Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Punjab president Sunil Jakhar is upset with the way in which the party has dealt with him. While he has not officially resigned from his post, he has made his intentions clear.
The Punjab state chief has skipped various recent party meetings, citing excuses. It is also learnt that recently he had meetings with the BJP top brass and expressed his displeasure over multiple issues.
It is learnt through sources that during his recent meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he has expressed that Punjab has not seen an impact of the saffron party because of the lack of application of the leadership towards the border state.
Sources also said that during his meetings with Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP chief and Union Minister JP Nadda, he has also expressed unhappiness over not being considered for a Rajya Sabha seat or not being offered a central ministership.
WHY JAKHAR IS UNHAPPY
Sources in the BJP say what irked Jakhar was Ravneet Singh Bittu, who joined the saffron party before the Lok Sabha elections and lost his parliamentary election from Ludhiana, was made a minister in the Modi government.
A bone of contention for the Punjab state chief was that even before the Lok Sabha elections when three Central ministers, including Piyush Goyal, were rushed to Chandigarh in February to speak to farmers’ leaders, he was not kept in the loop or asked to attend the meeting. In fact, later on, he had also made his displeasure public.
RETURN TO CONGRESS?
Sources further said that Jakhar is keen on going back to his former party, the Congress. It is learnt that he is in touch with former Punjab chief minister Charanjeet Singh Channi. Channi, who is currently a Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha, is said to have met Jakhar recently.
But sources close to Channi say that it is unlikely that the Congress will take Jakhar back, given his exit at a crucial juncture and his utterances in the public about the grand old party. “He does not bring anything to the table for us right now, and we do not see too much utility in his leadership anymore,” a source close to the Congress PCC chief told News18.
WHO NEXT?
The bigger headache for the BJP will now be to find who will take over as the next chief of the party in the state after Jakhar’s exit, which looks imminent.
Sources say that if the saffron party is looking for a Sikh face, they could hand over the responsibility to veteran leader Kewal Dhillon. In his 70s, he was unable to win any election during his stint in the Congress either.
If the BJP wants to field a Hindu, which is also a significant population, then the two frontrunners are Tarun Chugh and Subhash Sharma. Chugh is a general secretary in the central BJP and has, in the past, held responsibility for the organisation in the state. Currently, he is also the in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir, where elections just concluded.
Sharma, on the other hand, had contested the elections in the Lok Sabha from Anandpur Sahib on a BJP ticket. Currently, he holds a post in the state organisation. In his 50s, Sharma is said to be a loyal worker of the party in the state, where not much success has come their way.
“One thing is clear. This time around, the BJP will be keen on getting a state president who identifies with the party’s ideology. Giving such posts to turncoats or outsiders has not paid rich dividends,” a source told News18.
OTHER TURNCOATS SHARE SENTIMENT
But it is not just Jakhar alone who feels left out in the BJP. Several other leaders who had jumped ship from the Congress to the BJP, upon the insistence of the likes of former Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, share the same sentiment. In fact, of the seven ministers from the Channi government who had joined the BJP, five, including Rajkumar Virka, Balbir Sidhu, Jagmohan kank, Shyamsundar Arora and Gurpreet Singh Kangad, have already gone back.
Among the reasons given by these leaders is the lack of the BJP central leadership’s interest in Punjab. Apart from this there, acceptability in the BJP, after coming from another party, has been very low. “These leaders felt rudderless. To a large extent, their presence wasn’t required in the party,” a source told Network 18,
Many of them were left in the cold, especially with Captain Singh becoming mostly inactive in politics.
In the last assembly elections, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) wiped out the Congress and Bhagwant Mann was made the state chief minister. The border state of Punjab is important, given its strategic location and being a prosperous state with focus on farming. The headache of any government in the state has also been on how to curb the source and supply of drugs, which are abundantly available.
