2022 Punjab polls: Will Cong snatch defeat from jaws of a once assured victory?

If one had asked any member of the Congress around this time last year of their party’s prospects in the five states now bound for the Assembly polls, the response would have been of assured victory in Punjab, keen contests in Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and high hopes of a marginal revival in Uttar Pradesh.

With the elections now exactly a month away, ask the same question. In all likelihood, though the response on the other four states may be the same, Punjab would evoke an unsure and embarrassed “can’t say”.

Punjab, the only poll-bound state currently under Congress rule, witnessed the most dramatic and frenzied interventions from the party’s central leadership over the past year, particularly since last July, in an ostensible bid to retain power. Between July last and the present, the Congress’s Punjab unit witnessed a full-blown revolt by MLAs against chief minister Amarinder Singh, principal mutineer Navjot Singh Sidhu’s dramatic elevation as the party’s state unit chief and the equally theatrical exit of the Captain from office.

This was followed by the surprise appointment of a relatively unknown Charanjit Singh Channi as Punjab CM, another round of revolt by Sidhu and desperate moves in the party to either rein him in or show him the door. As the political potboiler descended into a yawn-inducing Ekta Kapoor soap opera, other skirmishes blew up.

The Captain walked out of the Congress to launch his Punjab Lok Congress (PLC), former PCC chief Sunil Jakhar and Congress MP Manish Tewari openly took pot-shots at the new CM and PCC chief, while Channi and Sidhu tried to best each other in their game of political brinkmanship.

The net result: with elections to the state due on February 20, the Congress is trapped deeper in the tangled web weaved by its central leadership – particularly former party chief Rahul Gandhi and general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

Also read: How UP’s 80% are polarising against Yogi Adityanath

In contrast, the Congress’s fast-emerging main political rival in the state, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), no stranger to internal turmoil, is seemingly steadying its boat with the belated announcement of Bhagwant Mann as its chief ministerial candidate and a plethora of populist poll promises.

With Mann, AAP’s lone Lok Sabha MP from Punjab’s Sangrur, the party hopes to reclaim ground in the state’s Malwa region where it had registered its strongest performance in the 2017 polls; bagging 18 of the region’s 69 seats. In the other two regions of Majha (25 seats) and Doaba (23 seats) where AAP had fared miserably in 2017, winning just one seat each, Kejriwal hopes the turmoil within the Congress and the desire of Punjabis to break the electoral stranglehold of Akalis and the Congress will aid a better performance for AAP.

Sukhbir Singh Badal’s Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), once the Congress’s chief adversary in Punjab, is also in hectic campaign mode, trying to cut political losses accrued due to its past alliance with a BJP that has left the state’s farmers riled due to the controversial and now-scrapped farm laws.

In 2017, the SAD had lost its dominance on the state’s all-important agriculture-dominated Malwa region – comprising 69 of Punjab’s 117 Assembly seats – to the Congress and the AAP, and suffered massive setbacks in its traditional bastion of the Panthic belt owing to public anger over the 2015 sacrilege cases.

The ageing Amarinder Singh may no longer command the political heft that propelled him to the Punjab CM’s chair twice, but then the titular Patiala royal is aching to hurt the Congress by engineering defections and cutting into its votes; even entering into a seemingly suicidal poll alliance with the BJP to smite his former party.

Adding to the ruling party’s troubles is the threat posed by some farmer outfits – united under the banner of Samyukt Samaj Morcha (SSM) – who have plunged into the poll fray threatening to chip away at the agrarian votes that the Congress was banking on until recently to retain power.

Meanwhile, the Congress is still busy dousing the flames within its camp amid rising fears of an impending implosion. Channi and Sidhu have made no secret of their personal aspiration of being projected as the party’s CM-face. A 36-second video posted by the Congress’s official Twitter handle, on January 17, signalled that the central leadership would rather bank on Channi, its newly-anointed Dalit posterboy, causing nervousness and another outburst – or even resignation – from the tantrum-prone former cricketer days ahead of the election date.

Also read: Bhagwant Mann is AAP’s chief ministerial face for Punjab polls

The damage control blueprint that the Congress high command had drafted months ago to beat anti-incumbency against the Captain Singh-led government by effecting a leadership change and rewriting the state’s electoral caste arithmetic has proved disastrous. An otherwise three-cornered fight between the Congress, AAP and SAD has turned into a six-cornered one with the PLC-BJP alliance and farmer leaders emerging as new adversaries and Sidhu emerging as the Punjab Congress’s in-house tormentor.

Political observers in Punjab believe the Congress high command, in its zealousness to exert authority over Amarinder Singh and give the state’s politics a new narrative by appointing Channi as the first ever Dalit Sikh CM, plunged the party into avoidable chaos without fully discerning imminent risks.

To many, the mistakes began with Channi’s appointment – hilariously ironic considering the party believed it to be a masterstroke that would have a favourable impact in poll-bound UP and Uttarakhand too where Dalits constitute a sizeable chunk of voters.

In doing so, the Congress, arguably, didn’t sufficiently weigh the pros and cons in Punjab of breaking the hegemony of Jat Sikhs on the CM’s chair while also miscalculating the reaction Channi’s appointment would evoke from Sidhu, the raging bull the Gandhis thought they could tame after unleashing him to toss Captain out of the ring.

Since Haryana was carved out of it in 1966, the unwritten rule in Punjab’s electoral politics has been that the CM always comes from the Jat Sikh community that, at a little over 20 per cent of the electorate, is substantially lower than the state’s Dalit population of nearly 32 per cent but remains electorally, socially and financially dominant. Before Channi, the only other time this rule was broken was when the Congress chose Giani Zail Singh, a backward caste Ramgharia Sikh, as the CM between 1972 and 1977.

Also read: Stranded Modi on Punjab flyover exposes India’s farcical politics

Senior journalist and author Jagtar Singh recently wrote in his blog that the “Congress committed a blunder when at the time of replacing Captain… it was asserted by one of its senior leaders (Ambika Soni) that only a Sikh leader would replace him”.

Channi’s appointment ticked the right boxes from a social justice point of view – a Dalit Sikh who came from humble beginnings was now replacing the scion of Punjab’s most prominent royal family – but it also caused a flutter in the Jat Sikh community. Sidhu, who has now replaced Amarinder Singh as the party’s main Jat Sikh face, has made no secret of his unhappiness at being kept away from the CM’s chair.

At the same time, as Channi was ostensibly chosen after Soni’s “only Sikh CM for Punjab” jeopardised the chances of Sunil Jakhar, the Congress’s key Hindu face and former state unit chief, it also possibly riled a section of the state’s less-talked about but electorally important Hindu voters who saw in Channi’s elevation a decisive messaging from the Congress that their community had no claim to Punjab’s top executive post.

Jakhar, who has been sulking ever since and taking regular swipes at both Channi and Sidhu despite being in-charge of his party’s poll campaign panel, conceded recently that the Congress needs to “calm identity anxiousness” among a section of Punjab’s population.

Congress sources, however, continue to insist that Channi’s appointment was electorally prudent as any anti-Congress Jat Sikh votes will likely divide between the AAP, SAD and the PLC-BJP combine – each of which now has a Jat Sikh at the helm – while the state’s Dalits, along with sections of the Jat Sikh and Hindu population will still back the party. This may sound good but it also defies Punjab’s electoral history where the Congress has, traditionally, needed a robust combination of votes from all these communities to come to power.

In 2007 and 2012, when the Congress lost two consecutive Punjab Assembly polls, the party had maintained a substantial lead over the SAD on the Dalit vote bank. The Congress had polled 49 and 51 per cent of Dalit Sikh votes and 56 and 37 per cent of Hindu Dalit votes in the 2007 and 2012 elections, respectively, against the SAD’s 32 and 34 per cent votes among Dalit Sikhs and 25 and 33 per cent votes among Hindu Dalits. However, in both these polls, the Akalis had romped to power primarily riding on the massive 61 (2007) and 52 (2012) per cent votes they polled among the Jat Sikhs.

To many in Punjab, despite Sidhu’s recent antics providing a clear answer, it remains a mystery why the Gandhi siblings used him – a Jat Sikh – to stage the coup d’etat against Amarinder but then anointed a “third party” as the new CM. Sidhu has used this to his advantage, making regular attacks at Channi while projecting himself as the sole leader who can usher in a “Punjab model” that will do justice to Punjab, Punjabis and Punjabiyat.

With neither Rahul nor Priyanka intervening decisively to rein in Sidhu, the Amritsar East MLA has gone on a rampage, undermining Channi at every turn, dictating government policy and appointments and loudly protesting in public when his words aren’t heeded.

Jagroop Sekhon, professor of political science at Amritsar-based Guru Nanak Dev University, told The Federal that the Congress is living up to the tag of being “its own worst enemy”. Sekhon believes the Congress had, perhaps, thought that Amarinder’s exit would have helped divert public attention from the government’s lack of performance, but the events that have followed since have only made a bigger mess of an existing morass. “People are now confused about who is actually running the show in Punjab? Is it Channi or Sidhu or Jakhar?” Sekhon said.

The recurring in-house resistance has, perhaps, given Channi the experience, within a short span of time, to deal with political adversities and adversaries with some ease. The best example of this was on full display in Channi’s handling of the political drama kicked up by none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently when the latter couldn’t reach Hussainiwala, near Ferozepur, to address a public rally on account of protesting farmers who allegedly breached his security protocol.

Also read: UP voters favour Modi & Yogi, but Akhilesh may see an improbable win

While Modi tried to use this fracas to his advantage by kicking up a storm – backed to the hilt by his and the BJP’s social media managers – over an “assassination attempt” that sounded ridiculous, to begin with, Channi quickly turned the tide by asserting that the BJP was trying to “paint three crore peace-loving Punjabis as Khalistani militants, terrorists and Naxalites”.

Yet, here too, the fault-lines within the Congress were exposed as Sidhu took more than 24 hours to back Channi while Jakhar issued a barely-veiled condemnation of the incident, terming the alleged security breach as one “against Punjabiyat”.

Days later, while Channi was still trying to consolidate his position, Sidhu fired a fresh salvo when, on January 11, he released his version of the “Punjab model” of governance but kept Channi’s image out of the promotional material. Jakhar was quick to slam Sidhu by insisting that the blueprint launched by the PCC chief had not been adopted by other party leaders.

It is in this backdrop of incessant cross-firing within its own camp, that the Congress leadership is now finalising ticket distribution for the Punjab polls – another exercise that requires consensus among warring state leaders. If the party’s first list of 86 candidates is any indication, the central leadership is walking on thin ice.

Also read: Cong puts forth Channi as CM candidate on Twitter; Team Sidhu ‘not worried’

Despite reports of strong anti-incumbency against a chunk of its nearly 75 MLAs, the party has, so far, re-nominated 60 of them to contest the polls and denied a ticket to just four. In naming the 26 other candidates, the central leadership has tried to evade the impression that anyone leader – Channi, Sidhu or Jakhar – was walking away with a disproportionate number of tickets for loyalists.

Party sources say the ticket distribution has factored in the possibility of a fresh rebellion by sitting MLAs who, on being denied a ticket, could defect to other parties like the AAP, SAD, PLC or BJP as this is also the season of political turncoats.

With polls a month away and the Congress’s actual election campaign still on the drawing board, it may be too early to predict the electoral repercussions of the storm brewing in the party, but for now, it looks like the Grand Old Party is, once again, trying really hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of a once assured victory.

(The writer is a freelance journalist based in Chandigarh. He tweets at @guptavivek83)