Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Friday resigned from all party positions, including its primary membership, delivering another blow to the embattled party that has seen a series of leaders leave it.
"The situation has become irretrievable", Azad, 73, said in his parting shot to Sonia Gandhi, whose trusted confidante he remained right from the time of Sitaram Kesri's unceremonious exit as the party's chief in 2000.
Azad said it was a good meeting with the Congress president with the discussion centred on how to prepare and fight unitedly the forthcoming assembly polls to take on rival parties.
While a tweet from a close aide of the Gandhi's and the Chief Whip of the party in Rajya Sabha, Jairam Ramesh took a dig on Azad for accepting the award, Congress stalwarts from the G-23 group have congratulated him for the 'well-deserved' award.
It took Udham Singh 21 years to avenge the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh. And 34 years for his remains to return to India after execution in a British prison.
Ganesh Joshi also credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the smooth conclusion of Rahul Gandhi's Yatra in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Congress on Wednesday said senior party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad was consulted several times before finalising the names in the revamped Jammu and Kashmir unit of the party, rejecting reports that the former Union minister was not on board.
'A man who has been treated with the greatest respect by the Congress leadership has betrayed it by his vicious personal attacks which reveals his true character. GNA's DNA has been Modi-fied,' Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh tweeted.
Certain references and subjects being quietly dropped from the new NCERT textbooks without any notification has kicked off a political controversy with the Opposition accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of 'whitewashing with vengeance'.
References to freedom fighter and India's first education minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad have been removed from the new class 11 political science textbook by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).
Mubashir Azad, the son of Azad's youngest brother, also said his uncle was "disrespected" by the Congress leadership which hurt him.
Seventeen former leaders of the Democratic Azad Party (DAP), including ex-deputy chief minister Tara Chand and ex-Pradesh Congress Committee chief Peerzada Mohammad Sayeed, on Friday returned to the Congress fold and were welcomed back by the party which said they were on a 'leave of two months'.
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Sunday launched a veiled attack on Congress leaders and said he gave sweat and blood for the party unlike those who are spreading 'falsehood' through social media.
'It was Maulana Azad's foresight which created the IITs, UGC, science academies across the country.'
A member of the 1983 cricket World Cup-winning squad, Azad was suspended from the Bharatiya Janata Party for openly targeting the then Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley over alleged irregularities and corruption in the Delhi and District Cricket Association in December 2015. He joined the Congress in 2018.
Azad, 73, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, ended his five-decade association with the Congress on Friday, terming the party "comprehensively destroyed" and lashing out at Rahul Gandhi for "demolishing" its entire consultative mechanism.
As of now, Azad couldn't be in the BJP leadership's calculus. The BJP has been trying to drill into the J&K electorate that this time around the UT would most certainly have a Hindu chief minister, explains Mohammad Sayeed Malik, the distinguished commentator on Kashmir affairs.
The Supreme Court has expressed its dissatisfaction with the Delhi Police's handling of appeals against acquittals in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots cases. The court emphasized the need for serious and earnest prosecution, not just for the sake of it. This comes in the wake of a public interest litigation filed by a former Shiromani Gurudwara Prabhandak Committee member, seeking justice for the victims of the violence.
Earlier, only Azad was scheduled to meet Sonia Gandhi.
The former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister said the agenda of the new political outfit would be to struggle for the restoration of J and K's statehood and to fight for the job and land rights of people.
The ambit of the G-23 grouping increased this time as some more leaders -- Patiala MP Preneet Kaur, former Gujarat chief minister Shankar Singh Vaghela, former union minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and former Haryana speaker Kuldeep Sharma -- joined them.
The Union government has ordered the complete withdrawal of the counter-terrorist commando force NSG from VIP security duties and handing over its nine "high-risk" VIPs to the CRPF by next month, official sources said Wednesday.
Four more Congress leaders, including former deputy speaker of the Jammu and Kashmir assembly Gulam Hyder Malik, and a dozen prominent workers of the Apni Party resigned from their respective parties on Monday in support of veteran politician Ghulam Nabi Azad.
Azad would be accorded a grand reception on his arrival from Delhi Sunday morning, and a procession would accompany him to the venue of the public meeting at the Sainik Colony.
As Azad ended his decades-old association with the party, leaders across political spectrum praised his contribution to Jammu and Kashmir, with the BJP hailing him as a "towering leader".
Sources said they will discuss the party's poor performance at the hustings and will evolve their future strategy.
'BJP has shown that it can win even when Mr Modi is not the main figure on the ticket unlike 2014 to 2019.'
Jairam Ramesh said the Congress has to be the "fulcrum" of any Opposition alliance to take on the BJP in the 2024 general elections as it is the only political force with a pan-India presence.
Ghulam Nabi Azad's resignation from the Congress on Friday marked the most high-profile exit of one of the "Group of 23" (G-23) leaders, who had written to party chief Sonia Gandhi two years ago for a "collective and inclusive leadership" in the organisation, exposing the faultlines in the grand old party.
Hooda and Azad were reported to have discussed concrete proposals to strengthen the Congress and ensure collective leadership and decision making as demanded by the grouping which met on Wednesday and signed a joint statement.
The Congress has proposed AAP should contest five seats while the Samajwadi Party and Left parties could contest one seat each.
'We repent our decision today as we feel we betrayed our (Congress) party, while the DAP betrayed us'
A habeas corpus petition was mentioned before a bench of Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela for listing on October 3 by a lawyer for Wangchuk's "next friend".
The Congress on Monday released a list of 30-star campaigners for the first phase of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
'The BJP had a big threat from the Congress in J&K, therefore they were threatened by us.'
Azad, who is a prominent member of the group of 23 leaders who had demanded organisational overhaul in the Congress, said that for the next two months the party is the top priority.
PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti drew comparisons between the treatment of Hindus in Bangladesh and minorities in India, sparking criticism from the BJP. Mufti expressed concerns about the alleged oppression of Hindus in Bangladesh and criticized recent surveys of mosques in India. She called for a united front against forces dividing people on religious lines and warned of a potential repeat of 1947-like riots.
Glimpses of the CWC meeting, which was meant to formulate a plan to revive the party from the death throes of electoral irrelevance, but...
Congress MP Ghulam Nabi Azad during his retirement speech in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday summed up his more than four-decade-old political career in few Urdu couplets and a brief speech.
Striking an emotional chord with the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi Thursday said he considers himself their soldier in New Delhi, and added his doors are always open for party workers -- 'the lions of the Congress'.
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