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By projecting Channi, the incumbent chief minister, the Congress hopes to dispel the impression that the party is a divided house and enthuse cadres to campaign hard. Rahul Gandhi’s announcement on Sunday that Charanjit Singh Channi would be the CM face of the Congress in Punjab marks a departure from the party’s tradition of declaring the leader after the election. By projecting Channi, the incumbent chief minister, the Congress hopes to dispel the impression that the party is a divided house and enthuse cadres to campaign hard. It also banks on the choice helping the party tap into the Dalit community that constitutes over 30 per cent of Punjab’s electorate — Channi is the first Dalit CM of the state.
Speaking at the rally, Rahul Gandhi said Channi was the choice of people — “It’s the decision of Punjab. It’s not Rahul Gandhi’s decision,” he said. The Congress had undertaken a social media poll on the leadership question and Channi polled the highest number of votes. However, the Congress culture since the time of Indira Gandhi has been for the party high command to decide the CM even when the party under the incumbent CM won a clear mandate — for instance, when a popular Sheila Dikshit won a third consecutive term in Delhi in 2008 she was made to wait by the central leadership before she was nominated for office. In many instances, the high command imposed its nominee overruling the choice of the legislative party or changed the CM at its whim. This culture, which allowed the party to set the impression that the chief minister held office at the pleasure of the high command and not the legislators, undermined the credibility of state leaders and weakened the office of the CM.
Ironically, Channi’s appointment as CM last year was forced on the Congress Legislative Party (CLP) by the party high command. It is now known that though the CLP’s preference was Sunil Jakhar, a former state unit chief and legislator, Channi got to the seat because of Gandhi’s intervention. In this backdrop, Gandhi’s claim of listening to the people’s voice is a little too rich: It’s more likely that an embattled party leadership, cornered by the ambitious state chief, Navjot Singh Sidhu, and the AAP’s projection of a CM face, found a way out in “people”. Predictably, Gandhi harped on the social background of Channi to claim that the choice was made also because “the people wanted a chief minister from a poor family, one who understands poverty and the pain of the poor”. This povertarian logic would rule out many Congress leaders, including Gandhi himself, from occupying public office. As the party’s chief campaigner, Gandhi ought to have taken stronger ownership of the decision to choose Channi, not signal a political distance from the choice.
This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 8, 2022 under the title ‘The CM face’.
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