Bickering within the Congress after Letter-23 expose continued unabated in Uttar Pradesh with former state president of UPCC and ex-MP Nirmal Khatri jumping into the controversy by attacking Ghulam Nabi Azad, accusing him of weakening the party during his (Khatri’s) stewardship of the party in UP.

In a post in the social media on Saturday night, Khatri, who was UPCC president before Raj Babbar, said that whenever Azad became the in-charge of UP, the party was doomed in the elections.

“During Azad’s captaincy in 1996, the Congress allied with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and again in 2017, due to his insistence, the party went for alliance with Samajwadi Party and won just seven seats, the lowest ever,” he alleged.  Congress always goes on the back gear whenever Azad is in-charge of the state, he further charged.

“Every Congressman was against the alliance with SP in 2017 polls and even Rahul Gandhi did not support it. But still it happened and the fate of the Congress was doomed in the elections,” Khatri said.

The attack on Ghulam Nabi Azad, the main crusader of the Letter-23 seeking more powerful party high command, came after the Lakhimpur unit of the party passed a resolution against former Union minister Jitin Prasada, who was among the signatories of the letter.

Earlier, former Congress MLC Naseeb Pathan put out a video message demanding veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad’s ouster from the party.

“As he has broken the party discipline, he should be made ‘azad’ and expelled from the party,” Pathan stated.

Pathan, incidentally, was one of Azad’s staunchest loyalists in the UP Congress at one time.

Surprisingly, instead of dousing the flames of revolt, the UPCC leadership maintained a studied silence on the issue. An unverified audio clip of conversation between two local Congress leaders revealed that the demonstration against Prasada was staged at the behest of a senior party leader and some labourers had been hired to shout slogans.

UPCC president Ajay Kumar Lallu, interestingly, defended the outburst, saying that some party workers wanted to convey their feelings to the party high command.

On Saturday, Prasada tried to put the controversy to rest by claiming that their letter just demanded an “active, full-time and visible” leadership in the party but it was being “misconstrued” and that he had full faith in both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.

“The letter was written with the sole purpose of suggesting how to reinvigorate and revitalise the party, and introspect for galvanising the organisation,” Prasada said.

“The letter was not to undermine the top leadership. I had stated this at the Congress Working Committee meeting as well. The letter is being misconstrued,” he claimed.