Ghulam Azad tears into Rahul in resignation letter: Read top quotes here

New Delhi, Aug 26: 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. In a five-page no holds barred letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi that comes ahead of crucial organisational elections in the party, Azad said he does so with a "heavy heart".

Here are top 11 points from his 5-page resignation letter:

1) After the entry of Rahul Gandhi into politics and particularly after January 2013 when he was appointed as Vice President by you, the entire Consultative mechanism which existed earlier was demolished by him. All senior and experienced leaders were sidelined and new coterie of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the Party.

2) One of the most glaring examples of this immaturity was the tearing up of a government ordinance in the full glare of the media by Rahul Gandhi. The said ordinance was incubated in the Congress Core Group and subsequently unanimously approved by the Union Cabinet presided over by the Prime Minister of India and duly approved even by the President of India.

3) Under your stewardship since 2014 and subsequently that of Rahul Gandhi, the INC has lost two Lok Sabha elections in a humiliating manner. It has lost 39 out of the 49 assembly elections held between 2014 - 2022. The Party only won four state elections and was able to get into a coalition situation in six instances. Unfortunately, today, the INC is ruling in only two states and is a very marginal coalition partner in two other states.

4) Since the 2019 elections, the situation in the party has only worsened. After Rahul Gandhi stepped down in a 'huff and not before insulting all the senior Party functionaries who have given their lives to the party in a meeting of the extended Working Committee, you took over as interim President. A position that you have continue to hold even today for the past three years.

5) Worse still the 'remote control model' that demolished the institutional integrity of the UPA government now got applied to the Indian National Congress. While you arc just a nominal figurehead all the important decisions were being taken by Rahul Gandhi or rather worse his security guard's and PA's.

6) In the August of 2020 when I and 22 other senior colleagues including former Union Ministers and Chief Ministers wrote to you to flag the abysmal drift in the Party the 'coterie' chose to unleash its sycophants on us and got us attacked, vilified and humiliated in the most crude manner possible.

7) Subsequently, the same coterie unleashed its goondas to physically attack the residence of a former Ministerial Colleague Kapil Sibal who incidentally was defending you and your kin in the courts of Law for your alleged attacks of omission and commission.

8) Unfortunately. the situation in the Congress party has reached such a point of no return that now 'proxies' arc 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.

9) Moreover, the 'chosen one' would be nothing more than a puppet on a string. Unfortunately, at the National level we have conceded the political space available to us to the BJP and state level space to regional parties. This all happened because the leadership in the past 08 years has tried to foist a non-serious individual at the helm of the Party.

10) The entire organizational election process is a farce and a sham. At no place anywhere in the country have elections been held at any level of the organisation. Handpicked lieutenants of the AICC has been coerced to sign on lists prepared by the coterie that runs the AICC sitting in 24 Akbar Road. At no place in a booth, block, district or state was an electoral roll published, nominations invited.

11) The AICC leadership is squarely responsible for perpetrating a giant fraud on the party to perpetuate its hold on the ruins of what once was a national movement that fought for and attained the Independence of India. Does the Indian National Congress deserve this in the 75th year of India's independence is a question that the AICC leadership must ask itself.