New Delhi: Mere hours after Prof Gourav Vallabh resigned from the Congress Thursday, the former spokesperson for the party joined the BJP in Delhi.
He had earlier quit the Congress citing disagreement over the party’s view on the Ram temple consecration, its silence on “people speaking against Sanatana (Dharma)” and its stand against wealth creators, among other reasons.
In a letter to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge Thursday, Vallabh, a former professor at Jamshedpur’s XLRI-Xavier School of Management, wrote that the party “is not able to adjust itself with the youth with new ideas”.
“The ground-level connect of the party has been completely broken, which is not able to understand the aspirations of a new India at all. Due to which neither the party is able to come to power nor it is able to play the role of a strong opposition.”.
Within the party, it’s difficult to “bridge the gap between big leaders and grassroots workers”, his letter, written in Hindi and posted on X, said.
कांग्रेस पार्टी आज जिस प्रकार से दिशाहीन होकर आगे बढ़ रही है,उसमें मैं ख़ुद को सहज महसूस नहीं कर पा रहा.मैं ना तो सनातन विरोधी नारे लगा सकता हूं और ना ही सुबह-शाम देश के वेल्थ क्रिएटर्स को गाली दे सकता.इसलिए मैं कांग्रेस पार्टी के सभी पदों व प्राथमिक सदस्यता से इस्तीफ़ा दे रहाहूं pic.twitter.com/Xp9nFO80I6
— Prof. Gourav Vallabh (@GouravVallabh) April 4, 2024
“Unless a worker can give direct suggestions to his leader, no positive change is possible,” the letter read.
Vallabh came into the limelight in 2019 after his debate with BJP leader Sambit Patra on the ‘100 days of Modi 2.0’ aired on a Hindi channel. At that time, he posed a simple question to Patra: “Just how many zeroes are there in a trillion?”
This was after Patra flexed the Narendra Modi government’s ambitions to make the country a $5 trillion economy by 2024. After insisting that Patra answer his query, Vallabh went on to explain that a trillion has 12 zeroes, before going on to add that 10^9 is a billion and 10^6 is a million.
Vallabh was appointed the party spokesperson in early 2019, months after he joined the party. He has a doctorate in credit risk assessment.
Vallabh has previously been associated with the Reserve Bank of India and the Punjab National Bank and has been the director of the CA Institute in Delhi.
Also read: Pidilite, Bajaj Finance, Nestle India, Asian Paints & more — companies Rahul Gandhi has invested in
‘Uncomfortable and troubled’
In his letter, Vallabh wrote that he was feeling “uncomfortable” with the party’s stand on various issues. Among these were its views on Sanatana Dharma and economic issues.
“Many people associated with the party and the alliance speak against Sanatan (sic), and the party’s silence on it is like giving tacit approval to it,” Vallabh, who has in the past claimed to be strongly religious, said, adding that ideas of religion “are intensely personal and not for public consumption”.
About the Ram temple consecration, he wrote that he was “upset” with the Congress party’s stance. “I am a Hindu by birth and a teacher by profession. This stand of the party has always made me uncomfortable and troubled.”
He was also critical of what he saw as the Congress’s stance against “wealth creators”.
“At present, Congress’s stand on economic matters has always been to humiliate and abuse the wealth creators of the country. Today we have turned against those economic liberalization, privatization, and globalization (LPG) policies for which the world has given us full credit for implementing in the country,” he wrote, adding that the party’s view on every disinvestment taking place in the country was “always negative”.
His aim when he joined the party in 2018 was to use his “ability and capability in economic matters in the interest of the country”, he said.
“We may not be in power, but we could have presented the party’s economic policy-making in the national interest in a better way in our manifesto and elsewhere. But this effort was not made at the party level, which is no less than a suffocation for a person knowledgeable about economic matters like me,” he said.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also read: Sanjay Nirupam takes a jibe at Cong, says ‘expulsion came after party received my resignation’