THE Punjab BJP celebrated the victory in the West Bengal elections in a five-star hotel in Chandigarh on Friday evening, barely a day after the Enforcement Directorate cracked down on three Punjabi real-estate developers in Mohali, just outside the garden city. The two incidents are separate but everyone also knows they are connected. The newfound confidence in the BJP stems from what once was an oft-repeated adage : What Bengal does today, the rest of the country does tomorrow.
And so, in the air, hangs the question, “Is Punjab next?” It’s a question not just Punjab, but all the country is asking. Certainly, the gloves are off.
Let’s start with the map of India that has turned mostly saffron in the last 12 years since PM Modi took power. Except for Himachal Pradesh and Punjab in the north, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Karnataka in the south and Jharkhand in eastern India, the rest of the country today belongs to the BJP. No need to repeat how the dominoes have fallen.
We also know the BJP likes to detail. In Bengal, the Special Intensive Revision was thrown into the “poriborton” mix of caste and gender and religion; alongside these pages, senior journalist Jayanta Ghosal writes how the BJP decided to subdue the “Jai Shri Ram” narrative it has favoured elsewhere to focus, instead, on the anti-incumbency ills associated with Mamata Banerjee. Even Bangladesh was not spared in this “no stone to be left unturned” strategy — Dinesh Trivedi, former Trinamool Congress MP who moved to the BJP five years ago, was sent to Dhaka as High Commissioner (a story broken by my colleague Ujwal Jalali) — to showcase its pro-Bengal intent.
The focus on Punjab has been a long time coming. PM Modi visited Gurdwara Sachkhand Ballan in February to mark the anniversary of Sant Ravidas, revered by the Sikh Ravidassia sect, while the sect head was given a Padma Shri in January — about 22 per cent of the state’s Sikhs are Dalits. Haryana CM Nayab Singh Saini’s forays into Punjab in a turban are well-known.
It seems the seven defector AAP MPs who recently joined the BJP will soon set up camp in Chandigarh — their staffers are already here. Even the banquet for Vietnamese President To Lam in Rashtrapati Bhavan earlier this week was designed by Punjab celebrity chef Harpal Singh Sokhi (check out his interview and food stories-cum-recipes in The Tribune) — the menu featured Bathinda vaale aloo, Dal Amritsari, and with a nod to Haryana, Hisar bajra khichdi.
With speculation gaining ground that elections in Punjab will be held towards the end of the year — Census operations are likely to start by middle-January 2027, which means they can’t overlap with the conduct of polls — the state BJP is certainly sharpening its metaphorical knives. It hasn’t escaped anybody’s notice that the ED named the president of AAP Punjab, Aman Arora, as being linked with one of the realtors raided on Thursday morning.
Oh yes, the gloves are off. The BJP is targeting the ruling AAP. CM Bhagwant Mann is hitting back at the Akali Dal — and implicitly, the BJP — by upping the ante against the 2015 sacrilege incidents that took place when the Akalis-BJP were in power. AAP will certainly fight to keep Punjab, keenly aware it is the only way it will still be taken seriously as the third pole in Indian politics. The recent passage of the Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Act, 2026, is also intended to whittle down the incredible influence of the SGPC (and therefore the Akali Dal), which issues AAP-critical statements every day.
Winning Bengal has certainly pumped up the BJP. And yet, as Delhi’s Lt Governor Taranjit Sandhu — grandson of Teja Singh Samundri, a blue-blooded reformer of the 1920s Gurdwara reform movement and a founder member of the SGPC — discovered, as the BJP candidate for the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat in mid-2024, that the powerful Sikh peasantry wasn’t ready to let him into their villages, even to campaign. (He had much better luck with the Hindu communities.)
That big question remains, even if much else has changed these past two years. Are Punjab’s Sikhs prepared to let the BJP in today?
Or, perhaps, that’s not the right question, because it would be folly to think the Sikhs are an undifferentiated, holistic group of people. The right question, perhaps, should be : How will the different Sikh communities, or castes, vote? And will some Sikh castes/communities let BJP candidates in, more than others?
Certainly the BJP will attempt to fragment the Sikh vote, in the hope that it can wean some people away. Talk of a BJP-Akali Dal alliance, before or after the poll, refuses to go away, despite Home Minister Amit Shah’s announcement the BJP will fight alone. It’s clear the two parties need each other — the Akalis need the Hindu vote the BJP can provide and the BJP needs the Akali vote.
The big difference between 2024, when BJP-Akali Dal talks fractured over which party would get more seats in the Lok Sabha polls, and now is that most of the country today, including big Bengal, has been coloured saffron. In this scenario, will Shah still be willing to play second fiddle to Akali Dal’s Sukhbir Badal?
Where, you might ask, is the grand old party in this political melee? The interesting thing about the Congress, which has just dumped its old partner, the DMK, in Tamil Nadu, and won back Kerala on an anti-incumbency Left vote, is that it has a good chance of retaking Punjab — if its various factions can still come together and hang together and woo the citizenry in its favour. (At the moment, though, that seems like a really tough ask.)
It may well, then, be time for Punjab to (tunelessly) hum the Satinder Sartaaj two-liner : Saanu saariyaan visar gaiyaan raavan ve/Kehre paase jaiye sajana. All our paths seem to have disappeared/What direction should I take now?
