Assam PCC working president and former AICC secretary Rana Goswami resigned from the party on Wednesday.

The 60-year-old Jorhat-based two-time former MLA is the second of the three working presidents of the PCC to quit this month, the first being three-time MLA Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha.

Purkayastha quit on January 14 after openly supporting the BJP-led government in Assam along with Basanta Das, another senior party MLA.

Goswami has risen through the rank, having held posts in both the government and the party, including the NSUI, Youth Congress, district PCC and the Assam PCC.

He was also the AICC secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh for seven years along with Gulam Nabi Azad, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Jyotiraditya Scindia. Azad and Scindia are no longer with the Congress.

In his second term, Goswami was the parliamentary secretary (home) in the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government.

In his one-para resignation letter addressed to AICC general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal, Goswami said he was tendering his resignation as the working president and as an active member of the party.

No reason for quitting was stated but he told The Telegraph from Delhi, where he is expected to meet the BJP leadership, that there were “various reasons” for him to quit.

Prodded, Goswami said the state Congress was “directionless”, “controlled” by two-three persons and the AICC leaders in charge of the state too had “no control over the state unit”. Asked whether he had raised these issues with the leadership, he answered in the affirmative, adding his “efforts to get things right did not bear fruit”.

Goswami’s departure is likely to hit the Congress’s poll prospects in Upper Assam.

Reports about Goswami’s imminent exit were doing the rounds of late but gathered momentum on February 25 when he was reassigned as the in-charge of Upper Assam, a region where the Congress fared miserably in the 2021 Assembly polls despite heading an alliance of like-minded parties.

Goswami held a meeting of his supporters on Saturday night on his future in Jorhat. On Tuesday, chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had told the media that Goswami was welcome to join the ruling BJP.