With less than five months left before Punjab goes to assembly polls, the ruling Congress party in the state is sinking deeper with every passing day into a crisis of its own making. The tactless ‘peace plan’ that the Congress’s central leadership had thrust upon its state unit, on July 18, by anointing the prattling Navjot Singh Sidhu as the Punjab Congress chief while letting his bête noire, Captain Amarinder Singh, to continue as chief minister is on the verge of certain collapse.
Calls by Sidhu’s supporters – four Punjab cabinet ministers and over 20 MLAs among them – for Singh’s ouster ahead of the assembly poll due in February 2022 have resurfaced, despite the Congress officially asserting that the Captain will stay on as CM to lead the party’s campaign. Singh’s supporters, on the other hand, have been just as brusque in dismissing the criticism coming his way, variously dubbing his detractors as “self-serving stooges” working on the instructions of one man (read: Sidhu) to “destabilise the government”. The 79-year-old CM, on his part, has largely been trying to keep his counsel but has also, rather uncharacteristically, been eager to dutifully roll out every diktat issued by the 57-year-old Sidhu.
That the Punjab peace plan adopted by the Congress high command last month after a long and bitter feud between Singh, Sidhu and their respective camps was shaky to begin with was always clear. Eager to prevent the attrition of Sidhu – a former BJP MP who had switched to the Congress less than five years ago – and to use him to reassert its dominance on the party, the Gandhi family (interim party chief Sonia Gandhi, former party president Rahul Gandhi and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra) had given in to the former cricketer’s demand of appointing him the party’s state unit chief despite strident opposition from the Captain. Further, the party appointed four working presidents to aid Sidhu. It craftily chose the four men – Sangat Singh Gilzian, Sukhwinder Singh Danny, Pawan Goel and Kuljit Nagra – who were known critics of the CM. The only concession that the high command extended to Singh, who had led the party to a stupendous victory in 2017, when the Congress was – and continues to even today – struggling with an electoral drought, was to allow him to stay on as CM.
If Singh had accepted these terms hoping that by retreating from a losing battle – the high command had already dropped enough hints of elevating Sidhu’s as PCC chief irrespective of the CM’s reservations – he could serve out his remaining tenure without daily criticisms from his intra-party rival, he clearly miscalculated. Despite extending an olive branch to Sidhu, a fellow Jat Sikh from his own erstwhile principality of Patiala, Singh realised soon that the pot shots will keep coming. Sources tell Outlook that though the Congress high command had assured Singh that Sidhu will “cease to undermine his authority” and will “seek his guidance in matters of running the party organisation in Punjab”, the former cricketer “made a slew of appointments without Singh’s knowledge” and in doing so, carefully selected vocal critics of the CM for key roles. Sidhu has also kept the pressure going on Singh to fulfill the ‘8-point programme’ the party had envisaged for Punjab and by routinely stating that the government wasn’t doing its job well.
Among the major appointments made by Sidhu over the past month were those of former Punjab DGP Mohd. Mustafa (principal strategic advisor), Malvinder Singh Mali, Pyare Lal Garg and Lok Sabha MP Amar Singh (advisors), Pargat Singh (general secretary, organisation) and Jagtar Singh and Surinder Dalla (media advisors). It is the utterances of some of these appointees, besides the open rebellion by over two dozen MLAs led by senior Punjab cabinet minister Tript Rajinder Bajwa – once a key Amarinder Singh supporter who now wants the high command to sack the CM – that has triggered the Singh-Sidhu spat afresh.
Recent comments by Sidhu’s advisors, Mali (who reportedly told a television news channel that “Kashmir was a separate country, belonged to Kashmiris, and India and Pakistan occupied it illegally”) and Garg (who took on Singh for criticising Pakistan on grounds that the CM’s comments were “not in the interest of Punjab), were strongly rebutted by the Captain and Anandpur Sahib MP Manish Tewari. While Singh ticked off Mali and Garg saying the two should “stick to their jobs” and “not comment on matters they know nothing about”, Tewari went a step further asking “do such people have a right to stay in India”.
Harish Rawat, the Congress’s general secretary in-charge of Punjab who played a central role in ensuring that the high command’s peace project is rolled out despite Singh’s reservations, is now in an unenviable position. When Singh’s detractors from the Sidhu camp met Rawat in Dehradun, on Wednesday, he told them that the party high command will not replace the Captain before the assembly polls. Singh’s supporters insist that Rawat can’t brush aside his own role in the mess that created by the central leadership in poll-bound Punjab. The former Uttarakhand CM is now on the back foot, assuring the Captain and his supporters that the party will not be mute spectator to the hara-kiri being unleashed in Punjab. Rawat told Outlook that he was “conscious of the embarrassment” that the party is facing in Punjab due to the controversial remarks made by Sidhu’s appointees and that “if needed, they will be removed.”
Removing Sidhu’s appointees, however, carries no guarantee of ironing out differences between the Amritsar East MLA and the Captain, admit party sources. “This is now an untenable situation. Punjab polls are for the Congress to lose… the state has a splintered Opposition and we should have been making optimum use of this, instead we are busy washing our dirty linen in public. Does the Congress look like a party that is in command in a state where it has an absolute majority and where elections are now due shortly? Every second day, Sidhu and his lackeys are embarrassing the CM and the high command is sitting pretty in Delhi instead of summoning those destabilizing our government and reading them the riot act,” says a veteran Punjab Congress leader.
The Captain’s detractors maintain that the party erred in allowing him to continue as CM till the elections. “There is immense anger against the unfulfilled poll promises of our government which had, so far, been camouflaged because of the farmers’ protests against the Centre’s anti-farm laws. As we move closer to the elections, the anti-incumbency against our government will take centre stage. The only way to neutralize this was a change of guard. By replacing Singh with Sidhu, a popular leader with mass appeal, no charges of corruption and one who is seen as a critic of both Amarinder and the Badals (the first family of key Opposition party Shiromani Akali Dal), we can still end anti-incumbency but the high command is scared that Captain will sabotage the polls for us,” says a Punjab Congress MLA who is a Sidhu confidante.
Those close to the CM maintain agree that though there is public anger over some poll promises – particularly the slow pace of investigations in the infamous 2015 sacrilege cases – Singh is “working overtime” to address the grievances. “In the past month, the CM has done everything Sidhu and his supporters have asked him to do. He increased the SAP for sugarcane within 24 hours of Sidhu tweeting about it; he immediately agreed to Sidhu’s demand for a daily roster of ministers to hold a janta durbar in the PCC office and he has made it clear to Sidhu that he will expedite every pending pro-people decision… now what more can he do,” asks a Lok Sabha MP from Punjab. A Congress MLA close to Singh adds, “it is clear that Sidhu’s grouse against Amarinder has nothing to do with unfulfilled poll promises; he is just a man in a hurry who just wants to become the CM at any cost. Similarly, a majority of those in Sidhu’s camp are MLAs and ministers who are personally facing heavy anti-incumbency or are unhappy with Singh for not obliging them with personal favours that were sought with regard to transfers and postings of some bureaucrats and clearance of some constituency-specific projects and schemes.”
The anti-Singh lobby has now sought an appointment with interim Congress chief Sonia Gandhi to demand sacking of the CM. Singh is keeping his cards close to his chest while also trying to rally support among the state’s Hindu electorate that, ostensibly, hasn’t taken kindly to the Congress high command’s over-reliance on the majority Jat Sikh vote bank (both Singh and Sidhu belong to the community) to retain Punjab. The CM is also carefully positioning himself as the ‘real patriot’ in the Congress – a military man who fought in two wars against Pakistan and continues to caution his party and the people against Pakistan’s nefarious designs – against Sidhu, whose proximity to Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan is well-known. Those close to Singh, however, say these may not be the only weapons in Singh’s political arsenal and that the Gandhis would be committing electoral suicide by alienating the CM any further than they already have.
