Kharge puts Sachin Pilot in charge of poll-bound Punjab and moves Baghel to Assam

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on 5 September appointed Sachin Pilot as All India Congress Committee general secretary in charge of Punjab, replacing Bhupesh Baghel. Baghel goes to Assam in place of Jitendra Singh. Randeep Singh Surjewala takes Gujarat and keeps Karnataka. KC Venugopal, the general secretary for organisation, said the orders take effect at once.

The Punjab move came a day after Rahul Gandhi chaired a meeting in Delhi with the state leadership. Kharge, Venugopal and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were present. The session followed months of open fighting inside the Punjab unit. In July the high command kept Amrinder Singh Raja Warring as state president and named former chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi as campaign committee chairman. Leaders around Channi then pressed Baghel to drop Warring. Rival slogans and clashes followed at party events. The Indian Express linked Saturday's change directly to that fight.

Pilot is a former Rajasthan deputy chief minister. Putting him over Punjab places a leader from outside the state's factions in the chair that will handle the 2027 Assembly election. Punjab has 117 seats. Congress lost the state in 2022 after a bitter internal split. The high command is also weighing changes at the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee. A bus yatra led by Rahul is being planned as part of the campaign build-up.

Surjewala's double charge is a different kind of signal. Karnataka is a Congress government state that recently completed a leadership transition. Gujarat is a BJP fortress where Congress needs a full-time organiser who already knows the southern file. Baghel, a former Chhattisgarh chief minister, now has Assam, where the party is trying to rebuild against a BJP-led government and a crowded regional field.

State in-charges do not run governments. They settle disputes, watch ticket distribution, and report to the AICC when a unit starts to break in public. Baghel could not stop the Warring-Channi quarrel from reaching Delhi. Pilot's first test is whether the same names accept a new referee. If they do not, the next announcement will be about the PCC, not about the in-charge.

Punjab's Assembly term ends in March 2027. That calendar now sits next to an advanced Census timetable in the same state, with population enumeration brought forward to December 2026 and early January 2027. Party structure and the official count will move in the same season. The Congress bet is that an outsider with a national profile can freeze the feud long enough to pick candidates. The record of the last cycle is that it could not.