Former Haryana chief minister and senior Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Thursday said Ghulam Nabi Azad's resignation from all party positions, including its primary membership, was "unfortunate".
He also said that when a senior leader takes such a step, it does make an impact on the party organisation.
"It is unfortunate, that is what I can say," Hooda told PTI when asked about Azad's decision.
"He (Azad) has been a Congressman throughout," he added.
Azad and Hooda are prominent leaders of the "Group of 23" (G-23) that has been critical of the Congress leadership's decisions.
The grouping, comprising many other prominent veterans including Anand Sharma and Manish Tewari, has been insisting on genuine elections right from the block level up to the Congress Working Committee (CWC) level.
Hooda, who is the leader of the opposition in Haryana, said it was up to the party high-command to decide on the future course of action in the wake of recent developments.
"I had recently said that the party high-command should reach out to Azad and Sharma to address their grievances and concerns," he said.
Only a few days ago, with months to go for the Himachal Pradesh polls, Anand Sharma resigned from the chairmanship of the party's steering committee for the hill state, saying he was left with no choice after the "continuing exclusion and insults".
Azad on Friday resigned from all party positions, including its primary membership, ahead of the organisational polls and accused the Congress leadership of committing "fraud" on the party in the name of "sham" internal elections.
The former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister had also stepped down as the chairman of the party's campaign committee in the Union Territory a few days ago.
Delivering another blow to the embattled party that has seen a series of high-profile exits, including that of Kapil Sibal and Ashwani Kumar, in the recent past, Azad wrote a five-page no-holds-barred letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, detailing his grievances.
He described the party as "comprehensively destroyed" and said the Congress has conceded the political space available to it to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the national level and to regional political parties at the state level.
