• Ghulam Nabi Azad to form new party after quitting Congress: NDTV reports

Veteran Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned from the party on Friday, calling out Rahul Gandhi for his "immaturity" and for "demolishing the consultative mechanism" in the party.

In a five-page letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Ghulam Nabi said that he was leaving with a "heavy heart", reports PTI.

The senior Congress leader's exit, not entirely unexpected, comes as another serious blow to the embattled 'Grand Old Party' that has seen a series of leaders leave it.

"The Congress," Ghulam Nabi said, "has lost both the will and the ability under tutelage of the coterie that runs the AICC to fight for what is right for India.... Before starting a 'Bharat Jodo yatra', the leadership should have undertaken a 'Congress Jodo yatra'."

In his resignation letter, he praised Sonia Gandhi but blamed her son Rahul for the Congress's defeat in the 2014 national election - a turning point for the party, which has been struggling to win elections since.

"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," wrote Azad, a former minister in the UPA government who had been a leading member of the G-23, or the group of 23 "dissenters" who had written to Sonia Gandhi earlier in 2020 calling for a complete overhaul of the organization and a full-time and visible leadership.

'New coterie'

"All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined," Azad said in Friday's resignation letter, adding that "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.

"The ordnance was incubated in the Congress core group and unanimously approved by the cabinet led by the Prime Minister and approved by the President," he said.

'Childish behaviour'

"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," Azad's letter said.

Azad went on to chronicle the Congress's downfall over the past few years.

"Under your stewardship since 2014 and subsequently that of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress has lost two Lok Sabha elections in a humiliating manner. It has lost 39 out of the 49 assembly elections held between 2014 - 2022. The party only won four state elections and was able to get into a coalition situation in six instances. Unfortunately, today, the Congress is ruling in only two states and is a very marginal coalition partner in two other states."

'Rahul stepped down in a huff'

Azad said since the 2019 national election the situation in the party had 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 for the past three years. 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 Shri Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs(personal assistants)."

Azad recalled how he was attacked in the party after his 2020 letter to Sonia Gandhi calling for a complete overhaul of the organization and a full-time, collective and visible leadership.

Azad said after that letter, he was attacked, vilified and humiliated in the most crude manner possible. A mock funeral was taken out in Jammu and Kashmir and those behind it were "feted by Rahul Gandhi personally".