Can Congress’s Pargat Singh bridge Punjab unit’s factional divide | Explained

The Story So Far: Caught up in the internal conflict ahead of the Punjab Assembly election due in early 2027, the Congress party on October 2 eventually put an end to months of uncertainty around the position of Punjab Congress chief by appointing Congress MLA Pargat Singh as the new president of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee.

Mr. Singh, a former minister and the captain of the Indian men’s hockey team, has been given the new responsibility after Congress leader Amarinder Singh Raja Warring formally submitted his resignation from the post of president of the PPCC to former party national president Rahul Gandhi. Mr. Warring has been the State president since April 22, 2022.

The power tussle, particularly between former Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi and Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, has been on public display for the past several months. To curb this internal turmoil, the party’s central leadership last month replaced Punjab’s previous party in-charge, Bhupesh Baghel, with Sachin Pilot, succumbing to the pressure of the disgruntled leaders. And now, Raja Warring has also been removed from his post in an apparent bid to pacify the discontented lot of leaders.

In July this year, a reshuffle of the PPCC triggered internal unrest within the State unit. While Mr. Warring was retained as PPCC president, Mr. Channi was given charge of the election campaign committee ahead of the 2027 Assembly polls. Mr. Channi, along with a few other leaders, was reportedly unhappy with how the unit had been restructured. The disgruntled leaders and their supporters demanded Mr. Warring’s removal as PPCC chief, bringing the State unit’s factional divisions out into the open.

Balancing act

All India Congress Committee’s decision to appoint Mr. Singh as the Punjab chief is seen as a move to curb the ongoing power tussle in the Congress party’s Punjab unit. Party sources said Mr. Singh’s appointment was driven largely by his clean, non-controversial image, which made him an acceptable choice across factions. By picking him, the party appears to have struck a balancing act, hoping he can bridge the divide between the two rival camps.

The Congress party, the principal opposition in Punjab, has been seen as the key challenger to the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the upcoming Assembly elections. But, amid the ongoing power struggle in the party, its position appears to be eroding.

Congress’s internal discontent first came to public view last year when Mr. Channi, who was the Congress’s chief ministerial face in the 2022 Assembly polls in which the party suffered a crushing defeat, called for a “greater Dalit representation” in the party, asserting that “Dalits were not getting due representation”. The remark, coming from one of the Congress’s most prominent Dalit leaders, exposed the simmering discord within the party’s ranks.

The calm to be tested

Even as the central leadership of the Congress is hopeful that, with the new president in place, the internal turmoil within the party’s Punjab unit will subside, that calm is likely to be tested in the days ahead. The outgoing president, Mr. Warring, has asserted that he was ready to serve the party wherever needed; it would be interesting to see how his supporters would react.

Over the past four and a half years, Mr. Warring has been instrumental in setting up the leadership at the booth level, and with his ouster, the key question remains whether the new president would be able to develop a connection at the grassroots level with Assembly elections just a few months away. While other political parties have already been aggressively campaigning, the Congress for the last several months has been stuck with the party’s internal bickering. The real concerns for the new president would be about his capacity to maintain the party’s organisational strength and voter outreach at such a critical moment.

The infighting has clearly put the State’s main opposition party on the back foot, changing the dynamics of the upcoming political cycle at least for now. The ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is battling the anti-incumbency factor and political observers believe that it stands to gain the most from the Congress’s crisis because people who are unhappy with AAP and were looking at Congress as an alternative might end up going back to AAP instead.