Ghulam Nabi Azad's exit: No loss for Congress, no gain for BJP

A former union minister, a former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, a former Youth Congress president and a party general secretary for decades is how Ghulam Nabi Azad is known.

Did he occupy all these high-profile posts because of his hard work? Well, that is highly debatable.

A leader with no mass base, Azad had reached this high in the grand old party mainly due to his machinations.

He first came in contact with Sanjay Gandhi in the 1970s and became a member of his young brigade. Sanjay Gandhi introduced Azad to Indira Gandhi who made him a minister in her government after she stormed to power in the Lok Sabha elections in 1980, three years after she was voted out by the Janata Party following the Emergency she imposed on 25 June 1975 and lifted after 21 months on 21 March 1977.

After her assassination in 1984, he courted Rajiv Gandhi who elevated him in his government. Rajiv Gandhi had won a huge mandate -- 404 out of the 516 seats -- in the 1985 elections following Indira Gandhi's assassination. Polls were not held in Assam and Punjab then.

After Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in 1991, he shifted allegiance to PV Narasimha Rao and played a crucial role in his appointment as the Prime Minister.

By the time Rao was close to completing his tenure, he sided with Sitaram Kesri and along with others installed him as the Congress.

Azad is on record to have told Rao in one of the meetings that "You are a good Prime Minister but a bad Congress president".

He remained a key advisor of Kesri till Sonia Gandhi took a plunge in politics and again played a key role in his exit after persuading her to take up the Congress president's post.

She gave him prime posts in the party and also key ministries after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance came to power in 2004.

She later appointed him the Jammu and Kashmir Congress president and subsequently the chief minister in 2005 as part of a post-poll power-sharing agreement with the People's Democratic Party (PDP).

Azad remained the chief minister till 2008 when his government passed a controversial order to transfer 99 acres of forest land to the Shri Amarnathji shrine board (SASB) in the Kashmir valley to be used during the annual pilgrimage.

The move triggered violent agitation in both Jammu and Kashmir, killing several protestors and pushing the state into one of its worst communal tensions. The PDP withdrew its support to the Congress, resulting in the fall of the Azad-led government.

In the subsequent elections in 2008, the Congress backed Omar Abdullah of the National Conference for the chief minister's post.

Instead of punishing him, he was inducted in the UPA II in 2009 and remained a minister till 2014 when the Manmohan Singh government lost elections and Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister.

In June 2014, he was named the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, a cabinet-rank post, despite losing the Lok Sabha elections from Udhampur to BJP's Jitendra Singh, now a union minister.

He held the LoP post till February 2021 when the Congress denied him a re-nomination.

A few months before his Rajya Sabha was to end, Azad and 22 other Congress leaders came together to write a letter to Sonia Gandhi, seeking reforms in the party. It was clearly a revolt against her though the group, that came to be known as G-23, demanded that the party should have a visible and active president apart from organisational elections from top to bottom.

The letter was widely seen as a tactic to pressurise the Congress high command to re-nominate him. His immediate concern was to retain the government bungalow he occupied for decades in Lutyens Delhi.

The BJP government, as a special case, has permitted him to use the house till further orders. Earlier this year, he was awarded with Padma Bhushan by the BJP government.

In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shares a special rapport with Azad to an extent that he turned emotional and had tears in his eyes while bidding him farewell on his retirement from the Upper House of Parliament in February 2021.

His resignation from the Congress came a day after home minister Amit Shah held a high-level review meeting on Jammu and Kashmir. Is this a sheer coincidence?

What are his future plans? Azad might launch a new regional party in Jammu and Kashmir and then try to win a few seats in the upcoming assembly elections from some parts of the erstwhile state, including from Chenab valley of which his home district Doda is a part.

If his party succeeds in winning some seats, he can seek support from other parties, including the BJP, in forming the government.

The BJP won't have any problem aligning with Azad given his credentials and closeness to Modi.

That aside, he might be having other options too given that politics is the art of the possible. But as of now, his exit does not appear to hurt the Congress nor benefit the BJP in any way.