The Congress on Tuesday suspended Sanjay Jha for “anti-party activities and breach of discipline”. He was removed as the party’s spokesperson last month.

“Nothing surprises me,” Jha was quoted as saying by NDTV. “What are the anti-party activities I indulged in? The least the Congress could have done was to approach me. We are showing an extremely intolerant culture.” Just minutes before the suspension order was made public, Jha had appeared on the news channel.

Jha was removed as the Congress spokesperson on June 18, almost 10 days after he criticised and questioned the party’s leadership in an opinion piece published in The Times of India.

In the article, Jha had also called out his own party for its indifferent attitude. “The Congress has demonstrated extraordinary lassitude, and its lackadaisical attitude towards its own political obsolescence is baffling, to say the least [and this despite a whopping defeat in two Lok Sabha elections and several reverses in states],” he wrote. “There are many in the party who cannot comprehend this perceptible listlessness. For someone like me, for instance, permanently wedded to Gandhian philosophy and Nehruvian outlook that defines the Congress, it is dismaying to see its painful disintegration.”

In an article in Scroll.in earlier this month, Jha had said that his Congress colleagues, who have criticised him for speaking out against the problems within the party, had not bothered to understand his views. “But they will help the Congress tremendously by reading My Experiments With Truth and Discovery of India,” he wrote. “It is never too late to make a new beginning.”

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