The Congress leadership made a mistake with Sidhu. The party is paying the price
It looked a perfect match in the lead-up to the 2017 assembly elections — the well-regarded Captain Amarinder Singh as the chief ministerial face, the much-liked Navjot Sidhu as his successor under training. But the partnership didn’t reach fruition, the understudy bunking the mentor’s tutorials midway through graduation. Rather than getting himself groomed, Sidhu chose to be a dropout. Having quit as a minister in 2019, he remained an outlier till the curtains were drawn on the Captain’s rule.
Arguably, Singh’s fall was on Sidhu’s call. Why then the continuing resort to the politics of resignation, of coercion and arm-twisting? The answer lies perhaps in the cricketer-turned-politico’s variously dissected persona — insubordinate, obstinate and high strung to the extent of being disruptive.
Given to marching to his own drumbeat, he is unwilling or is unable to stay in single file behind another person, be it Singh or his successor as chief minister (CM), Charanjit Singh Channi.
The hangover of his brush with the entertainment industry is manifest in the way Sidhu walks or talks. No surprise that he went for a theatrical abdication of responsibility rather than being the Congress’s sheet-anchor as its freshly-minted state president.
His treatment of Channi over eminently resolvable differences was an encore of his many confrontations with the ousted CM, who is now flirting with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Singh has since clarified that while he will leave the Congress, he won’t join the BJP.
Desperate to be the Congress’s “high command” in Punjab, Sidhu ironically has brought upon himself the fate the Captain willed for him. He has irretrievably hurt his image and that of the party by failing to appreciate that the incumbent CM, unlike his predecessor who was rendered vulnerable by age and anti-incumbency, is the toast of the country as Punjab’s first Scheduled Caste leader to hold the post.
Temperamentally understated, Channi has a way with people. In venturing to make an example of him, Sidhu cut his nose to spite his face. The altruistic, puritanical veneer he sports barely hides his vaulting ambition. This is despite the fact that he has raised certain legitimate issues, especially on bureaucratic appointments. Sidhu claims these can undercut the Congress’s 2017 promise to bring to book the Akali Dal leadership in cases of sacrilege under the Parkash Singh Badal regime.
On the face of it, these placements, as also the induction of a minister who had come clean in a judicial probe into graft, were negotiable behind closed doors. But Sidhu, the showman, chose rebellion over discussion, loath as he is to the prospects of Channi growing out his shadow.
What should worry the habituated rebel in Sidhu is his growing alienation from even the members of the faction he led to fight Singh. Having first scuttled the prospects of Sukhjinder Randhawa becoming CM, he also has problems with him getting the home portfolio as deputy CM. His turf war in Amritsar with OP Soni, the other deputy CM, is too well known to be underscored.
So flawed has been the central leadership’s search for the new Punjab CM that the party has more aspirants for the office today than it once had in Madhya Pradesh. Besides Sidhu, there is former state party chief Sunil Jakhar and Randhawa, who got the maximum votes in the legislature party meet.
It will be a classic dog’s breakfast if the Congress fails to quickly put its house in order. The party’s only hope in the upcoming polls is the disrepair that afflicts its rivals. The Aam Aadmi Party is struggling for quality human resources; the Akali Dal stares at a crisis of credibility. As for the BJP, its base has shrunk in the face of the farmers’ agitation.
The conundrum could worsen, however, if Singh can cut a substantial deal with the saffron party on the three farm laws. Short of that, he may be a mere mantlepiece in the close or distant proximity of the saffron party; a veritable Punjab edition of Karnataka’s SM Krishna who walked into the sunset on switching sides at a ripe old age.
Be that as it may, the Sidhu pantomime in the Congress must stop. Or else its initiative of giving the state its first Dalit CM will come a cropper.