The appointment of Navjot Singh Sidhu as the PCC chief has sent a many-layered message down the Congress ranks from the Gandhi siblings. The first of course is a clear-cut directive to Captain Amarinder Singh that both Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra are not going to take any diktats from the old guard, however powerful a regional satrap that entity may be. Considering the electoral lows the Congress is going through, one would have thought the party leadership would want to placate any leader that comes with some sort of a mass base. Of course, it can be argued that the Captain is well past his sell-by date and that it is high time the Congress groomed a younger leader to take his place. The argument is valid, but why to choose someone like Sidhu over the aspirations of other Congressmen and women who have served longer stints in the Congress.
There we come to the second layer of the message—the Gandhi siblings, especially Rahul, have for long been complaining that the old guard owing allegiance to his mother has tied down their hands. Rahul now wants to groom a leadership that owes allegiance only to him. And an outsider like Sidhu falls neatly in this bracket. Plus, he does have his own brand of mass appeal; also, he can draw crowds, but at the same time, he is not rooted enough to take on the party leadership, like perhaps a Sachin Pilot or even Capt Amarinder himself. That makes Sidhu the ideal candidate to be nurtured.
Those who talk about replicating the Punjab model in Rajasthan and replacing CM Ashok Gehlot with Sachin Pilot are overlooking something very basic—that unlike the Captain, the Rajasthan CM enjoys the trust of the Gandhi siblings. In the case of Rajasthan, it is young Pilot who is seen as a greater threat to the siblings, and therefore despite all the assurances given to him, one doubts if he will ever be given the same kind of support that Sidhu enjoys. Take for instance the photograph that Priyanka released of herself standing next to Sidhu when the latter called on her during the leadership tussle. One is yet to see a similar picture of Sachin who also came to Delhi in the last two months and apparently too had a conversation with Priyanka. But there has been no tweet from Priyanka’s office to confirm this. Ditto for Chhattisgarh where the sitting CM has stated categorically on record to NewsX that there will be no change of leadership in his state.
“Rotational CMship is there in the case where there are allies, here the Congress has an outright majority,” he said when asked about T.S. Singh Deo’s claims to the chief ministership.
And so one can argue that with the Congress best placed to win the Punjab polls (certainly after the farm bills the BJP has an uphill task ahead) it made sense to change the Captain to distance the party from any anti-incumbency against his tenure. But while whether Sidhu was the right man for the party remains an open-ended question, he certainly seems to be the right kind of man Rahul Gandhi was looking for.
Will we see a similar change of guard in Karnataka with the elevation of D.K. Sivakumar? Again, like Pilot, Sivakumar is a mass leader, though his appeal does not extend beyond Karnataka. It would be interesting to see if the Sidhu effect remains limited to Punjab, or whether it will be copied in other states as well.