New Delhi: More than 50 senior Congress leaders, including former Jammu and Kashmir deputy chief minister Tara Chand, resigned from the party in support of Ghulam Nabi Azad in Jammu on Tuesday, August 30.They submitted a joint resignation letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi.Chand and several others, including former ministers Abdul Majid Wani, Manohar Lal Sharma, Gharu Ram and former MLA Balwan Singh, announced their resignations from their party, including its primary membership, at a press conference.“We have submitted a joint resignation letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi in support of Azad,” Balwan Singh said.Also read: Will Ghulam Nabi Azad’s New Party Only End up Fragmenting Anti-BJP Vote in Jammu?Over a dozen prominent Congress leaders, including former ministers and legislators, besides hundreds of Panchayati Raj Institution (PRI) members, municipal corporators and district and block level leaders have already left the Congress to join Azad.Azad, 73, a former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, ended his five-decade association with the Congress on August 26, terming the party comprehensively destroyed and lashing out at Rahul Gandhi for demolishing its entire consultative mechanism.Azad has said that the party’s recovery was beyond prayers and it needed medicines to recover.“Congress needs dawa not dua to recover. It needs surgery to reinvent itself. It needs physicians and surgeons, not compounders,” he said.Criticising Rahul Gandhi for demolishing the party, he said, “I like Rahul as a person, but the problem lies with his brand of politics. This is not a generational battle. Had that been the case, so many leaders of Rahul’s age group wouldn’t have left the party.”(With PTI inputs)