Loyalist Forsakes Gandhis’ Fraying Party

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/world/loyalist-forsakes-gandhis-fraying-party.html

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NEW DELHI — A longtime and prominent loyalist of the Indian National Congress party publicly broke with the party’s president, Sonia Gandhi, and her son, Rahul, on Friday. The loyalist accused the Gandhis of interfering with her decisions when she was environment minister, forcing her to resign without explanation, then making her a scapegoat for their government’s failings.

The former minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, who is a former party spokeswoman, ended her 30-year association with the party in a news conference in Chennai during which she reiterated much of the content of a letter she wrote to Mrs. Gandhi in November. The letter was published Friday in The Hindu, a national newspaper.

In the letter, Ms. Natarajan wrote that she had been “continuously attacked, wrongly vilified and defamed in the media and exposed to every possible humiliation in public life” and that she had suffered “the most excruciating mental agony.”

The emotional and very public condemnation of the beleaguered Congress leadership was the latest indicator of how quickly the power of the long-dominant party has withered since it was routed in May’s election. After dominating the front pages of the country’s newspapers for years, news of the party has fallen deep inside the papers — though not on Friday, when the political scuffle was big news. Images of Mrs. Gandhi that once dominated the capital have now been replaced by those of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the winning Bharatiya Janata Party.

During his political campaign last year, Mr. Modi suggested that Ms. Natarajan was corrupt, speaking of a “Jayanthi tax” on those seeking clearances on projects, according to the Press Trust of India. Ms. Natarajan denied the claim.

Ms. Natarajan’s tenure was a controversial one, marked by delays in environmental clearances for mining and other industrial projects, decisions that are typically mired in red tape in India.

After her resignation, Mr. Gandhi gave a speech to industry leaders expressing his regret over “slow decision making” in environmental approvals of projects. Indian news outlets suggested that Ms. Natarajan had been removed for incompetence, though her letter said she had “never been told of any issues prior” to her resignation.

“What followed was a hysterical vicious false and motivated campaign against me, in the media, orchestrated by particular chosen individuals in the party,” she wrote.

She also said many of the project rejections had been at the behest of Mr. Gandhi, a member of Parliament and a top official of the Congress party, and she wrote that she had always taken care to honor what she referred to as Mr. Gandhi’s “requests.”

Congress party leaders denied Ms. Natarajan’s accusations on Friday.

Abhishek Singhvi, a Congress party spokesman, issued a statement saying that it was “saddening and deeply regrettable that someone who got four terms” as a member of Parliament and “remained party spokesperson for over a decade has chosen to unleash a diatribe which is entirely opportunistic and hypocritical apart from being factually untrue.”

In an interview with the Indian news channel NDTV that aired on Friday, Ms. Natarajan denied that she was angling for a position in the Bharatiya Janata Party, saying she decided to speak out because her family’s reputation was being “maligned.”

The current environment minister, Prakash Javadekar of the B.J.P., said in televised comments that he would review decisions made by Ms. Natarajan that had any markings of “extraneous influence.”