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Journalism of Courage
From Sharad Pawar to Ghulam Nabi Azad, the Congress has seen the exit of many a veteran and leader since 1998 when the Gandhi family took control of the party. But what sets apart Azad’s resignation is that his is the first time that a senior leader has put, on record, such a strong and pointed critique of Rahul Gandhi in a letter to Sonia Gandhi.
Calling Rahul “a non-serious individual,” whom the leadership tried to “foist” upon the party, Azad points to his “immaturity” and “childish behaviour” in the context of his 2013 trashing of the ordinance brought by the Manmohan Singh government to negate a Supreme Court order on disqualifying convicted MPs and MLAs. (Rahul had called the ordinance a “complete nonsense” which should be “torn up and thrown out.”)
That “one single action more than anything else contributed significantly to the defeat of the UPA government in 2014,” Azad wrote, because it “completely subverted the authority of the Prime Minister and the Government of India.”
In his letter to Sonia, who is in the US with Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra for a medical check-up, Azad said Rahul had “demolished” the “entire consultative mechanism” in the party which had helped Sonia during her tenure as President and that he had sidelined all “senior and experienced” leaders and let a “new coterie” of “inexperienced sycophants” run the party.
Referring to the Congress’s back-to-back defeats in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019 and the string of losses in Assembly elections since then, he said “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 continued to hold even today.”
This was a reference to the CWC meeting in May 2019 in which Rahul attacked the senior leaders accusing them of not supporting him in his ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the Rafale fighter jet issue and named senior leaders like P Chidambaram, Kamal Nath and Ashok Gehlot for putting the interests of their sons ahead of the party. He had accused the veterans of putting pressure on the leadership for securing tickets for their sons.
“Worse still, the remote control 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,” he said.
Contrast Azad’s outbursts to what Sharad Pawar, P A Sangma and Tariq Anwar had said in a letter to Sonia Gandhi on the foreign origin issue in 1999. They lavished praise on her, saying her “presence in the party gave it new life” even as they politely told her she should not aspire for the Prime Minister’s post.
“Our inspiration, our soul, our honour, our pride, our dignity, is rooted in our soil, it has to be of this earth. Soniaji, you have become a part of us because you have all along respected this. We, therefore, find it strange that you should allow yourself to forget it at this crucial juncture. It is not possible that a country of 980 million, with a wealth of education, competence and ability, can have anyone other than an Indian born of Indian soil to head its government,” the trio had said.
Azad used the word coterie several times. Pawar, Sangma and Anwa, too, had hinted at this. It is another matter that Pawar launched a scathing attack on Sonia in his book which came out in 2015.
Azad is the fourth leader of the G-23 to leave the party after Kapil Sibal, Jitin Prasada and Yoganand Shastri. On Rahul, they had all been restrained.
“I am no one to comment on what ails the Congress…You better ask those people who are giving me gyaan, they they should concentrate on what ails the Congress party, not abusing Jitin Prasada,” Prasada had said when asked about the plight of the party.
“I have chosen to snap my ties with the Congress for reasons that I do not wish to talk about now… Now that I am not in the Congress party, I do not wish to say anything adverse, anything that is inconsistent with the culture of politics that we must embrace. Within the Congress, I could say what I wanted to say. Now that I am not in the Congress, I do not wish to criticise anybody in the Congress,” Sibal had said.
Before Azad, only a few leaders had attacked Rahul in such a blistering fashion after they left. The first perhaps was Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Assam Chief Minister. And recently, it was Hardik Patel.
“There is a great dearth of inner-party democracy in Congress today. When I had humbly told Rahul Gandhi that in front of central observers, 52 MLAs out of 79 had categorically and emphatically sought the ouster of Tarun Gogoi, he answered me so arrogantly that it was his prerogative to change Chief Minister. Isn’t it a fact that our constitution has given power to the MLAs to select a leader of their choice? If that is the constitutional provision, from where does Rahul Gandhi get the prerogative to choose who will rule the people of Assam? He tried to pretend to be a very strong and determined leader but we all know how much insecure he is even in his own constituency. We had to work overtime to get Sanjay Singh elected from Assam into Rajya Sabha against our conscience just to ensure the electoral victory of Rahul Gandhi in Amethi in Lok Sabha election of 2014,” Sarma had said in his resignation letter.
Later, he famously alleged that Rahul Gandhi was “busy feeding biscuits” to his dog while Congress leaders from Assam went to meet him to discuss urgent state issues.”
Azad’s mention of the word coterie, however, is not new.
Pawar, in his book, “Life on My Terms — From the Grassroots to the Corridors of Power” had claimed that “self-styled loyalists of 10 Janpath” had scuttled his chances to become Prime Minister in 1991 citing his “young age.”
“Arjun Singh himself aspired to become prime minister and hoped to succeed (Narasimha) Rao soon. Anyway, once Sonia Gandhi had bought the coterie’s ‘bring Rao’ argument in 1991, the tide turned against me,” Pawar wrote.
Ironically, Azad had faced similar allegations once in the past. Ashok Tanwar, the former Haryana Congress president who left the party in 2019, had attacked Azad, then the AICC general secretary in charge of Haryana.
“The state of affairs in the Congress is so dire that decision makers at AICC can’t win an election themselves…Ghulam Nabi Azad’s attitude is that of playing the game and playing it dirty. He has sold out his responsibility of being the high command’s eyes and ears in Haryana by submitting entirely to the might of his friends,” he wrote.
