Shehzad Poonawalla had written a long letter to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in 2017 before resigning from the party. The letter was in complete contrast to his resignation letter to the BJP, which he submitted last month. His letter to Rahul was also way longer and critical of the party’s dynastic politics.
After quitting BJP, Poonawalla clarified that there is no way he was returning to Congress.
Replying to the same question, he sarcastically told NDTV, “I will join the Congress on one condition: Remove Rahul Gandhi, remove Sonia Gandhi, remove Priyanka Vadra, apologise for Nehru’s actions.”
Poonawalla joined the Congress in 2008 and, after what he described in his letter as eight years of putting his ‘energy and money’ for progress of the party, was made secretary of the Maharashtra Congress unit in 2016. However, by 2017, he had begun moving away from the party, citing what he described as an unfair election to choose the Congress president. He eventually resigned in December 2017. “Rahul ji, during the 2002 Gujarat riots while I was in school, I read in my text books about Nehru, Azad & Gandhi and it was natural for folks like me to fall in love with the Congress ideology. It has a glorious history of over 100 years, it led the freedom struggle & had a solid track record towards building India since independence.
In his letter to Rahul Gandhi, Poonawalla mentioned about the same election and wrote that the choice of the party president would be obvious because the system was “rigged”. He went on to question whether the Congress was a “private limited company” or a Bollywood “khan-dan”, referring to Rahul becoming Congress general secretary the same year. “Due to pressing emergency financial and personal circumstances, I will move into the private sector, but wherever possible and in whatever format possible, I will continue to support the vision and work of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP,” he said.
