Just days before Punjab goes to polls, senior Congress leader from the state and former Union cabinet minister Ashwani Kumar Tuesday resigned from the party. Kumar, a veteran Congressman, is the first senior UPA cabinet minister to leave the Congress post its debilitating Lok Sabha election defeat in 2019.
The Congress has seen a string of exits by leaders, including its youth faces – among them the likes of Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, R P N Singh, Sushmita Dev, Priyanka Chaturvedi and Laliteshpati Tripathi – in the last two years. Kumar’s exit signals that even the old guard is increasingly getting disenchanted with the state of affairs in the party.