Jignesh Mevani trolls Hardik Patel for ungraceful exit from Congress

|HT|

Gujarat legislator Jignesh Mevani on Friday hit out at former Congress leader Hardik Patel for his ungraceful exit from the party, criticising him for bad-mouthing the Congress and its leaders. Mevani, who has been supporting the Congress, is expected to officially join the party before the 2022 Gujarat assembly elections. Patel, 28 years, quit the party earlier this week, three years after he joined it.

“You can have differences with the party. But it is inappropriate (for Patel) to say that the Congress is anti-Gujarat or anti-India... The affection that you seem to have developed towards the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) shows that you have somewhere comprised on the ideological front,” Mevani, an Independent legislator from Vadgam, told media persons.

He said that the Congress party gave all the support to Patel, making him the working president for Gujarat, a post that Patel resigned from while quitting the party. Patel was also the star campaigner for Congress in many states where the Congress recently fought elections. “His exit should have been a graceful one, which it was not,” Mevani said. Congress in 2017 had weaved an alliance of Mevani, Patel and OBC leader Alpesh Thakor to take on the BJP in 2017 assembly elections. Thakor quit the party in 2019 and joined the BJP. The same year, he lost the by-elections for the Radhanpur seat which he had won in 2017.

Patel is believed to be prepping to join the BJP ahead of Gujarat elections later this year.

Patel’s one-page resignation letter -- he put out copies in English and Hindi on his Twitter handle -- was scathing in its criticism of the Congress and its leaders, who he said did not have a roadmap for the people, were non-serious and behaved as if they hated Gujarat and Gujaratis. “Whenever our country faced challenges and when the Congress needed leadership, Congress leaders were enjoying abroad,” Patel said in his resignation letter.

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