The dispute centres on the Congress high command's July 1 decision to retain Amarinder Singh Raja Warring as Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections. As part of the same organisational reshuffle, former Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi was named chairman of the party's Campaign Committee, while Leader of Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa was given charge of the Election Management Committee — an arrangement designed to spread responsibility across the party's senior leaders and ensure representation across Jat Sikh, Dalit Sikh and Hindu community lines within the state unit.

The reshuffle didn't land as intended. Channi, widely believed to have wanted the state unit's top job for himself, has been joined by Gurdaspur MP Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa — a past rival now aligned with him against Warring — in openly opposing the decision. A meeting meant to resolve the standoff, hosted by senior MLA Rana Gurjeet Singh at his Chandigarh residence on July 11, drew over 90 party leaders, a notably larger turnout than the roughly 60 who'd gathered at Channi's residence right after the original announcement. Nearly every senior Punjab Congress leader not aligned with Warring attended, including Bajwa himself, despite his historically frosty relations with both Channi and Randhawa.

Congress's Punjab in-charge Bhupesh Baghel, who has faced accusations from Randhawa and others of favouring Warring over the party's broader interests, held the meeting expecting a possible breakthrough. Instead, Randhawa emerged afterward to declare that the party doesn't need "compromised leaders," with Channi standing beside him as he said it — a clear signal the talks had failed. Notably, neither Channi nor Randhawa nor even the usually conciliatory Bajwa joined Baghel when he addressed reporters afterward, itself read as a sign of how badly the meeting had gone.

Sources say the Channi camp's demand goes beyond simply removing Warring as party chief — they also want him excluded entirely from candidate selection for next year's Assembly polls. Baghel rejected that specific demand outright, but said he would relay the group's broader concerns to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and organisational general secretary KC Venugopal. Baghel has separately insisted publicly that the high command's original decision "will not be reconsidered" under pressure, dismissing the standoff as something too serious to be treated like a "gudda-guddi ka khel" — a Hindi idiom for child's play, roughly translating to a mock doll's wedding.

With no resolution reached, the matter now sits with the central leadership. Bajwa, for his part, has urged all factions to keep their eyes on the bigger contest, arguing that no individual leader's ambition should outweigh the party's or the state's interests — a message so far more aspirational than descriptive of where Punjab Congress actually stands heading into election season.