Congress resets Punjab and UP leaderships, but factional challenges persist

Barely five months ahead of the assembly polls in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the Congress announced new chiefs for its units in the two states late Friday (October 2).

The announcement puts an end to months of speculation over the fate of the beleaguered incumbents—outgoing Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring and his UP counterpart Ajay Rai—but with no guarantee of either the electoral dividends the new appointments would pay nor of an end to intra-party dissent.

Two states, two plans

In Punjab, which has been witnessing months of open rebellion against Raja Warring by several senior party leaders, including former chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi and Gurdaspur MP Sukhjinder Randhawa, the party has handed the state unit’s reins to three-term Jalandhar Cantt MLA and former Indian Hockey captain Pargat Singh.

Also read: Motormouths, mixed messages and a fragile alliance: Congress-SP’s UP challenge

In Uttar Pradesh, where the party is ambitious of an electoral revival tethered to both, a perceptible increase in Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s popularity and ally Samajwadi Party’s social justice outreach, the Congress has wound the clock back over four decades to fall back on a caste combination that helped it dominate state politics until the early 1980s.

Rai, a prominent Bhumihar leader, has been benched to make way for three-term Rampur Khas MLA Aradhana Misra ‘Mona’, a Brahmin and daughter of party veteran Pramod Tiwari.

Internal bickering

Curiously, controversy-courting Saharanpur MP Imran Masood, who has lately been in news for his unrelenting attacks on Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, has been appointed working president while Devinder Nishad, an OBC leader, and Alok Prasad, a Dalit, have been roped in as senior vice-presidents.

Though the intra-party leadership tussle in UP had not been nearly as damaging for the Congress as the anti-Raja Warring campaign in Punjab, sources say there had been a communication breakdown between Rai and the party’s UP in-charge, Rajendra Pal Gautam, in recent weeks. While Gautam, a former AAP minister in Delhi, is widely seen as a Rahul appointee and a permanent fixture in the Congress’s ongoing Dalit outreach efforts, sources said it was “only a matter of time” before Rai was eased out.

Also read: Pargat Singh vows to strengthen Congress in Punjab, serve people with dedication

It is as yet unclear whether Rai, a former five-term MLA who hopped from the BJP to the SP and eventually landed in the Congress, will be rehabilitated with some other role in the party’s 2027 poll campaign. A senior Congress functionary, however, said the party is in the process of constituting various election-related committees for UP and Rai could be assigned to lead one of them.

Interesting choice in Punjab

For Raja Warring, sources say rehabilitation within the party’s election apparatus in Punjab seems “unlikely”. “All Punjab poll committees were constituted in June and, in fact, it was from then on that the campaign to remove Raja Warring spilled out into the open. With the exception of Amar Singh (Fatehgarh Sahib MP and chief of the party’s manifesto committee), all other panels are headed by people who wanted Raja Warring sacked, so it is unlikely that he will be included in any of those panels,” said a party leader from Punjab while adding, “he (Raja Warring) still enjoys Rahul’s confidence, so he may be accommodated in the AICC with some key assignment.”

The party high command’s decision to nominate Pargat Singh as Raja Warring’s replacement also makes for an interesting choice. Over the last few months, it had been widely rumoured that if the high command did remove Raja Warring, a Hindu leader would be appointed as the Punjab Congress chief.

Former Sangrur MP Vijay Inder Singla was largely seen as a frontrunner for the post and party insiders say many leaders had even extended their congratulations to him when Raja Warring sent in his resignation to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi earlier this week. Sources said Kharge, too, favoured having a Hindu face as the PPCC chief since all other major party posts in the state were already held by Sikhs—Jat Sikhs Partap Singh Bajwa and Randhawa as Leader of Opposition and chairman of the party’s core committee, respectively, and Dalit Sikh Channi as chief of the campaign panel.

Why Pargat Singh?

While Channi and Randhawa were both reportedly keen on taking over the reins of Punjab Congress, sources said the central leadership was not keen on appointing either of them. Besides already holding charge of the party’s campaign panel and core committee, the duo who united to seek Raja Warring’s ouster and before him that of state in-charge Bhupesh Baghel (replaced with Sachin Pilot), are also CM aspirants.

Also read: Congress rejig sets new norm: 'Neglected' loyalists rewarded, seniority not a shield

Appointing either of them as PPCC chief, would have “strengthened the perception about who the leadership favoured as the CM face”, said a senior party MLA, explaining that Pargat “was a relatively safe choice, as he is not seen as aligned too closely with any camp and is not in the CM race either”. Among Hindu faces the party could have bet on, Singla already leads the party’s election management and coordination panel while Bharat Bhushan Ashu was essentially seen as a Channi man and appointing him risked triggering protests from other factional leaders, the MLA said.

Whether Pargat, along with party in-charge Pilot, is able to unite a deeply divided Punjab Congress to mount a poll-winning offensive against the ruling AAP is to be seen. The high command’s late intervention to sort the leadership mess, sources say, is likely to irk a large number of party district chiefs who were “chosen with the strong backing of Raja Warring and Baghel”—both now relieved of their roles in Punjab.

The UP challenge

The challenge for the high command in Uttar Pradesh doesn’t end with a mere change of guard either. The decision to rope in Mona and Masood as state unit president and working president, respectively, alongside Nishad and Prasad as senior vice-presidents, is aimed at striking both a regional and caste/community balance in a state where all revival experiments of the past four decades have come a cropper.

With a Dalit as state in-charge and another as senior vice-president, a Brahmin as state chief, a Muslim as her deputy and an OBC as another state vice-president, the Congress high command aims to reach out to all caste and community groups that were once strident backers of the party in the state.

Also read: Smooth take-off, but can Pilot navigate Punjab turbulence and land Congress a win?

The return of a woman Brahmin chief after over 15 years—the last one being Rita Bahuguna Joshi, now with the BJP but reportedly eager for a gharwapsi to the Congress—also coincides with growing unease among Brahmins against the BJP. Additionally, though her constituency falls in the Pratapgarh district, Mona hails from Allahabad, the gateway to anti-incumbency prone Purvanchal and a student hub where Rahul recently addressed a hugely successful edition of his Chhatron ki Goonj rallies.

Two contrasting personalities

Masood is from western UP and represents another traditional voting bloc of the party but one, which unlike the Brahmins, hasn’t abandoned the Congress—the Muslims. Congress leaders also point out the stark difference in the personality of Mona and Masood, claiming that though both are seen as confidantes of Priyanka Gandhi, the former is a mild-mannered party loyalist who, like her father Pramod Tiwari, has cultivated cross-party relations, the latter is prone to making provocative statements and infelicitous attacks at political rivals, including Congress ally SP, despite having himself changed parties frequently.

How the duo work together would be as interesting to observe as it would be to see how they collectively tackle the seat-sharing talks with the SP, which has already publicly admonished Masood on several occasions for his frequent outbursts against Akhilesh.