Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, March 14: While the Aam Aadmi Party’s chief minister-elect for Punjab Bhagwant Mann has decided to take oath of office and secrecy on Wednesday, the BJP on Monday appointed central observers to oversee the legislature party meetings and election of chief ministers to the four states it won majority in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur where the process of installation of the new governments are expected start after Holi festivities on March 18.
While union Home Minister Amit Shah and former Jharkhand chief minister Raghubar Das will be overseeing the process in Uttar Pradesh; in Uttarakhand Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Minister of State for External Affairs Meenakshi Lekhi have been appointed; Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju will be taking care of Manipur and Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar and Minister of State for Fisheries and Animal Husbandry have been deputed for Goa.
With this, the BJP has set in motion the formal process of electing chief ministers in these States. The biggest quandary in all this is Uttarakhand where, while the party won, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami lost his seat. In such a scenario, the BJP has to decide whether Dhami may be appointed chief minister and subsequently elected to the Assembly via a by-poll, or risk a by-poll to elect a Member of Parliament from Uttarakhand or circumvent all this and choose a candidate from the newly elected MLAs. Sources in the party said while the party was leaning towards choosing from elected MLAs, other options were also “open.”
In Goa, possibility of Vishwajeet Rane replacing the chief minister Pramod Sawant is not ruled out but for the time, the BJP dismissed it as mere speculation. “In Goa and in Manipur, while there is some internal murmuring, the fact is that the party’s position in the Assembly improved vastly and as such there is no reason to punish the current chief ministers under whom the polls were fought,” said an office bearer of the party.
In Uttar Pradesh, Shah’s appointment also points to possible large-scale change in the council of ministers and the need for this process to be done in an orderly, disciplined fashion. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath, who is set to return as Chief Minister, was in Delhi on Sunday and Monday where he met top leaders of the party as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
While for the BJP things are moving peacefully, it all out war in the Congress over Punjab where the grand old party was unseated by the relatively new-comer in politics, the AAP. Though the BJP too could not make any dent in the border state, the Congress being given one of its worst drubbings by the small time party the AAP speak volume of its inability to impress the voters.
Both the former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar and the former Congress chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, who quit the Congress to form his own party and aligned with the BJP, blamed the Congress high command for the party’s dismal showing in Punjab. Jakhar blamed the party’s crushing defeat in the state on the choice by the party high command of Charanjit Singh Channi, while Amarinder Singh held the Gandhis totally responsible for the rout of the Congress in the assembly polls, claiming that the party was “comfortably placed” in Punjab before he was unseated as Chief Minister.
Jakhar said Channi was caught with his “hand in the till” when he was brought in to fight the perception of corruption. “I do not want them to compound this mistake again. The way he was built up as a hero – a guy who was caught with his hand in the till. For a leader you need chaal, chalan, charitra (good conduct, integrity, character). There is nothing which inspires confidence in him. You want to build him as a hero, a mascot? I’m sorry, I don’t accept him,” Jakhar said blasting the outgoing Chief Minister.
Weeks before the election, Channi’s nephew Bhupinder Singh Honey was arrested after raids by the Enforcement Directorate revealed a large amount of cash at his home. Honey was accused of making money from illegal sand mining. Channi had distanced himself from the allegations.
Jakhar said there was a perception that the new Chief Minister would get anything done in the limited time that he had and that Channi acted out of greed. “The perception of this government in the last 111 days was that the whole clan was (Mr Channi’s) working as if there was no tomorrow. Let’s make use of every single day – not to address people’s concern but to address our own need more money. This was the perception that the common man carried. Short of an advertisement in the paper that if we have something to be done, come to us…we’ll do it. This kind of perception did us in,” said the Congress leader. He continued: “You cannot fight corruption with corruption,” he said.
The party’s disastrous Punjab campaign, he said, was a combination of “compounding one mistake after another” and bad choices driven by senior leaders “misleading” the Gandhis. Jakhar said he had hoped the problems would be discussed threadbare in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on Sunday but instead, he saw “sycophants”. Reeling off a long list of problems that he said “could have been handled otherwise”, Jakhar said the defeat was “scripted by Harish Rawat”; the former Uttarakhand Chief Minister was Punjab in-charge.
“He came to Punjab with a set agenda,” Jakhar remarked, suggesting that this was to promote Navjot Singh Sidhu, who aggressively demanded top billing in the run-up to the Punjab election and who played a big role in Amarinder Singh’s replacement as Chief Minister by Channi four months before the election. “I suspected what he was up to. He got his agenda implemented at the cost of bickering.”
The former Punjab Congress chief also questioned the logic of leaving the question of the party’s Chief Ministerial candidate wide open even after appointing a new Chief Minister. “After you have nominated Channi, it is insulting to ask who will be Chief Minister. How can you say that? A general fights the war for you and you will appoint another general? This is not the way,” said Jakhar.
In a statement a day after the Congress Working Committee (CWC) took stock of the drubbing received by the party in five states, Amarinder Singh took digs at the “pompous” state Congress president Sidhu and the “corrupt” Channi, who replaced him as Chief Minister.
After his ouster as Chief Minister last year, Amarinder Singh left the Congress and floated his own Punjab Lok Congress. He joined hands with the BJP to contest the elections but could not win a single seat while the BJP won only two seats.
Singh slammed the CWC for trying to put the blame for the Congress defeat in Punjab on him instead of “gracefully admitting” their “own blunders.” “The Congress has not only lost in Punjab but also in UP, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur and the Gandhis are entirely to blame for the party’s shameful defeat,” he said.
People across the country had lost faith in the leadership of the Gandhis,” he said, referring to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. In the just-ended assembly polls, the Congress got just 18 seats, and the Aam Aadmi Party romped home with 92 in a House of 117.
Amarinder Singh claimed several senior leaders within the party were blaming the infighting in Punjab Congress and the “anti-party” statements of Navjot Sidhu for its bad performance in the state. “The party had dug its own grave in the border state the day they decided to back an unstable and pompous person like Navjot Sidhu, and naming a corrupt man like Charanjit Singh Channi as chief minister just months before the polls,” he said in a statement here.
The CWC leaders who were claiming that there was strong “anti-incumbency” against his government had conveniently forgotten that he had won every election for the party since 2017, including the civic bodies polls in February 2021, just seven months before his unceremonious removal, Singh said. “These leaders are just sycophants who are trying to shield the family by shifting blame and closing their eyes to the writing on the wall,” he said.
He claimed the Congress had no future under the present set-up. Singh said the real reason for the defeat in Punjab was the party high command first favouring and then failing to rein in people like Navjot Sidhu, “who indulged in tarnishing the image of the party for their own personal gains”.
“In their efforts to discredit me, the party high command joined hands with Navjot and others, and in the process ended up discrediting the party totally.” Mr Singh said though he did not owe any explanation to the CWC or the Congress, he had chosen to react to the comments of these leaders just to clarify his position to the people of Punjab, to whom he still felt accountable, he said.