Jakhar added, “These people who sit in Delhi they have taken the sheen off Rahul Gandhi’s historic decisions.” But it is a mysterious refusal by the Gandhis to intervene with urgency that has created the mess. If the Congress does manage to hold its own in a fiercely contested election, where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has run a much more cohesive and tightly controlled campaign, the credit should go to Channi.īut the unfiltered eruption by Jakhar captures precisely the implosion within the Punjab Congress and the inability of the party’s top leadership to contain its fallout. In just a few months, he has built a well-liked personal brand among people. And whether or not Channi had the backing of his fellow legislators he has undoubtedly been the political discovery of the election season with his unruffled style and grassroots approach. Jakhar’s proclamations, of course, are hardly neutral. “He has undermined himself by insisting that he be declared chief ministerial candidate what will he ask for next: An affidavit?”
“Channi is an outsider too,” he said about Punjab’s first Dalit CM, who has been photographed riding pillion with Jakhar on a motorcycle in happier times. “I am more Sikh than many Sikhs in the party,” he told me, saying the “spirit of Punjabiyat has been undermined.”īlaming Congress veteran Ambika Soni for a veto that amounted to “political apartheid”, he declared that “active politics is over for me I will not work with these people.” He guffawed when I asked him whether the Gandhi family made a grave error of judgment in bringing in an outsider such as Sidhu in a key leadership role. He alleged that he was passed over because he is not a Sikh.
“Is it a crime to be a Hindu?” he asked me more than once, in the context of how, in the aftermath of Captain Amarinder Singh’s exit, Jakhar apparently had the support of the maximum number of party colleagues: 42, compared to two for the present chief minister (CM) Charanjit Singh Channi.
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