Drabu quits PDP

Drabu, former finance minister who was associated with the PDP for four and a half years, said his resignation "had been coming for a while now" as he had already "disengaged" himself from the party affairs for "quite some time now".

In his resignation letter sent to the PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, 57-year-old Drabu recalled his association with the party and said, "I can't say that I enjoyed every moment of it."

Drabu had played a key role in forging of alliance between the PDP and the BJP in 2015 and the subsequent formation of government headed by late Mufti Sayeed.

The alliance collapsed in June this year when the BJP pulled out.

 

Referring to the forging of alliance between the PDP and the BJP for forming government in Jammu and Kashmir three years back, Drabu hoped that when history judges Mufti Sayeed and his decision, "it does so in the context and with the complexity it deserves".

The alliance between the two parties, seen ideologically poles apart, had earned the PDP many critics.

A professional economist, Drabu said his journey in politics has had its fair share or highs and lows, successes and failures, appreciation and condemnation, contentment and frustrations, and agreement and disagreements.

"....the time has come for me to bid adieu," he wrote in his letter to Mufti.

"This had been coming for a while now. Even though I have not been a dissident -- you are aware that 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," Drabu said.

"I didn't precipitate the matter because I believe it is ethically and morally wrong to leave the party under whose aegis one has contested and won the seat in the Legislative assembly. Now that that is over, I am hereby resigning from the J&K PDP," he added.

He noted that his legislative engagement had prematurely come to an end with the dissolution of the state assembly by the Governor last month.

"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," he said.