Patidar leader and working president for Gujarat Congress Pradesh Committee Hardik Patel on Wednesday resigned from all party positions.
Sparking speculation that he might be looking at joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of state elections in Gujarat later this year.
The 27-year-old leader, who is also convenor of Patel Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS), blamed the Congress leadership for not taking any issue seriously.
“Whenever I tried to draw the attention of party leaders towards pressing issues of Gujarat, it seemed they were more focused on their mobile phone screens and other gadgets,” Patel said in his resignation letter.
In a letter that was sharply critical of the Congress leadership, Patel said he was deeply hurt to see that when scores of party workers travelled 500-600km to attend a meeting and discuss issues, Congress leaders were busy trying to ensure that some senior Congress leader from Delhi was served his chicken sandwich on time.
“Be it building the Lord Ram temple at Ayodhya, CAA-NRC issue, abolishment of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir or GST, people of this country have for long been seeking a resolution to these issues. Be it any issue in the country or for my Patel community, the Congress’s role has been to oppose only the ruling central leadership. This is one of the reasons why most of the states have rejected Congress. It is because the party and the party leadership have failed to draw a basic roadmap for the states,” said Patel.
The 27-year-old youth leader said he is resigning from all positions including his primary membership of the Congress.
Patel recently removed the Congress bio from his social media accounts, sparking speculation of him leaving the party. He has aired his discontentment with the state leadership in the past few weeks.
Recently, Patel shared the dais with senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during his visit to a tribal area of Gujarat but the two did not get spend much time on the sidelines to discuss the many concerns that Hardik Patel had been flagging to the leadership, a person aware of the matter said.
Patel got a major respite when the sessions court recently accepted the state government’s proposal to withdraw a case in connection to an FIR lodged by a BJP councillor with Ramol police station in Ahmedabad in 2017.
The court acquitted Patel and others accused in the case after setting aside a metropolitan court’s order passed in April that rejected the government’s request to allow it to withdraw the case under provisions of section 321 of CrPC. The state government had appealed in the Ahmedabad sessions court against the order.
In August 2015, Patel spearheaded a quota agitation to seek reservation in government jobs and colleges for the Patidar community under the other backward classes category at a ground in Ahmedabad. The agitation turned violent and spread to various parts of the state. More than ten people lost their lives and one police constable was also killed in Surat.
Patel is facing two cases of sedition. In the first case, he has been accused of instigating youths to vandalise public property following his arrest and subsequent release in August, 2015.
In the second one, the Surat police filed a chargesheet under charges of sedition on Hardik Patel. Police accused Hardik of making inflammatory speeches that incited widespread violence. He was jailed for 9 months in October 2015 and was later exiled from the state for another 6 months by the court.
Presently, the matter is pending before both the Ahmedabad and Surat sessions court and bail has been granted to the accused in both cases.