HOLI has come late — or early, depends how you look at it — to Punjab, with the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) celebrating its sweep in the Municipal Corporation elections in the state with colour and dhol and sweetmeat. The Congress is a far second, and Independent candidates have fared better than both the BJP and the Akali Dal.
With the BJP’s state chief, Kewal Dhillon, only 24 hours old, it may not be fair to pronounce a verdict on the party’s performance — it has been decimated in Dhillon’s own area, Barnala. But what is interesting is that one of the two BJP MLAs in the existing Assembly, Jangi Lal Mahajan from Mukerian, notes my colleague Deepkamal Kaur, openly campaigned for the Akali Dal candidate (who won), although neither party is in alliance.
If this election is, indeed, a dry run to the Assembly elections later this year or early next, it promises to be hotly contested. Some will say the BJP may have left the transition too late — too late for Delhi Lt Governor Taranjit Sandhu to be showcased in Punjab and too late for Kewal Dhillon to take charge. Certainly, there was a lot of lobbying for the post, since Sunil Jakhar announced a year ago that he didn’t want the job. But the party will take heart in the fact that it has swept Naya Gaon, a municipal council in Mohali, cheek by jowl with Chandigarh — not far from the Chandigarh Golf Club, with its undulating courses, watering holes, a favourite parking spot for the city elite — while both AAP and Congress have been reduced to one seat each.
This election has also more or less made clear the direction that both AAP and BJP are taking — the former will do everything to protect its turf and the latter will do everything else to break into the state.
It’s clear now that Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann will be the face of AAP, with the national leadership from Delhi, both Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, in charge but firmly in the background — everyone is keenly aware that Punjabis are outliers, rebels without a pause, and like to take charge of their own fate. Moreover, all the accusations against Mann on his own home turf, Dhuri — faction-fighting, drug usage, an unclean city — have fallen flat, with AAP sweeping the Dhuri municipal council election on Friday.
As for the BJP, it is equally clear the RSS will play a significant role in managing the upcoming contest — its cadres and ‘panna pramukhs’ (literally, the ‘pramukh’, or person, who manages the names of every voter on the page, or ‘panna’) have already been diligently working the ground. However Kewal Dhillon turns out — his declared net worth is between Rs 200-229 crore, with homes in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar, Sector 9 in Chandigarh, in Dubai, and Marbella in Spain — his performance will be a clear measure of the hard work the RSS puts into the state.
Question is, what does the Congress want to do? This column has often been disparaging about the grand old party’s warring factions, all of them angling for the pure pleasure of the Delhi High Command — which, admittedly, has been busy this week with executing a bloodless transition in Karnataka, with CM-so-far Siddaramaiah handing over the baton to his Number Two man DK Shivakumar without a yelp.
Certainly, many in Punjab will be hopefully looking at Delhi for a repetition of that skilful manoeuvre. In fact, if the Karnataka experiment is anything to go by, it seems it may have incorporated into its learning curve the damage it did to its own party back in 2021 when Punjab Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, was changed less than one year before the Assembly election.
The Delhi rumour mill today is rife with speculation that the Congress High Command, flush with the success in Kerala and enamoured with its intervention in Tamil Nadu, is willing to play for high stakes in Punjab in the coming months, in Himachal Pradesh in late 2027 when polls are due and in Rajasthan in late 2028. (This also means that Sachin Pilot may finally have a chance, because, like DK Shivakumar, he did not quit the Congress, unlike several of their colleagues.)
For now, the party’s poor showing in the municipal elections became apparent on Friday — it had even lost from the home turf of the state party president Raja Warring. Jalandhar MP Charanjit Channi didn’t even campaign in his constituency. Voters have paid no heed to candidates in the belt where Partap Bajwa and Sukhjinder Randhawa reign. And so, as the top leadership plus state leaders huddled to discuss the road ahead in Delhi, it was clear to everyone that if the party wants to remain in the reckoning, it will have to take some tough decisions.
The next six months are expected to be long and hard. Every day will count. MLAs will jump ship, some will shift their constituencies. The long shadow of the Enforcement Directorate will hang over the land. AAP minister Sanjeev Arora has been in ED’s judicial custody since May 9. Congress leader in charge of Punjab Bhupesh Baghel’s son was arrested by the ED last July in two cases linked to an alleged liquor scam, but granted bail by the Chhattisgarh High Court this January.
So, are these municipal polls a shape of things to come, or will Punjab have to resort to Shah Rukh Khan? Kya Punjab mein picture abhi baqi hai, mere dost?
