Ghulam Nabi Azad is a Kashmiri leader of the Indian National Congress and has been minister of health and family welfare since 2009. Prior to that, he was parliamentary affairs minister under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh until 2005, at which time he was appointed chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir for three years. He is one of the Congress party’s most important organisers, as indicated not only by his time heading parliamentary affairs but also by his record nine stints as the general secretary of the All-India Congress Committee and by his equally impressive 18 years on the party’s central working committee, around the longest of any Congress official alive today. His organising skills are credited with the Congress winning or holding multiple important state elections over the past two decades, perhaps most surprisingly J&K in 2002, as well as dozens of national-level confidence votes in which the Congress likewise came out on top.
Azad was born in 1949 in a small village in Doda district, in eastern Jammu, and studied zoology at Kashmir University. He formally entered politics in 1973, the year after he graduated, working for the next few years at the lower levels of local Kashmiri politics until, in 1975, he was appointed president of the state’s youth congress. Three years later, he first made his name in national politics, heading the All India Muslim Youth Conference for three years. By the mid-1980s, he had risen to the top echelon of Congress party politics, where he has stayed, in varying capacities, ever since. He became part of the Rajya Sabha in 1990 and the following year took on the Parliamentary Affairs Ministry portfolio for the first time. He has also overseen the tourism, urban development and law portfolios.
Although one of the Congress party’s top leaders, Azad has courted significant controversy during his tenure in various leadership positions. He was forced to tender a surprise resignation in 2008 from his chief ministership in J&K after his attempt to transfer a parcel of land to a Hindu shrine resulted in massive and violent public demonstrations. More recently, his time at the top of the Health and Family Welfare Ministry has been marked by several notorious statements and policy decisions, perhaps most notably referring, at a United Nations conference on HIV/AIDS, to homosexuality as a “disease” from the West. Nonetheless, he has also won plaudits for expanding a force of health workers to focus on rural and slum areas, and has pushed for Indians to marry later in life.
official biography here.
