Azad to hold public meeting in Jammu on Sept 4, first after quitting Cong

Former Union Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who quit the Congress last week and has decided to float a political party, will hold a public meeting on September 4 at Sainik Colony in Jammu.

This will be his first meeting since he snapped his nearly 50-year-long association with Congress. The public meeting is scheduled for 11 am.

Azad has said that he will launch a new party soon and the first unit will be formed in Jammu and Kashmir in view of impending assembly polls. Azad was Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 2005 to 2008.

With Azad signalling that he will float a new party, several leaders have resigned from the Congress in Jammu and Kashmir.

 

Former Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Tara Chand is among 64 leaders who have resigned from the Congress.

In an indication of his political stock even as he has resigned from Congress, three party leaders who are members of Group of 23 met him at his residence in the national capital on Tuesday. Azad was also a member of G-23.

The leaders who met Azad were former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Hooda, former Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan and former union minister Anand Sharma.

In his resignation letter to Sonia Gandhi, Azad had targeted party leadership, particularly Rahul Gandhi, over the way the party has been run in the past nearly nine years.

In the hard-hitting five-page letter, Azad had claimed that a coterie runs the party while Sonia Gandhi was just "a nominal head" and all the major decisions were taken by "Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guards and PAs".

Azad had said he was submitting his resignation with "great regret and an extremely leaden heart" and severing his about 50-year association with the Congress. He was earlier Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha.

Recounting his long association with the Congress, Azad had said the situation in the party has reached a point of "no return."

"Unfortunately, the situation in the Congress party has reached such a point of no return that now 'proxies' are being propped up to take over the leadership of the Party. This experiment is doomed to fail because the Party has been so comprehensively destroyed that situation has become irretrievable. Moreover, the 'chosen one' would be nothing more than a puppet on a string," he said.

While Azad took potshots at Sonia Gandhi in the letter, his sharpest attack was on Rahul Gandhi and he described the Wayand MP as "non-serious individual" and "immature".