Three days earlier, a similar meeting was held at Sultanpur Lodhi in Kapurthala district. Amid reports that several party leaders are vying for the post of Punjab Congress president, Bholath MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira said Navjot Singh Sidhu continues to hold the post as his “resignation is yet to be accepted by the high command”.
Days after the party’s defeat in the 2022 Assembly elections, Congress president Sonia Gandhi had asked the chiefs of the five state units in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur to resign, in a move that was seen as the first sign of the leadership’s attempt to fix accountability.
“He (Sidhu) continues to be our party’s state president…He is an able leader,” Khaira said after Sidhu met about 20 state Congress leaders in Ludhiana where some of them pitched for a key role for cricketer-turned-politician.
The meeting was called to discuss ways to “strengthen” the party’s state unit after the debacle in the Assembly elections and the Centre’s decision to apply central service rules to employees of the Chandigarh Union Territory, party leaders said. The meeting was held at the residence of six-time MLA Rakesh Pandey, who also faced defeat from Ludhiana North this time. While Sidhu did not speak to the media, Pandey said that a discussion was held to ponder over the reasons behind party’s humiliating defeat in Punjab.
“According to me, it was not just party’s Punjab leadership but also the Delhi leadership that was equally responsible for the results we got. They deployed such leaders in Punjab from Delhi who were incapable and instead of improving things, they further deteriorated the situation. The removal of Captain Amarinder Singh as chief minister and then replacing him with Charanjit Singh Channi were also not the right decisions,” said Pandey, adding that they will seek time from party high command “to discuss these issues in detail; we all are responsible for the results that party got”.
Three days earlier, a similar meeting was held at Sultanpur Lodhi in Kapurthala district.
Khaira dismissed reports that the meeting was a show of strength by the “Sidhu group” before the Congress picks its next state unit chief. “I want to clarify it was not a meeting of a particular group, Sidhu group, etc. It’s very wrong to say this. It was a meeting of the Congress party,” he added.
The participants included Ashwani Sekhri and former MLA Surinder Dawar. However, former MLA Sanjay Talwar and former minister Bharat Bhushan Ashu were not present in the meeting. Asked if he will back Sidhu for the state’s party chief post, Khaira said, “Whatever decision our party takes, we will all abide by that.” To another question, he said, “I want to categorically debunk claims regarding groupism within the party unit.”
Khaira said the meeting took a strong view of the Centre’s announcement to apply central service rules to the employees of the Union Territory of Chandigarh. “By doing so, the BJP government has attacked country’s federal structure. A unilateral decision was taken without consulting Punjab and the meeting strongly condemned the move. Chandigarh belongs to Punjab. But the BJP-led government is diluting claim of Punjab over Chandigarh,” he said.
Ashwani Sekhri said the purpose of Tuesday’s meeting was to discuss “Punjab issues”.
He, too, backed Sidhu.
When specifically asked that names of party leaders Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, Ravneet Singh Bittu, Santokh Chaudhary and Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa are doing rounds for the post of the state Congress chief, Sekhri evaded a direct reply and said there can be many names.
After the Ludhiana meeting, Sidhu, who was accompanied by Sekhri and some other party leaders, went to Behbal Kalan, where two people were killed in a police firing during a protest against the desecration of a religious text in 2015.
Sidhu joined the protest by a family of a victim. Sukhraj Singh, a son of the victim, has been sitting on an indefinite protest since December to demand justice.
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