Ghulam Nabi Azad’s claim that Rahul Gandhi’s outburst in 2013 against the Manmohan Singh government over an ordinance led to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) defeat in the general elections the following year has surprised many in the party, with the veteran leader’s former colleagues asking why he did not speak his mind at the time. The government had brought the ordinance to negate a Supreme Court order on disqualifying convicted MPs and MLAs, but Rahul’s criticism forced it to withdraw the ordinance a week later.
Azad was the Health Minister in the Singh-led Cabinet but remained silent like his other ministerial colleagues, leaving Singh to fend for himself and, according to an account, consider stepping down because of the lack of confidence in the government expressed by Gandhi who was the Congress’s vice-president at the time.
Accusing Rahul of being immature, Azad wrote in his resignation letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday, “One of the most glaring examples of this immaturity was the tearing up of a government ordinance in the full glare of the media by Rahul Gandhi. The said ordinance was incubated in the Congress Core Group and subsequently unanimously approved by the Union Cabinet presided over by the Prime Minister of India and duly approved even by the President of India.”
“This ‘childish’ behaviour completely subverted the authority of the Prime Minister and Government of India. This one single action, more than anything else, contributed significantly to the defeat of the UPA Government in 2014 that was at the receiving end of a campaign of calumny and insinuation from a combination of the forces of the right-wing and certain unscrupulous corporate interests,” Azad said.
Before Rahul, Digvijaya Singh, Milind Deora, and M Veerappa Moily were the Congress leaders to have openly spoken against the government taking the ordinance route to save convicted lawmakers. The first beneficiary of the legislation would have been Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad, a Congress ally. At the time, Moily was the petroleum minister and the only member of the Cabinet, which cleared the ordinance, to express reservation. “It is not an appropriate time for this,” Moily said at a Cabinet meeting.
While several ministers and senior leaders felt Rahul’s open criticism of the government was unwarranted, they kept mum. Many believed that the remarks were a blow to the image of the government as well as that of Sonia Gandhi, who was a part of the Congress core group meeting that cleared the ordinance proposal.
At the press conference on September 27, 2013, Rahul rubbished the ordinance, calling it “complete nonsense” that should be “torn up and thrown out”. By evening, he wrote to Prime Minister Singh, who was abroad, saying that his comments were made on the spur of the moment but he strongly believed in what he had said.
In his 2020 book Backstage: The Story Behind India’s High Growth Years, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who was the Planning Commission’s deputy chairperson at the time of the controversy, recalled that Singh thought of stepping down after Rahul’s criticism. The PM was in New York at the time and “issued a characteristically mild statement that the Congress vice president had written to him expressing his views, and the matter would be discussed in the Cabinet on his return”.
Ahluwalia wrote, “I was part of the PM’s delegation in New York and my brother Sanjeev, who had retired from the IAS, telephoned to say he had written a piece that was very critical of the PM. He had emailed it to me and said he hoped I didn’t find it embarrassing! Sanjeev had been quite unsparing. He said the PM had betrayed himself time and again by turning a blind eye to goings on around him. He also said that when he took up the office, he became ‘our’ PM and not the Congress party’s representative. He went on to say it was not too late to resign: ‘Rahul is ripe to take over and we would all welcome his coming out of the shadows.’ It was strong, no-holds-barred stuff and, not surprisingly, Sanjeev’s article was widely reported in the press with reference to him being my brother.”
He added, “The first thing I did was to take the text across to the PM’s suite because I wanted him to hear about it first from me. He read it in silence and, at first, made no comment. Then, he suddenly asked me whether I thought he should resign. I thought about it for a while and said I did not think a resignation on this issue was appropriate. I wondered then whether I was simply saying what I thought he would like to hear but on reflection, I am convinced I gave him honest advice.”
Rahul, too, later admitted that the words he used were wrong. “My mother told me that the words I had used were wrong,” he said in Ahmedabad a few days after the press conference. “In hindsight, maybe the words I used were wrong, but the sentiment was not wrong….I have the right to voice my opinion. A large part of the Congress party wanted ii…Why am I being penalised for raising my voice on something that was wrong? Was I wrong?”
The Congress on Friday asked Azad why he was silent at the time. “If you think it was wrong, you would have thought it to be wrong then also. Why were you silent then? That means you are selfish, your mouth gets shut before a post. Now you don’t have a post and therefore you are speaking. Now, when he doesn’t have a post, he is reminded of all the ideals and principles,” said Congress media department chairman Pawan Khera.