Not dawa, only dua can save Congress: Ghulam Nabi Azad

Ghulam Nabi Azad, who resigned from Congress last week, has said that Congress needed a surgery to recover and gain a foothold again in the country's political arena.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, who resigned from Congress on February 26, in an exclusive interview with India Today, said that the party’s recovery was beyond prayers and it needed medicines to recover.

“Congress needs dawa not dua to recover. It needs surgery to reinvent itself. It needs physicians and surgeons, not compounders,” he told India Today’s Rajdeep Sardesai.

Azad, who had criticised Congress MP Rahul Gandhi for “demolishing the party’s consultive mechanisms” in his resignation letter, said: “I like Rahul as a person, but the problem lies with his brand of politics. This is not a generational battle. Had that been the case, so many leaders of Rahul’s age group wouldn’t have left the party.”

Azad was referring to several ‘young’ leaders who had resigned from the party in recent times, Jyotiraditya Scindia being the most notable among them. Scindia quit the Congress in 2020 and is now the Union civil aviation minister.

Among the other notable leaders in “Rahul Gandhi’s age group” who recently resigned from Congress are spokesperson Hardik Patel, Jaiveer Shergill, Jitin Prasada, Sushmita Dev, Priyanka Chaturvedi and RPN Singh.

“Unfortunately, after the entry of Shri Rahul Gandhi into politics and particularly after January, 2013, when he was appointed as Vice President by you, the entire consultative mechanism that existed earlier was demolished by him,” he had written in his letter to Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi.

All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined, and a new coterie of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the party.