Senior Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leader Haseeb Drabu, also the architect of the Agenda of Alliance that brought the PDP and the BJP together to form a government in 2015, on Thursday quit the party.
“Even though I have not been a dissident, you are aware I had resigned from the Cabinet, Assembly and the party nearly two years ago, which you didn’t accept. I have disengaged myself from party affairs for quite some time now. It was ethically and morally wrong to leave the party under whose aegis one has contested and won the seat in the Legislative assembly. Now that it is over, I am hereby resigning from the J&K PDP,” reads the resignation letter of Mr. Drabu, who served J&K as Finance Minister during the PDP-BJP regime.
The relations between Mr. Drabu and PDP president Mehbooba Mufti soured in March this year when the former delivered a lecture in New Delhi and called “Kashmir a social and not a political issue”. Ms. Mufti later dropped him from the Cabinet.
Mr. Drabu, who earned a good rapport with BJP’s Kashmir point-man Ram Madhav during the three-month long negotiations on the government formation in 2015, was an MLA from Pulwama’s Rajpora constituency. He was key man to push many economic reformations, besides supporting the GST regime in J&K.
Mr. Drabu has become the fourth prominent face, after ex-MLA Imran Reza Ansari, ex-MLA Abid Ansari and MLC Yasir Reshi, to quit the party since the PDP-BJP government fell apart in June this year.
Holding back any criticism against Ms. Mufti, Mr. Drabu said, “I may not have enjoyed every moment of it, but when I look back at it, it has been an enriching and enlightening association. I got a full flavour of politics, in its fascinating range from principles, pledges, to perfidies.”
The former finance minister said PDP patron Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, who him into politics, made him realise that “politics is not the last refuge of scoundrels.”
“I just hope that when history judges Mufti sahib and his decision to ally with the BJP, it does so in the context and with the complexity that it deserves. I wish the PDP all the very best. May it contribute to the resolution of the long impending political issue, help in bringing about social order, peace and prosperity in the state,” Mr. Drabu said.
