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.”
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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.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 31, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Loyalist Forsakes Gandhis’ Fraying Party. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
