Captain by his side, Sidhu takes charge
CHANDIGARH : Navjot Singh Sidhu on Friday took over as president of the Punjab Congress in the presence of chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh who said they will work together for the welfare of Punjab as the party sought to present a united front after months of infighting and ahead of the run-up to the assembly elections early next year.
A day after he appeared to soften his stance towards Sidhu by deciding to attend the takingover ceremony of the new Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee team, Singh struck all the right notes in his address to party workers, saying, “it is your responsibility to support the party president.”
After the Congress elevated Sidhu as the head of the party’s state unit, overruling the chief minister’s objections, yet maintaining that it would fight the 2022 elections under Singh’s leadership, a reconciliation was always on the cards -- although Singh’s aides said that this could happen only if Sidhu apologised for some of his very public statements against the chief minister. It wasn’t immediately clear whether an apology had been proffered.
It also remains to be seen if the rapprochement survives a Congress victory in 2022, given that Sidhu has never disguised his ambitions. Ahead of the ceremony, the two bonded over breakfast at Punjab Bhawan.
Tensions between Singh, 79, and Sidhu, 57, who quit the state
cabinet in 2019, have simmered since that year but flared up in May after the government suffered a legal setback in a 2015 case of police firing on a crowd protesting the desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. That was under the Shiromani Akali Dal government headed by the Badals, and Singh was accused by some in the Congress as being soft on them.
Sidhu quickly rallied support as leaders opposed to Singh coalesced around him and raised other issues as well -- the failure of the government to keep its 2017 election promises, and the dependence of Singh on some powerful bureaucrats. The Congress’s central leadership set up a three-member committee. The panel met around 150 functionaries – it also met Singh twice -and submitted its report to party chief Sonia Gandhi on June 10. It rapidly became clear that Sidhu had the support of both Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, both of who, it is believed, see him as the future of the party in the state.
After taking charge at the state Congress headquarters, the Amritsar East MLA said: “Every Congress worker in Punjab has become the chief of the party’s state unit from today.”
The cricketer-turned-politician said he would back the farmers protesting against the three farm laws. Sidhu also raised the sacrilege issue, saying “CM Saab we have to resolve the (sacrilege) issue, then, we will be called true Sikhs…i resolve to take all these cases to a conclusion.”
In his address, Singh went down memory lane and recalled his old Patiala ties with Sidhu, saying: “I was commissioned in the army, the year Sidhu was born. When my mother asked me to enter politics, his (Sidhu’s) father helped me. I used to go to his house when he was about six years old.”