After venting their ire against senior party leader Jitin Prasada, Congressmen in Uttar Pradesh are now targeting senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad and questioning his earlier role as the All India Congress Committee general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh.
Azad is one of the 23 senior Congress leaders who signed the controversial letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, asking for a full-time, “effective”, “active” and “visible” party president.
Now, former Uttar Pradesh Congress committee president Nirmal Khatri has accused Azad of forcing the Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance on the party in the 2017 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.
“As far as I know, Rahul Gandhi, too, was opposed to the alliance, but probably kept quiet due to Azad’s recalcitrance and defeatist political thinking….His principles of political science focused on the politics of alliance,” said Khatri in a post on the social media, directly targeting Azad.
In an interview to a news agency, Azad, who is the leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha, had defended the letter, saying, “Any Congress worker having a genuine interest in the party will welcome the letter.”
Khatri has countered the points raised by Azad in his interview after the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting.
“Azad forgot to mention his role as in charge of Uttar Pradesh where he destroyed the Congress. In 1996, the Congress alliance with the BSP failed to work. He (Azad) entered into an alliance with the SP in 2017 and the Congress won the lowest number of seven seats in the state assembly,” Khatri said.
He questioned Azad for pointing out that no election had been held in the CWC for the past 23 years and asked why he didn’t raise the issue for so long. He also targeted Azad for raising issues on a public platform, saying “CWC resolved that no leader will ever speak about internal issues. Azad’s interview (to a news agency) is a violation of the spirit of the resolution.”
In response to Khatri’s post, a demand to expel Azad from the Congress is being made on social media.
“I demand from Soniaji and Rahulji that in the interest of the Congress, Ghulam Nabi Azad should be expelled from all the party posts,” read a post on social media. Khatri, in his posts, had made point-to-point rebuttal to Azad and said he had realized from the latter’s observations that he was senior to Azad.
Khatri said Azad got only 320 votes in the first assembly election from Jammu and Kashmir in 1977 while he (Khatri) lost the poll for the Ayodhya assembly seat by 428 votes only.
Lakhimpur Kheri district Congress committee (DCC) has already passed a resolution, demanding action against all the 23 senior leaders, including Jitin Prasada. Khatri’s comments, shared by many other partymen on social media, have become a point of discussion in the party circles.
After the Lakhimpur Kheri resolution, the DCC president Prahalad Patel claimed that DCC passed it under pressure from an office bearer of UPCC.
This is not the first time that controversies are in focus in the state unit of the party. Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee’s (UPCC) revamp after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections had led to a section of partymen questioning the rejig and accusing the new team led by UPCC president Ajay Kumar Lallu of being anti-upper caste.
