Hours after Ghulam Nabi Azab resigned from the party, five other leaders from Jammu and Kashmir said they have quit Congress in support of the veteran Congress leader’s resignation on Friday. Among those who have resigned from party posts are GM Saroori, Haji Abdul Rashid, Mohd Amin Bhat, Gulzar Ahmad Wani and Choudhary Mohd Akram, ANI reported.
“We the five ex-MLAs are resigning from the Congress party in support of Ghulam Nabi Azad. Now, only the JKPC president will be left alone,” said Jammu and Kashmir Congress leader GM Saroori.
In a five-page letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Azad said that he resigned from all party positions, including its primary membership, with a “heavy heart”.
The development comes more than a week after Azad declined to be a part of the party’s campaign committee head and a member of the political affairs panel of the Jammu and Kashmir unit. Hitting out at the party, Azad said that 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,” the former Union minister and Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha wrote.
Also Read: Ghulam Nabi Azad quits Congress, blames Rahul Gandhi in hard-hitting letter
Hitting out at former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, the former Rajya Sabha MP said that when Gandhi entered politics and became the vice president in 2013, he demolished the “entire consultative mechanism” that existed in the Congress.
Azad wrote, “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 to continue to hold even today for the past three years.”
“All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined and a new coterie of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the party,” he said.
Azad, who was part of the G-23 group seeking sweeping changes in the Congress party since 2020, said that the party has lost both the will and the ability under the “tutelage of the coterie that runs the AICC to fight for what is right for India”, adding, before starting a ‘Bharat jodo yatra’, the leadership should have undertaken a ‘Congress jodo yatra’.
The Bharat Jodo Yatra, a mass-outreach programme for over four months, that would begin on September 7 from Kanyakumari, and Congress leaders will traverse 3,500 kilometres through 12 states, which will conclude in Kashmir.
