After Ghulam Nabi Azad's resignation, Manish Tewari slams Congress 'coterie culture'

New Delhi, Aug 27 (IANS) A day after Ghulam Nabi Azad quit the Congress blaming party leader Rahul Gandhi, another G-23 leader Manish Tewari on Saturday slammed the grand-old party for its "coterie culture".

Talking to IANS over phone, the Anandpur Sahib MP said had the party implemented the suggestions of the G-23 group in December 2020, the current situation would not have arisen.

However, hitting out the at the 'coterie culture' he said: "Peons of Congress leaders are giving sermons to those who have given decades to party." These "so-called" leaders are not capable of winning even the municipal polls.

Asserting that he is not a tenant but a shareholder in the party, the veteran leader said the very fact that Congress is losing all elections confirms that the party is not in sync with the people of the country.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, in his resignation letter, has blamed Rahul Gandhi for the destruction of the party and alleged that proxies are propped up for the president's post, who will only be a mere puppet.

Azad alleged that the G-23 leaders were abused, humiliated, insulted and vilified in a specially summoned meeting of the extended Congress Working Committee following their letter seeking reforms in the party in 2020.

"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 the situation has become irretrievable. Moreover, the 'chosen one' would be nothing more than a puppet on a string," his resignation letter read.

He said at the national level, the Congress has conceded the political space available to the BJP and state level space to regional parties.

"This all happened because the leadership in the past eight years has tried to foist a non-serious individual at the helm of the party," he alleged without taking the name of Rahul Gandhi.

Azad alleged that in August 2020 when he and 22 other senior colleagues, including former Union Ministers and Chief Ministers wrote to Sonia Gandhi to flag the abysmal drift in the party, the "coterie" choose to "unleash its sycophants on us and got us attacked, vilified and humiliated in the most crude manner possible".