Navjot Kaur Sidhu's 'Rs 500 crore CM' claim sparks fresh feud in Punjab Congress

Four years after a rebellious Navjot Singh Sidhu kicked off a sequence of events that eventually led to the Congress’s decimation in the 2022 Punjab Assembly polls, it is now his wife and former MLA Navjot Kaur Sidhu who has put the Congress party in a bind.

Adding to the political drama now playing out in Punjab, albeit from some distance, is Captain Amarinder Singh, the octogenarian politician who had to unceremoniously exit the chief minister’s office due to Sidhu’s rebellion and is now a sidelined satrap in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Kaur's explosive remark

Earlier this month, Kaur, who recently made a full recovery from cancer, left the Congress leadership red-faced when she told reporters that one needs “a suitcase of Rs 500 crore” to become Punjab’s chief minister.

Also read: Navjot Kaur Sidhu calls MP Randhawa's legal notice 'devoid of merit', issues counter threat

The statement was interpreted in political circles as insinuating that the Congress high command had picked chief ministers for the state — a post her husband lost out to Charanjit Singh Channi, who had succeeded Amarinder in September 2021 in an unexpected quirk of fate — for a price.

Kaur’s outburst has led to her suspension by the party, a move that has only made her more belligerent in levelling allegations against senior party leaders from the state, including state unit chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring and the All-India Congress Committee’s General Secretary Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa.

Kaur following her husband?

To many, Kaur seems to be following in the footsteps of her garrulous husband, the original disruptor in Punjab Congress, whose stony silence on the ongoing melee has triggered its own share of speculations in state politics. After all, Sidhu’s brief stint as the Punjab Congress chief had seen him rage and rant against the Channi government instead of leading the party’s charge against its political rivals — the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the Akali Dal and his former party, the BJP — ahead of the 2022 polls.

Also read: Sidhu will return to active politics if Cong declares him CM face: Navjot Kaur

For the Congress, an equally distressing outcome of Kaur’s outburst has been the resurfacing of factional feuds within the Punjab Congress, with murmurs of unrest rising against Warring, who is the MP from Ludhiana.

If your head isn’t spinning yet with this political merry-go-round in the Punjab Congress while the Congress high command in Delhi remains blissfully inert, there’s more.

Congress asks Punjab leaders not to reveal internal matters

Scorched by Kaur’s allegations, the Congress high command has reportedly directed its Punjab leaders against discussing internal matters of the party in the media or in public. The calculated silence is meant to gloss over widening fissures in the party.

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Meanwhile, an unexpected succor seems to have come the party’s way from none other than Captain Amarinder — the very stalwart the Congress had, under Sidhu’s influence, forced out of its ranks into the open embrace of the BJP.

Captain Amarinder calls Navjot couple 'deranged'

The Captain has stridently rubbished Kaur’s claims as “blatant lies”, called the two Navjots “deranged” and made known that as a BJP member whose advice on Punjab politics is seldom taken by his current party, he misses the “democratic style” of the Congress’s functioning wherein “decisions were taken after discussions with all leaders”.

His latest statements to the media come close on the heels of his claims that the BJP cannot hope to form a government in Punjab without allying with the Akalis and that the saffron party “still doesn’t understand Punjab”.

Sources told The Federal that the 83-year-old former chief minister, who maintains cordial relations with former Congress president Sonia Gandhi despite his bitter parting with the Grand Old Party, is aching for a rapprochement with it.

While there is no telling just yet how the Congress leadership would respond to Captain Amarinder’s overtures, which way the party’s bitter sparring with Kaur would settle or when Sidhu might enter this muddle, what is clear is that the party remains already besieged by problems within its ranks in Punjab with no glide path visible for its electoral recovery in the 2027 polls.

Congress's poor bypoll shows

The Congress’s humiliating defeat in the Tarn Taran Assembly bypoll last month, where its candidate Karanbir Singh Burj finished a distant fourth, is the latest addition to the string of losses the party has faced in critical Assembly by-elections in Punjab.

Since the AAP romped to its unprecedented victory in Punjab in March 2022, the Congress has also lost Assembly bypolls for Jalandhar West, Chhabewal, Dera Baba Nanak, Gidderbaha, and, most recently, Ludhiana West.

Also read: Punjab bypoll: EC suspends Tarn Taran SSP Ravjot Grewal over SAD allegations

Of these, the party’s losses in Ludhiana West, Gidderbaha and Dera Baba Nanak stand out the most for their association with two of the Punjab Congress’s most prominent faces — state chief Warring and national General Secretary Randhawa.

Warring was a third-term Congress MLA from Gidderbaha when he was elected to the Lok Sabha last year from Ludhiana. The Ludhiana West seat that the Congress lost to the AAP’s Sanjeev Arora in a high-stakes bypoll earlier this year falls within Warring’s Ludhiana Lok Sabha constituency. In Gidderbaha, the party had lost the bypoll despite the Punjab Congress chief staking his personal prestige in the contest by getting a ticket for his wife, Amrita Warring.

Likewise, Randhawa was a fourth-term MLA from the Dera Baba Nanak seat when he vacated it after being elected to the Lok Sabha from Gurdaspur. The Congress had fielded Randhawa’s wife, Jatinder Kaur, for the Dera Baba Nanak bypoll, but despite her husband’s pitched campaigning, she lost.

Kaur's revolt boosts party's unhappy voices

Navjot Kaur’s revolt and her pointed attacks on Warring and Randhawa have now put the spotlight back on these leaders of the Punjab Congress and encouraged other disgruntled elements within the party to whisper against what many perceive as an ineffective leadership.

Senior state leaders under fire

Warring, who rose up through the party’s ranks through its students and then youth wing, is facing the worst of the brunt while knives are also out for more senior leaders such as Randhawa as well as Partap Singh Bajwa, the Leader of Opposition in the Punjab Assembly. Sources say the situation is much like a ‘free-for-all’ where allegations and counter-allegations have been flying thick and fast, though still behind closed doors, and among various factional leaders of the party.

Also read: Punjab Opposition allege press clampdown as police checks disrupt newspaper delivery

Sources say Punjab Congress leaders such as former CM Channi, Bharat Bhushan Ashu, Rana Gurjeet Singh and Sukhpal Singh Khaira, among others, have been variously accusing Warring and Bajwa’s of steering the party against the ruling AAP ineffectively, despite the failures of the Bhagwant Mann government and a growing perception of Mann being reduced to a rubber-stamp chief minister who is merely following diktats from AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal.

On December 11, sources said the party’s huddle in Delhi, convened by state in-charge Bhupesh Baghel, to contain the damage from Navjot Kaur’s accusations ended with calls for a leadership reset in the state. Days earlier, Channi’s invitation to the entire gamut of Punjab Congress leaders for a private function at his Rupnagar residence was meant to show a ‘united face’ of the party, but ended up triggering rumours that Channi, the only Dalit to ever serve as Punjab CM, was trying to pivot himself as Warring’s replacement in the state unit.

Party leaders say Warring, Bajwa and Randhawa, who remain active in state politics despite being the party's in-charge for Rajasthan, often work at cross-purposes in a bid for brinkmanship while the party’s electoral revival in Punjab continues to teeter. The Tarn Taran bypoll debacle and the muck raked up by Navjot Kaur’s accusations also come at a time when the Congress has to face zilla parishad and panchayat samiti elections in the state.

State chief a liability?

Many view Warring as the party’s biggest liability in the current political scenario — a leader too junior to be able to read the riot act to seniors such as Bajwa, Channi or Randhawa and also one with a propensity to make politically immature statements.

During the Tarn Taran bypoll campaign, Warring ended up likening party candidate Burj to a dog that is “loyal and honourable”. In an earlier incident, his remarks on the dark complexion of late party stalwart and Dalit leader Buta Singh had left the party scurrying for cover.

Hard pressed to explain how, amid the growing turbulence, the party would chart an electoral recovery in the state where polls are just over a year away, the Congress’s secretary in charge for Punjab, Ravindra Dalvi, had little else to offer than the familiar rhetoric of a united face of the party.

“All party leaders will work together, and we will win the elections… They are all committed to the party’s ideology and are working tirelessly for the party,” he told The Federal.