Former J&K finance minister Haseeb Drabu resigns from PDP

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.

Srinagar: The PDP suffered another jolt on Thursday when its senior leader and former finance minister Haseeb Drabu announced his resignation from the party.

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 been a dissident… I have disengaged myself from party affairs for quite some time now,” he wrote in the letter.

He 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 leader 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. – PTI