Why Ghulam Nabi Azad's loyalists dumped the DAP founder

Establishing a political party is one thing but steering it to success quite another; more so, when the outfit’s founder neither has an assured electoral base of his own nor a coherent vision for a new politics but only a long career in public life secured through sycophancy and patronage. Ask Ghulam Nabi Azad, former Chief Minister of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, who severed his five-decade-long ties with the Congress party last August and, a month later, launched the Democratic Azad Party (DAP).

Within three months of its launch, the DAP, which Azad had claimed would emerge as an alternative to the Congress, the National Conference, the People’s Democratic Party and the BJP, is on a nosedive. On Friday (January 6) as many as 17 former DAP leaders, cutting across hierarchy and regions of the Union Territory, joined the Congress.

Joining DAP a ‘blunder’

These 17 leaders included former J&K deputy CM Tara Chand, former MLA Balwan Singh (both founding members of the DAP who had been expelled from the party by Azad last month, along with another former MLA, Manohar Lal Sharma, for anti-party activities), former J&K minister Peerzada Mohammad Sayeed and former MLC Muhammad Muzaffar Parrey. Chand, Sayeed and Singh had followed Azad out of the Congress – a party to which they have now returned.

Sharma, said sources, had initially indicated to some senior Congress leaders that he too was willing to return to his parent party but changed his mind later, ostensibly to keep his options open with other parties, including the BJP. Sources in the Congress and the DAP claim a second exodus from Azad’s camp to his erstwhile party is expected “very soon”.

For the Congress, the return of these leaders comes as a shot in the arm weeks before Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra marches into the UT, where it is set to conclude on January 30 at Srinagar’s historic Lal Chowk. The massive public support that the yatra has been drawing ever since it began from Kanyakumari on September 7 and its recent endorsement by NC’s Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, PDP’s Mehbooba Mufti and CPM’s J&K chief Mohammed Yusuf Tarigami also played a crucial role in propelling these 17 leaders to the Congress.

Also read: ‘Realised our mistake’: Ghulam Nabi Azad’s followers return to Congress

Most of the leaders who quit the DAP, Chand in particular, had been Azad’s protégés and confidantes during the latter’s long years in high positions within the Congress. When they came back to the Congress, they predictably dubbed their joining the DAP “a blunder”, made in a “moment of emotions” because of their “friendship with one man (Azad)”.

Azad puts up a brave front

Azad, on his part, has expectedly put up a brave front, asserting that the return of these leaders to the Congress is “not a setback” because, according to him, they were all people with “no constituency”. He, of course, made no comment on why he had placed all of them at high posts in the DAP – Chand and Sayeed had both served as founding vice-chairman of the fledgling party that is yet to be registered by the Election Commission – if he felt they were “leaders with no constituency”.

It must be said here that it’s rich of Azad to be taking a swipe at his former co-travellers for being leaders without a constituency. In a political career spanning 50 years, Azad has won only two direct elections from J&K – the first in 2006 when he contested a by-election from Bhaderwah as sitting chief minister of J&K with support from the PDP and the second in 2008. Prior to 2006, Azad had contested from J&K only once, way back in 1977 from the Inderwal constituency, when he secured fewer than 1,000 votes and forfeited his deposit.

As a protégé of the late Sanjay Gandhi in the 1970s, Azad had risen through the ranks of the Congress quickly. After his humiliating electoral debut in 1977, Indira Gandhi had shipped him out to Maharashtra’s Washim to contest the 1980 Lok Sabha polls. Given that the 1980 elections were held in the backdrop of the disastrous Janata government debacle that had swerved public sentiment decisively in Indira’s favour, Azad won from Washim.

Azad retained the seat in the 1984 General Election, contested soon after Indira’s assassination and in which the Congress scored it’s still unbeaten tally of 414 Lok Sabha seats.

Also read: 64 J&K Congress leaders quit party in support of Ghulam Nabi Azad

Between 1989 and 2006, as the Congress’s electoral footprint shrunk nationally and also in J&K as well as Maharashtra, Azad stayed away from elections but not from positions of power, be it in Congress-led governments or within the Congress organisation, as he remained part of the inner coterie of whoever was at the helm of the Grand Old Party – from Rajiv Gandhi to Narasimha Rao to Sitaram Kesri to Sonia Gandhi.

Political observers from Kashmir maintain that Azad managed to win the 2006 by-election and the 2008 Assembly poll only because he had contested the first one as a sitting CM and the second soon after his term in office was cut short by the PDP, in wake of the row over the transfer of government land to the Amarnath Shrine Board. In the 2014 general election, the Congress had fielded Azad for his debut Lok Sabha contest from J&K against the BJP’s Jitendra Singh in Udhampur. He lost the contest and when the Congress wished to field him again from this seat in the 2019 polls, he reportedly chickened out.

Unlike Azad, Chand, a former three-term MLA from Chhamb constituency is known to have significant clout among the Hindu community of Jammu and has previously also served as  J&K Assembly Speaker. Sayeed, a veteran Congress leader with considerable influence in Muslim-dominated Anantnag, otherwise a PDP bastion, has thrice served as MLA from the Kokernag seat, as minister in various J&K governments and also as chief of the J&K Congress.

Why Azad was dumped by 17 loyalists?

Party-hopping and leaders quitting a party in all sound and fury only to return to it later offering profuse apologies is not uncommon in Indian politics. The case of the DAP-17 is no different. What is interesting though is how Azad, who had been drawing massive crowds to his rallies across J&K over the past year, particularly since he quit the Congress, and was emboldened enough by this show of popular support to launch his own outfit in the UT’s already crowded political landscape, was suddenly dumped by his closest aides and followers.

Also read: Ghulam Nabi Azad launches Democratic Azad Party in J&K

A senior Congress leader who had initially tried to broker truce between Azad and the Congress told The Federal, “Azad believed that in post Article 370 Kashmir, he stood a better chance to establish himself as a strong leader…whether this had anything to do with assurances he may have got from the BJP, I don’t know but the fact is that the Congress was rudderless and he had lost the confidence of the Gandhis, especially Rahul, so he wanted to move out.”

Further, he said, “At the same time, he also felt that the abrogation of Article 370 had significantly reduced the political influence of the Abdullahs, while Mehbooba Mufti had already been discredited because of the BJP-PDP alliance. He was convinced there was space for a new force to come up and he wanted to use his non-controversial image and fairly good record as CM of J&K to build the DAP.”

Azad’s three-year tenure as J&K CM between 2005 and 2008 had not been remarkable but it was also, for most part, a period that had brought back some semblance of normalcy to the strife-torn state. Unlike the Abdullahs and the Muftis, who are often accused of being corrupt, self-seeking and power-hungry, Azad was seen as a sincere, even if status-quoist, administrator without the baggage of any controversies.

That image finally broke with the Amarnath row which also ended his CM tenure but as an individual he continued to be seen by ordinary voters as a cordial politician. This past, coupled with the public display of praise, acclaim and solidarity from Narendra Modi and the BJP, when the Congress refused to give him another Rajya Sabha term last year while the Prime Minister ‘broke down’ in the Upper House during his farewell speech for his “old friend”, perhaps, played a role in Azad’s decision to finally break away from the Congress.

However, those who joined him in the DAP said Azad shared with them “no vision” for the party, “functioned arbitrarily” and acted “on cues from the BJP”. Chand told The Federal shortly after his return to the Congress that despite his 40-year-old association with Azad, he had been “feeling suffocated in the DAP”.

He accused Azad of “humiliating me and other leaders who stood firmly behind him when he quit the Congress” and of running the DAP “like a dictator”, where no leader of the party was allowed to ask the founder what the new party stood for or what its future plans were.

Sayeed, who had incidentally signed off on Chand’s expulsion order from the DAP in December, echoed similar views and said, “a coterie of nobodies from one small part of J&K was controlling the DAP while those who had given 30, 40, 50 years to the state were expected to take instructions from these people”.

Also read: Bharat Jodo Yatra is crowd-puller, but political heft eludes Congress

The small part of J&K that Sayeed was referring to, said another former DAP leader, was the Chenab Valley – the gateway from Jammu to Kashmir and the region that Azad belongs to. This former DAP leader, who requested anonymity claiming he still had “great respect for Azad because he was my leader for 20 years”, said Azad “unfortunately had no clear political vision…whenever we asked him what DAP’s expansion plans or its ideology were, he said leave all this to me.”

Congress sources said senior leaders of the party like J&K in-charge Rajni Patil, former J&K PCC chief Ghulam Ahmed Mir, incumbent PCC chief Vikar Rasool Wani, J&K Congress working president Raman Bhalla and former MP Tariq Hameed Karra had been in constant touch with Chand, Sayeed and other DAP leaders for sometime after sensing that an implosion in Azad’s party was imminent.

Interestingly, Wani, former MLA from Banihal in Ramban and Bhalla, former MLA from Gandhi Nagar in Jammu, were both seen as Azad’s nominees when they were appointed PCC president and working president last August, days before Azad quit the party.

Azad, a BJP proxy?

Things had apparently begun to go downhill for Azad almost immediately after he formed the DAP. What reportedly irked many was the “fast-gaining impression that Azad was a BJP proxy because of the incoherent stand he was taking on crucial issues such as Article 370, plight of the Kashmiri Pandits and continuing terror attacks in J&K,” said another DAP leader who rejoined the Congress on Friday.

That the BJP-led central government did not ask him to vacate his South Avenue Bungalow in Lutyen’s Delhi after he ceased to be an MP was also seen as sign of a nexus between Azad and the BJP, as was the Padma Bhushan award that was conferred on Azad by the Union of India last year.

What seems to have hurt Azad the most was a combination of his incoherent stand on Article 370 and the perception of him being a BJP proxy. The vision document that Azad released for his DAP made no assurances on whether his party stands for reinstating Article 370.

On the contrary, last September, while addressing a public meeting Azad said, “For votes, I won’t mislead people like other parties. To restore Article 370, political parties would need a majority in the Lok Sabha of around 350 votes and 175 in the Rajya Sabha. This is a number no political party has or is likely to ever get. The number of Congress MPs (in the Lok Sabha) has come down to below 50 seats, and if they speak of restoring Article 370, they are making false promises.” Many saw this as Azad’s exhortation to the people of Kashmir to accept a life beyond Article 370.

With Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra moving towards Kashmir and stridently attacking the BJP, the Congress had begun to draw public attention in J&K once again. With the Abdullahs and Mehbooba Mufti also supporting the yatra, Rahul’s walkathon was seen in the Valley as a definite and tangible political campaign against the BJP that had repealed Article 370.

Azad had neither been invited to the BJY nor had he issued any statement in its support, further bracketing him with the BJP. If this wasn’t enough, Rahul, when asked at a media interaction on January 31 about the possibility of Azad’s return to the Congress, had practically replied in the negative.

With the announcement of Assembly polls in the UT likely in the next few months – the state Assembly had been dissolved in 2019 with the abrogation of Article 370 and fresh elections haven’t been called since – a realignment of secular forces against the BJP is being eagerly anticipated in J&K. Azad’s DAP had hoped to capture this imagination but is now imploding under the weight of its own contradictions and the follies of its founder.