Congress gets a new Pilot in Punjab, but will its Warring stop?

In a reshuffle of his party’s office bearers late Saturday (September 5), Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge entrusted AICC general secretary Sachin Pilot with the charge of Punjab, replacing Bhupesh Baghel, who has been dispatched to look after party affairs in Assam.

The decision to replace Baghel with Pilot is being viewed as a concession granted by the party high command to a litany of senior Punjab Congress leaders who had publicly accused the outgoing in-charge of partisan conduct.

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Yet, its efficacy in bringing the party’s stalled preparations for next year’s Punjab polls back on track is likely to be tested not merely in what a party veteran called a “cosmetic change of replacing the in-charge” but in Pilot’s ability to convince the growing ranks of party leaders unwilling to work with Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring end their squabbling.

A high-stakes assignment

Over the past two months, Punjab has witnessed a daily spectacle of party leaders, most prominent of them being former CM Charanjit Singh Channi and Gurdaspur MP Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, pressing on their demand for sacking Raja Warring. That this is happening in a state where the Congress was fancying its strongest chance of returning to power among the three northern states going to polls early next year – the other two being Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand – makes Pilot’s task all the more difficult.

Channi and Randhawa, along with sundry other party leaders, had been accusing Baghel of patronising Raja Warring despite the latter’s proven “incompetence”.

Rebels turn up the heat

In recent weeks, matters had reached such a pass that the rebel leaders had refused to share a public platform with Raja Warring and Baghel while the duo toured Punjab to meet party workers and take stock of preparations for the impending assembly polls. Instead, Channi and Randhawa, along with senior leaders like Rana Gurjeet Singh, Bharat Bhushan Ashu and Pargat Singh, launched a parallel public outreach campaign while their supporters routinely disrupted party events chaired by Baghel and Raja Warring.

Party insiders say the intra-party turf war had begun to sting the Congress high command. Baghel’s failure to broker a truce had plunged an ambitious pan-state bus yatra, to be flagged off by Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, into uncertainty even as the ruling Aam Aadmi Party as well as the Opposition’s BJP, Shiromani Akali Dal and the Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) had already gone into campaign mode. Sources said Baghel and Raja Warring wanted Rahul to launch the bus yatra, tentatively from Amritsar and criss-crossing various assembly segments in Punjab’s critical electoral belts of Majha and Malwa, last month.

However, with the intra-party feud showing no sign of abating, the yatra is still awaiting a launch date.

High command steps in

A senior Punjab Congress leader told The Federal that at a meeting convened by the central leadership last week to take stock of the growing morass not just Baghel but also AICC general secretary (organisation) KC Venugopal were given a “verbal lashing” by Kharge and Rahul for “allowing the situation to spiral out of control”.

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Kharge and Rahul, sources said, took a dim view of the fact that though various election-related committees were set up on July 1 to give early impetus to the party’s poll preparations, none of the committees, except the manifesto panel headed by senior MP Amar Singh, met in the last two months.

Ironically, while these panels were set up by Kharge to end infighting in the party, they had ended up intensifying it. Channi and Randhawa, tasked with heading the campaign and core committees, respectively, had immediately gone on the warpath against the leadership, refusing to work with Baghel and Raja Warring. Baghel’s decision to spend an entire week in Chandigarh fire-fighting days after the announcement of these committees failed to break the deadlock while the ranks of party leaders supporting Channi and Randhawa in their campaign for Raja Warring’s removal gathered momentum.

Pilot’s challenge

With Baghel packed off to Assam, it would be interesting to see if the party high command also concedes the rebel faction’s demand to bench Raja Warring or if Pilot convinces Channi & Co. to not insist for it.

A Congress leader who had been working as an emissary of the rebels told The Federal, “by replacing Baghel, the high command has agreed to meet those who have an issue with the way things have been functioning in Punjab half-way, now I think these leaders should also look at the larger interest of the party, our only goal right now should be to win the trust of the people of Punjab so that the Congress can form a government and work for the issues of the state, whether it is Channi or Randhawa, they are all responsible leaders and I am sure that they, along with our new in-charge, will be able find a way to move forward unitedly and keep individual egos aside”.

Another party leader pointed out that the high command’s choice of assigning Punjab to Pilot is an “interesting one”. “There seem to be multiple factors at play here. Pilot is from Rajasthan and Randhawa is the AICC in-charge for Rajasthan. From what we hear, Pilot has a good rapport with Randhawa; the high command may have felt together they can end this daily circus of factionalism, which has already done a lot of damage to the party’s electoral prospects in Punjab,” this leader said.

“It also shows growing trust of the leadership in Pilot because the general sense in the party is that out of all the states going to polls early next year, our best chance of victory in is Punjab. Most importantly, Pilot may have been told that his own prospects of leading the campaign for Rajasthan (where elections are due in end-2028), would depend on whether he delivers Punjab,” the leader added.

A positive reaction from rebels

For the Congress high command as well as Pilot, what would have come as relief is the positive reaction from the rebel camp to Baghel’s ouster. While Channi thanked the high command for the appointment calling it an “important decision”, Randhawa said Pilot’s “leadership, experience, and strong connection with the people will give new strength and direction to the Congress organisation in Punjab”.

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A source close to Pilot told The Federal that “within hours” of being given the new assignment, the Rajasthan leader had already “spoken to Channi, Randhawa and several other leaders from the anti-Raja Warring faction” and assured of addressing their grievances while also appealing to them to “exercise restraint” while commenting on intra-party matters in public.

Time is running out

Pilot is expected to visit Chandigarh in the coming week, knowing well that he has little time to find a glide-path for his party’s electoral flight in Punjab. With his own political future in Rajasthan, arguably, tied to his performance in the new role, Pilot knows the price of failure, but whether that alone can help him rein in the warring factions of Punjab remains to be seen.