Drabu quits PDP

SRINAGAR: Ahead of upcoming Assembly elections. the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) suffered another jolt on Thursday when its senior leader and former finance minister Haseeb Drabu announced his resignation from the party.

The architect of PDP-BJP alliance in Jammu and Kashmir, Drabu is reported to have sent his resignation to the PDP president Mehbooba Mufti Thursday evening, a copy of which he shared on Twitter.

In his resignation letter, Drabu, a well known economist who has also served as chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank, said his legislative engagement has prematurely come to an end with the dissolution of the state assembly.

"I don't agree with the timing and manner in which it was done. It doesn't credit either the democratic system or its custodian participants with any glory, whatsoever.

"Be that as it may, the time has come for me to bid adieu!" Drabu, who was the editor of a business daily earlier in his career, said.

The letter, which was posted by Drabu on his personal twitter handle, said his exit from the PDP had been coming for a while now.

“Even though I have not be a dissident — you are aware I had resigned from the cabinet, assembly and party nearly two years ago which you didn’t accept — I have disengaged myself from party affairs for quite some time now,” he wrote in his letter.

The relations between 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”.

Mufti later dropped him from the Cabinet.

In his letter, Drabu said he did not believe in precipitating the matter because he thought it to be morally and ethically wrong to leave the party under whose aegis he had contested his maiden elections to the state assembly.

"Now that it is over, I am hereby resigning from the Jammu and Kashmir PDP," he said.

After Imran Ansari, Drabu is the second elected legislator to abandon the party after Governor Satypal Malik dissolved the state assembly on November 21.

In his emotional resignation letter, Drabu remembered former chief minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed who had sought him out and brought him into politics.

"Working with him made me realise that politics is not the 'last refuge of scoundrels'!.. I just hope that when history judges Mufti Saheb and his decision to ally with the BJP, it does so in the context and with the complexity that it deserves," he said.

Recalling his political journey, Drabu, who was one of the chief architects of the Agenda of Alliance between the PDP and the BJP in 2015 and then again in 2016, said during "this brief period, I got a flavour of politics in all its fascinating melange ranging from conviction, compulsion and compromise to principles, pledges and perfidies!"

He said his journey so far has had its fair share of highs and lows, successes and failures, appreciations and condemnation, contentment and frustrations, and agreements and disagreements.

"There are many things that I am thankful for, many more I am grateful and yet much more that I am distressed about. A slice of full life in itself as it were!" he wrote.

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.

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.

While Drabu has not hinted at joining any party for now, speculations are rife that he might move to Sajad Lone’s People’s Conference, giving the former finance minister’s proximity with BJP-backed Lone.