Electoral politics is a relay run in which the final lap throws up the winner or the distance by which the better-endowed team leaves others behind.
The analogy is apt for Punjab which goes to polls on February 20 with five claimants to the medal that’s the border state: The ruling Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party, the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bahujan Samaj Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party-Punjab Lok Congress, and the farmers’ formation called the Sanyukta Sangharsh Morcha.
Quite instructive to understand the run of the tide this time is the way the 2017 election shaped up amid a deafening clamour for AAP but a victory for the Congress. More surprising than the latter taking the power podium was the length with which it romped home. From the 46 seats it had in the outgoing assembly, the party grabbed 77 in the new House compared to the AAP’s 20 and the SAD’s 18.
As the new kid on the block, the AAP’s show was superlative but way short of the promise it had purveyed then and does so even now. After the vote five years ago, this writer had coined a one-liner that has not lost its relevance, albeit with some improvisation. If in 2017 it was “AAP ka shor hai, Congress ka zor hai,” in 2022, till a few days ago, the decibel-support was higher for the hitherto Delhi-centric party with the Congress ostensibly enfeebled: “AAP ka ab bhi shor hai, par Congress kamzoor hai.”
That was until an AAP founding member now estranged from Arvind Kejriwal broke his silence to suggest that the latter co-opted separatist elements in his earlier, unsuccessful bid for power in Punjab. As even a day can be a lifetime in politics, the party’s prospects have to be re-assessed in the light of poet-politician Kumar Vishwas’s assertions. The timing of his comments isn’t beyond suspicion, aimed as it evidently is to influence the upcoming vote, as had happened five years ago when the Hindus drifted away from the AAP to go almost en bloc with the Congress.
Quite relevant to understand what had then gone wrong is a 2018 statement on Twitter by actor-politician Gul Panag, another disaffected AAP member who lost the Chandigarh Lok Sabha election on the party ticket in 2014. Responding to a tweet on AAP “romanticising Khalistanis” in the assembly polls a year ago, she wrote: “(A) poorly calculated flirtation that was. One I warned against, repeatedly. It’s because they didn’t get or understand Punjab. (They) thought the K-gang had electoral weight. All of us from Punjab knew better. But alas!”
Panag’s allusion was to certain central leaders of AAP who ran the party’s 2017 campaign, inviting charges of “remote controlling” the party’s state unit that witnessed rebellions and walkouts, including by its then state convenor, Sucha Singh Chottepur, who recently joined the SAD and is its candidate from Batala.
The AAP has raised a flurry of questions in response to insinuations made by Vishwas. Its points-person in Punjab, Raghav Chadha asked on Twitter: If what he has said is true, why did he not inform the security agencies or leave the party in 2016 (when the alleged conversation happened between him and Kejriwal on mobilising support from separatists)? Was he complicit then and exited the party to start such propaganda after being denied a seat in the Rajya Sabha? In another tweet Chadha averred that Kejriwal isn’t an “antankwadi (terrorist) that he’s made out to be. He’s a nationalist (rashtrawadi) who’s for the spread of education (shikshawadi) and development (vikashwadi). On his part, the Delhi chief minister said if anyone felt terrorised by him, it were his rival parties that have ganged up against him, unsettled as they are by his agenda for the state’s all-round development.
Be that as it may, Vishwas’s calibrated intervention, regardless of its objective or motivation, could unravel the “eik mauqa” narrative of Kejriwal and his CM-face Bhagwant Mann that has shone brighter than the poll-promises of other parties. If at all, it can be repaired with cogent ripostes, not by hurling counter-questions at the accuser.
The imperative of an on-ground salvage operation needs no emphasis, given that there’s just a day left between now and the voting date. The Hindu constituency needs assurances that ring true. A yeoman task it’ll be, the question being whether it’s doable in the time available.
The supreme irony is that Kejriwal’s campaign focus lately was on exploiting contradictions within the Congress after Sunil Jakhar’s frontally caustic rejoinders to Ambika Soni’s comment ruling out a non-Sikh as CM of Punjab at the time her party was head hunting for a replacement for Captain Amarinder Singh. With Rahul Gandhi asking for a yes or no reply from the AAP convenor on whether or not the conversation with Vishwas happened, the shoe now is on the other foot
The slope ahead could be slippery for AAP. A factor that undermined the party’s ambitious maiden attempt in 2017 was the shrill support it received from the overlapping separatists-ultra-Left flotsam besides the loquacious non-resident Indians who arrived from their foreign abodes with means, money and a mind made up. They were loud as they wanted to demonstratively register solidarity.
Panag was right when she expressed her reservations about the electoral strategy of the party to which she then belonged. The fear of the eighties revisiting was tangible among the minority Hindu electorate who bore the brunt of the Khalistan movement. This writer, in fact, had come across dozens of voters that year in Malwa’s Moga who forecast a backlash, a few even suggesting that the BJP, part of the unpopular alliance then in power was encouraging their core-backers away from the AAP and towards the Congress.
It was the AAP leadership’s failure to read the mood that fetched them the consolation prize of being the principal Opposition rather than the winner they could’ve been or aspired to be. There were other downsides, not the least of them being the lack of a robust organisational structure. Yet, what did them in was the somewhat ‘exaggerated’ perception of the party being the harbinger of the past the Punjabis had lived down at tremendous social and economic cost.
The AAP might manage to ride the goodwill it has as an untested entity, to emerge unscathed from the damaging disclosures. But there certainly are serious questions now about the communication Kejriwal had widened across classes on life and sustenance issues: joblessness, agrarian distress, inflation, drug abuse and migration of skilled, educated young men to foreign shores. “The controversy ignited by Vishwas has traction in cities. It’s a bad sign for AAP,” said Ritesh Sharma, an Amritsar-based businessman. A frequent traveller to the countryside, he noticed as much anger against the Congress for Charanjeet Singh Channi’s “bhaiya” jibe. The CM has since clarified that his taunt was directed at the AAP leadership, not migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
As it isn’t always easy to correct a misdirected or misinterpreted message in the din and hustle of elections, both the AAP and the Congress will have to account for the SAD and the BJP’s concomitant gains; the latter, despite not being in a winning position, already having a tactical understanding with the Dera Sacha Sauda which has adherents in about 40 of Malwa’s 69 assembly constituencies.
In a seemingly touch and go situation, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether Punjab will have a single party regime or a post-poll coalition, the natural allies for which are only the SAD and the BJP. That’s for some political observers a long shot and for others a possibility, even if their aggregate tally isn’t past the 59 mark in the 117-member House. But an essential pre-requisite for the resurrection of their traditional alliance which dissolved in the face of the widely opposed farm laws, will be an appreciable fall in the AAP’s popular stock and Channi’s Dalit appeal coming unstuck for the Congress.
The border-province’s socio-economic indicators aren’t any better today than what had brought upon it the scourge of terrorism over three decades ago. At that time, scores of educated, unemployed youth, who had dropped out of joint families, were drawn to militancy that at once fetched them religious sanctity and a muscular profile in a combative milieu. The worrisome part is that they’re lured and getting invested now in drugs.
Only the people’s native wisdom can save the state from the rush for political power that could trample its future and that of its poor and the youth who’re jobless and without hope.
(With inputs from agencies)