Former Haryana minister Ajay Yadav quits Congress

Five-time MLA and former Haryana minister Ajay Singh Yadav resigned from the Congress on Thursday, days after the party lost the state elections to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Yadav said he was “disillusioned with the party high command for treating me shabbily after Sonia Gandhi left the post of Congress president”. Gandhi left the post in 2017 and returned to it briefly in 2019.

“I have sent my resignation letter to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s ji of AICC (All India Congress Committee) committee chairman, OBC (Other Backward Class) wing and also to the primary members of the Indian National Congress Party,” said Yadav in a post on X.

The 65-year-old described his resignation as a “difficult decision” because of his family’s seventy-year association with the Congress, which began when his late father became an MLA in 1952.

Yadav is the third prominent Congress leader in Haryana to quit the party in recent years, PTI reported.

Earlier this year, four-time former MLA Kiran Choudhry, whose father-in-law Bansi Lal was Haryana chief minister three times, defected to the BJP and is now serving as an MP in the Rajya Sabha.

Four-time MLA and former Congress Working Committee member Kuldeep Bishnoi left the party in 2022 and joined the BJP.

Yadav is seen as a rival to Congress leader and former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. He had recently criticized the Congress party’s state unit for alleged infighting in the run-up to the Assembly elections.

He had called on the Congress to examine its poor performance in South Haryana, better known as the Ahirwal region, where it secured only one of the 14 seats, compared to the BJP’s 10. His son Chiranjeev Rao lost from Rewari seat to BJP’s Laxman Yadav by over 28,000 votes.

Yadav also said that Ahirwal region was not represented in the Congress Working Committee, Central Election Committee and Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee.

The BJP won the Haryana Assembly election by gaining 48 seats in the 90-member General Assembly. This was an increase from the 40 seats it won in 2019. The Congress won 37 seats.