Margaret Alva resigns as AICC general secretary

Senior Congress leader Margaret Alva is learnt to have resigned as AICC general secretary. She reportedly sent in her resignation to Cong president Sonia Gandhi, report Vinod Sharma and Saroj Nagi.

Senior Congress leader Margaret Alva is learnt to have resigned as AICC general secretary. She reportedly sent in her resignation to Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Monday.

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As general secretary, Alva was in charge of seven states, including Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab.

It was not immediately clear whether the Congress president would accept her resignation.

“It is confirmed,” a senior Congress leader told HT when asked about Alva having put in her papers. “Thank God that good sense has prevailed,” he said in an apparent allusion to her “scandalous” charge that tickets were sold by the Congress during the Karnataka assembly polls and that Congressmen were the party’s own worst enemies.

Alva is understood to have sent her resignation after a meeting with Defence Minister A.K. Antony, who heads the party’s Disciplinary Action Committee to which the matter relating to her allegations and the ostensible breach of discipline by her had been referred. There was no word on what transpired at the meeting.

AICC spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan rejected her allegations of tickets being sold. “There is no truth in the allegations so the question of a probe does not arise,’’ she said.

But Alva’s charges found an echo in the statement of Yogendra Makwana, chairman of the AICC’s scheduled caste department, who is all set to quit the party. He claimed that two SC women ticket aspirants from Rajasthan made a similar complaint to him.

“A candidate from Bara constituency in Rajasthan told me an AICC leader demanded Rs 80 lakh from her to get her a ticket,’’ alleged Makwana.