'J&K will decide the name & flag for party', announces Ghulam Nabi Azad

|HT|

Former Union minister and senior ex-Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who recently resigned from the party, held a public meeting at Sainik Colony in Jammu on Sunday. Amid speculation, Azad announced that he was as yet to decide the name of his party.

"The people of Jammu and Kashmir will decide the name and the flag for the party. I will give a Hindustani name to my party that everyone can understand,” Azad said at the rally.

Azad reached the venue after a rousing reception by his supporters at Jammu airport. Azad, who had been chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 2005 to 2008, wore a Dogra turban to strike a chord with Jammu.

“I am always with the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Right now, I am not the chief minister or any minister. I am just a human. In the past one week, many people have resigned from the Congress and have supported me,” Azad said during his address.

Azad also thanked those five ministers who joined him. “Three of them joined a regional party, I never named that regional party chief, but they got agitated when I spoke of floating my own party,” Azad added.

Former ministers Taj Mohiuddin, Abdul Majid Wani, Manohar Lal Sharma, GM Saroori, RS Chin, Jugal Kishore, Peerzada Mohd Sayeed and former MLA Balwan Singh, who were present on the occasion, pitched Azad as the next chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir.

Former minister from Reasi Jugal Kishore said Azad is the requirement of the people of Jammu and Kashmir and called him “indispensable”.

Recalling Azad's golden period as chief minister in the PDP-Congress coalition government, Jugal Kishore said, “Now, leaders from the PDP, BJP and National Conference are here sharing the dais... and more will come.”

“Azad is a leader of tall stature, who was not heard by the Congress high command. You stood with Indira Gandhi, Sanjay, Rajiv, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi through thick and thin,” he added.

This was his first meeting since Azad snapped with his nearly 50-year-long association with Congress. Azad 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.

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 are among 64 leaders who have resigned from the Congress. Over 36 Congress leaders including leaders of the National Students' Union of India, the youth wing of the Congress party, from various universities in Jammu have submitted their resignations in solidarity with Azad.

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 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."

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".

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)