IT’s been an overheated week in Punjab’s politics. The new BJP president Nitin Nabin was in the state just prior, travelling across Amritsar, Ludhiana and Jalandhar to get a feel of the challenge in the run-up to the Assembly polls in early 2027. Just as Nabin left Punjab, an old video that purportedly shows Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann committing a blasphemous act has taken over the airwaves.
The Akal Takht, widely considered by believing Sikhs to be the supreme authority in all matters of faith, has censured Mann over the video, as have all the Opposition parties. Mann is fighting back, citing the clean chit from a laboratory in BJP-ruled Gurgaon — except, two people from the lab have since been arrested by the Haryana Police on allegations of money exchanging hands.
Will Mann survive this crisis? Will it significantly damage AAP that began its political journey with a people’s movement against corruption, far away in Delhi, or will the party still be able to overcome this week’s setback and transform the crisis into an opportunity?
Until last week, AAP was widely seen to be coasting along, a fragmented Opposition hardly enough to mount a serious challenge. The chief minister’s episodic walkabouts after dusk were hardly enough to stir the Sutlej-still-not-in-spate. Along with Arvind Kejriwal’s shrewd promises of freebies — a leaf the AAP leader seems to have successfully taken from the BJP arsenal — which includes the distribution of monies to women (Rs 1,500 monthly to women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Rs 1,000 to those that don’t), besides promising to assuage the grievances of influential groups, including sanitation workers, school teachers and sarpanches, AAP was crafting a formula that had a little bit of something for everyone.
As Punjab holds its breath, the question is if this week’s political war over videos will spill into the next.
Until last week, the BJP was seen as an also-ran; this week, amid the unfolding chaos, it is sensing the political ground open up beneath its feet. Ambition has always been known to be a persuasive glue, but the question always is, whether it’s enough. Meaning, with six months or so to go to the polls, does the BJP have 117 candidates to fight all the seats in the House?
Senior BJP leaders like Home Minister Amit Shah and Nitin Nabin certainly think so. The Tribune ground reports say neither SAD nor BJP have a leg to stand on, alone; together, though, they could be a force to contend with. My colleague Aditi Tandon recently quoted a senior BJP leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity, saying that “nothing can be ruled out in politics”. And so the question this week, as the ground shifts in Punjab : Will BJP and SAD, who had a bitter falling out over the Modi government’s farm laws in 2020, finally kiss and make up?
Certainly, “a week is a long time in politics” is a cliché every politician swears by — except Rahul Gandhi, who seems to have bigger fish to fry, including flying off abroad for a belated 56th birthday celebration, while crucial conversations over a new state chief for Punjab had hardly concluded in Delhi last week. Remember the Congress came second to AAP in the recent urban body elections, indicating that while it is a divided party in the state — at least five self-appointed chief ministerial candidates at last count — a glimmer of loyalty to the idea of the Congress still remains.
SAD’s big challenge, of course, is whether Punjab has been able to forgive it for not taking strong action against those accused of the sin of “beadbi” or sacrilege, which took place back in 2015 in a small town called Bargari, when pages of the holy Guru Granth Sahib were found torn up — SAD was in power at that time.
Certainly, the Opposition this week is accusing Mann of committing the same sin in the alleged video — a charge that Mann and AAP have strongly refuted. That’s why the coming days will define the character of the election campaign ahead. Will the CM be able to weather the storm and prove his innocence? Or will Punjab do to AAP in 2027 what it did to SAD in 2017?
The battle for 2027 is only beginning. The Akal Takht has already ordered that historic gurdwaras across Punjab put up banners that are critical of Mann. Many have complied; but there are also reports that some independent managements as well as those that hold affiliation to the Singh Sabha are not falling in line — not yet. The lines are still unclear this week.
And then there’s that other so-called party, Waris Punjab De (WPD), whose MP from Khadoor Sahib, Amritpal Singh, was elected when he was behind bars in an Assam jail and remains there. As the ground shifts in Punjab, where does WPD fall in the new narrative?
As the week ends, the horizon turns muddier and people wonder what tomorrow will bring, here is a screenshot of the state, wildly spinning on an axis hardly of its own making. The Tribune’s reporter in Amritsar, Pawan K Jaiswar, says everyday seizures of heroin and small arms along the India-Pakistan border are rising; police officials explain that drones from across the border are getting more sophisticated, able to beat the radar by flying low and bringing in larger consignments, of drugs and guns.
In Jalandhar, Aparna Banerji’s stories on entire families being wiped out by heroin is an indication of the drug’s monstrous hold. AAP’s ‘Yudh Nashiyan Virudh’, the campaign against drugs, is welcome because it has exposed and excavated this crisis to a significant degree, but the enormity of the challenge means that rehabilitation cannot be limited to name-calling. If Punjab has to be saved, an exhaustive action plan must have everyone, both the ruling party and the Opposition, on board.
Sometimes it gets worse — when drug-running collaborates with arms smuggling. This week in Amritsar, the BJP suspended a local senior leader after the BSF recovered 26 sophisticated weapons, including an AK-47 gun, from his son, allegedly an addict.
Perhaps the last word this week should belong to my colleagues Neha Saini and Rajmeet Singh, who pointed out that political parties like to invoke history to leverage the present — from AAP’s use of Shaheed Bhagat Singh in the 2022 election to BJP’s invocation today of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Sarkar-e-Khalsa, a Sikh state that was both secular and inclusive.
And so it goes in Punjab, the past and present mingling, just like its eponymous rivers. Question is whether and how the rivers will find their way to the sea.
