The complete overhaul of the faction-ridden Punjab Congress bears the stamp of former party president Rahul Gandhi whose loyalist Amrinder Singh Raja Warring was appointed state Congress president on Saturday night.
The party also appointed former state unit chief Partap Singh Bajwa the leader of the Congress Legislature Party, prominent Dalit leader Dr Raj Kumar Chabbewal his deputy, and Bharat Bhushan Ashu a working president. These three leaders are also considered close to the Gandhi family, especially Rahul.
Amrinder Singh Raja Warring: The 44-year-old Gidderbaha MLA, who has served as the chief of the Indian Youth Congress, carries no political baggage and presents the party with a clean slate as it looks to regroup.
A known baiter of the Badals of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), he was among the only 18 party candidates to win the elections to the 117-member Assembly. The three-time firebrand MLA learnt the ropes in politics from former Congress leader Jagmeet Singh Brar — his fiery oratory bears Brar’s imprint — who switched to the SAD and lost the election from Maur.
As transport minister in the Charanjit Singh Channi-led government, Warring came into the limelight as he hit the ground running in an attempt to revive the state’s transport services and end the monopoly of private players. Subsequent court cases and the judiciary’s decisions, however, did not go his way as he struggled to end the private companies’ monopoly. But he did succeed in increasing the transport department’s revenue.
Partap Singh Bajwa: In his latest role as the Leader of the Opposition, the 65-year-old Qadian MLA makes a return to state politics after several years.
Bajwa was a Cabinet minister in the Captain Amarinder Singh-led government between 2002 and 2007 and was also the state Congress president from 2013 to 2015. He is the only MLA in the current Assembly to have also served in both Houses of Parliament.
The veteran leader comes from an illustrious political family. His father Satnam Singh Bajwa was a four-time MLA who was assassinated in 1987 at the peak of militancy in the state. The Congress leader has often said with pride that his family has won 12 elections, Assembly and parliamentary, since 1962.
After climbing up the ranks in the party from the late 1970s, Bajwa served as a Cabinet minister in the governments of Beant Singh, Harcharan Singh Brar, and Rajinder Kaur Bhattal. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election, he defeated actor-turned-politician Vinod Khanna of the BJP from Gurdaspur and in 2016 made it to the Rajya Sabha.
Both in the state and during his time in Parliament, the Qadian MLA has raised issues of concern to Punjab and Sikhs. In the Lok Sabha, he demanded that the government negotiate a land-swapping agreement with Pakistan to get back the Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara, which is the final resting place of Guru Nanak Dev. In the Rajya Sabha, he was also very vocal in his opposition to three farm laws that triggered protests by farmers in Punjab.
At a one-day special session of the state Assembly on April 1, Bajwa led the Opposition from the front by countering Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
Bharat Bhushan Ashu: The former Cabinet minister was elected the working president despite losing the election from Ludhiana West. With his appointment, the Congress retains a prominent Hindu face in the state leadership.
Last year, as the feud between Amarinder Singh and former state party chief Navjot Singh Sidhu played out in the open, 49-year-old Ashu remained neutral saying he was a “party soldier”. He also did not attend a meeting late last month in Ludhiana that Sidhu had organised in an attempt to drum up support for another tenure at the helm of the state unit.
Dr Raj Kumar Chabbewal: With Channi out of the picture, the 52-year-old MLA from Chabbewal and chairperson of the state Congress’s Scheduled Caste (SC) Department is now the Dalit face of the party in Punjab.
A radiologist by profession, Dr Chhabewal is a first-generation politician and a self-made man — his father was a peon in a bank after retiring from the Army — who has had a meteoric rise in the party since joining it in 2009. He was appointed the SC Department’s chairperson in 2015 and became a member of the All India Congress Committee soon afterwards. In 2019, he left many veteran Congress leaders fuming when the high command fielded him from the Hoshiarpur reserved Lok Sabha constituency.
Dr Chabbewal is a prominent upwardly mobile Dalit face from Doaba who is equally acceptable among other sections as well. He is one of the few state leaders to have steered clear of the factionalism in the party, instead preferring to focus on his constituency that voted him to power for the second straight time.
