In an exclusive interview to NDTV, former Union Minister Jayanthi Natarajan has called on the Congress to introspect on its functioning.
Former Union Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, who quit the Congress on Friday, and made a mega attack on party vice president Rahul Gandhi and has said the party needs a "lot of discussion" on its functioning.
"I left Congress because I felt suffocated... I couldn't take the propaganda of a malicious campaign against me," Ms Natarajan told NDTV last evening, emphatically denying reports that she has met BJP president "Amit Shah or any other BJP leader."
Ms Natarajan has alleged that as Environment Minister in the UPA-2 government of Manmohan Singh, she received "specific requests" from Mr Gandhi's office which she treated as directives. She alleged that after instructing her to protect the environment, the Congress vice president publicly criticised her decisions before the election last year, in an attempt to woo industry.
A day before he did that at an industry meet, Ms Natarajan says she asked to resign by the then Prime Minister. She waited, she said, for months for an audience with Mr Gandhi and his mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, before writing an explosive letter to Mrs Gandhi that was made public today.
She said she did not think she acted out of line. "I sought a meeting with the Congress President, to ask for party work. It is not wrong to ask the Congress president for party assignments," she said.