Congress Falls Back On A Fullback: Where Pargat Singh Fits In Punjab Poll Play

Perth, 1985. India were trailing West Germany 1-5 at hockey's Champions Trophy with about eight minutes left when a 20-year-old fullback picked up the ball near the halfway line, ran at the defence, skipped past four defenders, and lifted it over the goalkeeper. It sparked a comeback still counted among Indian hockey's greatest. India scored four times in that spell to draw 5-5.

Forty-one years later, the Congress has handed him the ball in Punjab with lots to defend against, and everything to play for.

"It all happened so fast. Maybe the Germans did not expect it from me," Pargat Singh recalled about that match in Australia in a 1991 interview.

On Friday, the party named the former Olympic captain its state unit chief, two days after Amarinder Singh Raja Warring resigned and months before the 2027 Assembly elections.

Picking Pargat was a fallback, though not purely defensive. Former minister Vijay Inder Singla, a Hindu from the Bania (trader) community who heads the party's election management committee, was reportedly the frontrunner in two rounds of deliberation. Instead, the high command replaced one Jat Sikh with another, keeping the community equation intact and bringing a measured, issue-driven skipper to the top.

Lokniti-CSDS survey data from the last few elections shows why the Congress is worried about the numbers. The same data, read against Punjab's history, shows that arithmetic rarely decides the final score, least of all in a contest that's five-cornered this time.

READ | Hockey Legend Pargat Singh Named Punjab Congress Chief After Raja Warring Quits

Pargat Singh, 61, is seen as a measured speaker, unlike the more irreverent Raja Warring whom he replaces.
Photo: FB/@pargatsofficial

Holding The Line

Sikhs make up around 58 per cent of Punjab's population, and every chief minister since the state's reorganisation in 1966 has been a Sikh. Most have been Jat Sikhs, a largely rural, landowning community estimated at 22 per cent of the population. The incumbent, Aam Aadmi Party's Bhagwant Mann, is one.

Not all, though. Giani Zail Singh in the 1970s came from a Ramgarhia Sikh background, of traditional artisans, and Charanjit Singh Channi, who served briefly before the Congress lost in 2022, is a Dalit Sikh.

The Jat Sikh vote is where the Congress is weakest. Only 16 per cent of Jat Sikhs voted for it in 2022, down from 29 per cent in 2017, according to the Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey. AAP took 46 per cent.

The state chief of every major party is a Jat Sikh this time, except AAP, which has a Hindu state unit chief and a Jat Sikh chief minister. Sections of the Congress are learnt to have argued that dropping the community from the top would have left it the odd one out. The poll field still carries Sikh issues, such as the alleged inaction by the then SAD-BJP government over sacrilege incidents in the mid-2010s.

Flank That Remains Open

The party has to, however, tackle how to give representation to Hindus, about 39 per cent of the population and the majority in most towns and cities. They have been a Congress stronghold in the not-so-distant past.

Pargat Singh started his innings by visiting prominent religious places of both Hindus and Sikhs in Delhi, where he was at the time of his appointment.

Among upper-caste Hindus, the Congress got 49 per cent of the votes in 2017, which halved by 2022, while the BJP's share tripled to reach 20 per cent, Lokniti-CSDS data showed. AAP was the main gainer across Hindu groups in 2022. Still, the Congress held on to more of its Hindu vote than its Sikh vote.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the Hindutva-focused BJP, contesting without the traditionally Sikh party Shiromani Akali Dal, took 18.56 per cent of the vote, its highest ever.

The Congress has had Hindu faces at the top before. Sunil Jakhar, state chief from 2017 to 2021, was even in the reckoning for chief minister when the party replaced Captain Amarinder Singh in 2021, before it made Channi the state's first Dalit chief minister. Jakhar later said advisers in Delhi had made his candidacy a Hindu-Sikh issue, and he quit the party in 2022 and went on to lead the BJP's state unit. The BJP recently replaced him with Kewal Singh Dhillon, its first Jat Sikh state president.

AAP has paired a Jat Sikh, Bhagwant Mann, with Aman Arora, a Hindu, as its state unit chief. The Congress has yet to find that balance.

Voters, however, may be more open than the parties. In the 2022 Lokniti-CSDS survey, 73.7 per cent of respondents said Punjab's chief minister can also be a non-Sikh.

Who's The Playmaker?

Dalits, from both Sikh and Hindu Scheduled Castes, make up about a third of Punjab's population, the highest such share in any state; 34 of the 117 Assembly seats are reserved for them. But making Channi chief minister in 2021, months before the polls, did not bring the Congress their votes. The party's share among Dalit Sikhs fell from 42 per cent in 2017 to 27 per cent in 2022, while AAP's rose from 21 to 46 per cent, Lokniti-CSDS found.

AAP won 28 of the 34 reserved seats, and Channi lost both seats he contested.

Channi, now the Jalandhar MP, remains the party's most prominent face, and his camp led the push to remove Warring. "Channi saheb has won," Warring said after his removal.

Channi served briefly as CM, the first Dalit to hold the post in Punjab, before the 2022 debacle of the Congress. Photo: IANS

READ | 'Charanjit Channi Saheb Has Won': Raja Warring Meets Rahul Gandhi After Exit As Punjab Congress Chief

Formally, the party has no chief ministerial face, but Channi is its campaign committee chief. The Congress has had a tradition of the campaign committee chief becoming chief minister in several states. "When we get the majority, the high command will decide," Leader of the Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa, another Jat Sikh contender, has said. Tradition dictates that the high command in Delhi decides.

As it stands today, the Congress has a Dalit Sikh as the de facto face and a Jat Sikh running the organisation, covering the state's two largest Sikh groups.

Geography adds another layer. Malwa, with 69 of the 117 seats, has traditionally decided who governs Punjab. The AAP won 66 of those seats in 2022. With Warring gone, none of the Congress's three most prominent leaders is from Malwa. Pargat and Channi are Jalandhar-based in Doaba, and Bajwa represents Qadian in Majha.

Does A Formula Work?

"Caste and community in Punjab is a current, not a container," historian and political commentator Harjeshwar Pal Singh said, however.

"Leaders win by riding moods, not by filling quotas," he opined.

AAP's 2022 victory cut across groups, described as "a bouquet of support from all castes and communities". In the Lokniti survey, 46 per cent said a candidate's caste mattered "not at all" to their vote.

Clear, rooted, and firm leadership is what matters, according to Harjeshwar. "In a multi-cornered fight, anti-incumbency does not automatically land in the challenger's lap; it has to be harvested, and that needs a sickle in one firm hand," he said.

In 2022, AAP declared Bhagwant Mann its CM face and won by a landslide. The Congress won in 2017 with Captain Amarinder Singh firmly in the saddle; it removed him before the 2022 elections and ended up presenting a fragmented leadership to voters.

In 2024, the vote splintered as the Congress and AAP were level at about 26 per cent, the BJP rose to 18.56, and two independents who campaigned on hardline Sikh platforms, including a jailed Amritpal Singh, won seats.

The 2027 field remains fragmented; it includes the AAP, Congress, SAD, BJP, and Amritpal's Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De). A SAD-BJP alliance remains under discussion. Calculating vote banks too minutely, thus, may end up confusing not just the voters but the leaders themselves.

For the Congress, presenting a united face remains the challenge. Pargat was a part of the Channi camp, though his public statements kept up with his calm but firm demeanour. He is known to write formal letters on specific issues to governments, and gives interviews focused on the public and not on factionalism.

READ | From Badals To Captain: How Pargat Singh's Dissent May Have Scored It For Him

Pargat's Long Game

The hockey champ's political journey has been winding yet moving forward, like that historic goal run in Perth. He served in the Punjab Police before entering politics to win the Jalandhar Cantonment seat for the SAD in 2012. Suspended by that party in 2016 after questioning some of its actions, he joined cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu to form a group that weighed AAP versus Congress. They moved to the Congress, which won. Pargat stayed in Sidhu's corner through the Amarinder years, became a party general secretary when Sidhu rebelled and took over the state unit in 2021. Pargat served in Channi's cabinet.

In the 2022 AAP sweep, Pargat was one of only 18 Congress candidates to win. Sidhu, the six-hitting opening batter, has since drifted away. The long-run defender has stayed.

"Hockey has changed now... Everyone must learn to play in every position, to attack, defend, everything," Pargat Singh said in an interview three decades ago. That's the job he has now.

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