It shows Congress leaders hemmed in by the police to stop them from marching in Delhi. Raja Warring, removed last week as Punjab Congress chief, has his arms raised around Rahul Gandhi as cops press in from all sides. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra stands just in front of the two. Camera crews and phones on selfie sticks crowd the edges.
The image is edited so that only the three leaders appear in colour, surrounded by figures in greyscale. A thousand words or less, but this photo Amarinder Singh Raja Warring posted on Thursday, accompanied by a 21-word couplet, seeks to say a lot.
Channi and Congress Legislature Party leader Partap Singh Bajwa did not agree with the arrangement, and others lined up behind them as it turned into a virtual rebellion. On July 1, three months before his resignation, the high command announced that Warring would continue as state president, with Channi heading the campaign committee. Pargat Singh, known for his measured approach, eventually replaced Warring on October 2.
Days after being replaced as Punjab Congress president, Amarinder Singh Raja Warring was on the frontlines of the Congress-led Opposition’s protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, at one point climbing atop the police bus carrying Rahul Gandhi.
The Congress lost badly to the AAP. On Wednesday, the second day of the protest, police detained Rahul Gandhi at a roundabout near the Shangri-La hotel in central Delhi. Security personnel carried him on their shoulders into a police bus. Raja Warring and Indian Youth Congress (IYC) president Udai Bhanu Chib, along with some other leaders, climbed onto the roof of that bus. Warring is, what you’d call in college-speak, Udai Chib’s super-senior as a former IYC chief. And that is a key fact in his journey in politics in general and within Rahul Gandhi’s Congress in particular. Back in Punjab, friction within the Congress was at its peak then too. Warring took over the battered Punjab unit in April of that year, becoming its youngest-ever president.
Warring handed his resignation as Punjab Congress president to Rahul Gandhi in person in Delhi on October 2. Warring rose through the party’s youth wing, starting his career as the Muktsar block chief of the Youth Congress in 2000, became the district president in 2002, and was elected Punjab Youth Congress vice-president in 2008 at a time when Rahul Gandhi was seeking to make his own mark in the party. He was appointed IYC national president in December 2014, and served for nearly four years. In May 2018, Gandhi, who had become Congress president by then, named Keshav Chand Yadav as his successor. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, as Rahul asked top leaders to contest, Warring entered the contest from Bathinda but lost to the SAD’s Harsimrat Kaur Badal by a relatively narrow margin. After Rahul Gandhi stepped down as party president following the 2019 Lok Sabha defeat, Warring publicly pitched for his return at an event marking his father and former PM Rajiv Gandhi’s 75th birth anniversary, with Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh in the audience. Channi became CM as the party replaced Captain Amarinder Singh ahead of the 2022 polls.
Before the meeting, he said, “I am going to meet the boss. “The party wants Rahul Gandhi and the country also wants Rahul Gandhi,” he said then.
