JALANDHAR: All his political career, Captain Amarinder Singh never played on the side-lines, hence his third resignation, although the first two were out of own volition, a perceived sacrifice that built his stature.
The Punjab chief minister may be out for now due to compulsion but he can’t be written off, since he still has his cards close to his chest. He became a Congress MP in 1980 and joined the negotiations to sort out the Punjab issue before Operation Bluestar happened and he resigned from both Parliament and the party in 1984 despite being a personal friend of the Gandhis.
This gave him a place in history that, later, helped him dominate the Punjab Congress affairs for more than two decades. Whoever remained Punjab Congress president, Amarinder remained tallest in the party’s state unit. He switched to the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and became a minister in Surjit Singh Barnala’s government in September 1985. Seven months later, he quit that cabinet in protest when police entered Darbar Sahib on Barnala’s orders. By this, he endeared himself to the Sikhs.
After the Akalis denied him ticket in the 1997 elections, he moved back to the Congress in 1998. Sonia Gandhi made him the state chief of the party and he led it to a sterling performance in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls. Public dissatisfaction was working against the Parkash Singh Badal government but Amarinder had the hard task of bridging the gap between the Congress and the Sikhs. In 2002, he led the party to victory and sent Badal and his son, Sukhbir Singh Badal, to jail in corruption cases in which they were, later, exonerated.
Another high point of his political career was the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act in 2004, for which he called a special session of the assembly. It nullified all the agreements with other states and the Centre on the sharing of river waters. It had inter-state consequences. In the early 1980s, Congress CM Darbara Singh had withdrawn a petition from the Supreme Court on river waters’ issue. Capt became a “saviour of Punjab waters” in the party’s eyes, even as the SAD also claimed to have championed the cause.
In a previous tenure, he survived an open rebellion by Rajinder Kaur Bhattal. The Punjab Congress lost the 2007 and 2012 assembly elections, both times under his command, but his charisma was not lost.
On Sonia Gandhi’s prodding, he contested the parliamentary election from Amritsar in 2014 as outsider in the game and defeated BJP giant Arun Jaitley, which pushed Amarinder’s national appeal and helped him not only wrest the Punjab Congress presidentship from Partap Singh Bajwa but also win the state by a huge mandate of 77 seats.
When his charisma worked Amarinder could force party high command to appoint him as Punjab Congress president even after he made some not-so-charitable remarks about Rahul Gandhi in an interview in September 2015. He was undisputed leader of Punjab Congress and had his way for six years both in the government as well as in the party. If the party’s central leadership had weakened after 2014 parliament election, he had grown stronger at the same time.