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,” Mr Azad wrote, pointing out that Sonia Gandhi had heeded senior leaders.
All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined, he said, and “new coterie of inexperienced sycophants” started running the affairs of the party.
“One of the most glaring examples of his immaturity was the tearing up of the government ordnance in the full glare of the media by Rahul Gandhi,” he said.
Rahul Gandhi in 2013 tore up a controversial ordnance or special order to spare convicted lawmakers from disqualification and called it “complete nonsense”, embarrassing his own Congress-led government and then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
“This childish behaviour completely subverted the authority of the Prime Minister and the government of India. This one single action more than anything else contributed significantly to the defeat of the UPA government in 2014 that was at the receiving end of a campaign of calumny and insinuation from a combination of forces of the right wing and certain unscrupulous corporate interests,” Mr Azad’s letter said.
