Hardik Patel Leaves Congress, Swipes At Rahul Gandhi With “Chicken Sandwich”
Hardik Patel resigned from the Congress today, slamming Rahul Gandhi, who had brought him into the party in 2019. In the letter bomb that embarrasses the party just after its revival strategy meeting, he claims that top leaders “were distracted by their mobile phones” and that the Gujarat Congress leadership was more interested in ensuring “chicken sandwiches” for them.
According to sources, the Gujarat Patidar leader has been in contact with the BJP leadership for the past two months and is expected to join the party within a week. The BJP leadership wants him on board, and after some resistance, the Gujarat unit of the party has agreed, according to the sources.
“When I met top leaders, they seemed distracted by their mobile phones and other issues as opposed to listening to issues concerning Gujarat,” Hardik Patel wrote in his resignation letter days after Rahul Gandhi’s Gujarat visit, when a meeting between the two did not materialise.
Following that thinly veiled jab, he launched another at Gujarat Congress leaders.
“In Gujarat, senior leaders are more concerned with ensuring that visiting leaders get their chicken sandwiches than with engaging with people during yatras,” the letter stated.
“When our leader was needed in India during critical times, he was abroad,” Hardik Patel continued, echoing criticism levelled at Rahul Gandhi by critics including the ruling BJP.
He claimed that the Congress leadership “hates Gujarat and has no interest in the state,” and that the party has been “rejected in virtually every state because they have no roadmap to present to the people.”
He claimed that the Congress party’s politics were limited to simply opposing everything the government did. He went on to say that the party “obstructed” the resolution of important issues such as the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Goods and Services Tax, the Ayodhya temple-mosque case, and Article 370. (the scrapped constitutional provision that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir).
In 2019, just before the Lok Sabha election, the Patidar activist joined the Congress. He was named the Congress’s Working President in Gujarat, a position he claimed had meant little to him during his years in the party.
He had been complaining for weeks about the Gujarat Congress leadership’s marginalisation of him, comparing it to a “groom forced into nasbandi (vasectomy).”
He also attempted to meet with Rahul Gandhi recently, but the meeting did not take place, despite widespread media speculation. Rahul Gandhi said he didn’t have time to meet him personally during his visit because he had a lot of meetings with community leaders to wrap up in five to six hours. “I don’t have a godfather in Delhi who can help me; I have to rely on myself,” he explained.
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