Power play in Punjab politics ahead of elections

The stage is set for the high-stakes Assembly elections, scheduled to be held in March 2022

The political landscape in Punjab before elections has never been so muddled in the last few decades. While Congress has gone for a generational change by appointing Navjot Singh Sidhu as PCC chief, ignoring the objections of veteran Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, Shiromani Akali Dal and BSP have stitched an alliance after a gap of 25 years. The BJP, for the first time, will be contesting the polls on its own in the state after 24 years.

The AAP, which had surprised political pundits by winning four Lok Sabha seats in 2014 with 25 per cent of total votes, slumped in 2019 and could win only one Lok Sabha seat (of Bhagwant Mann) with less than 7.5 per cent of vote share. Leaving behind its poor performance in the recent past, AAP is said to be getting back into the reckoning.

It is a quadrangular contest for the first time in Punjab in the last three decades. Before the Sidhu-Singh fight, Congress had an edge but now the contest could be wide open.

The Congress, whose sole face for the last two decades was Amarinder, decided to move to generation next. It has put its stakes on cricketer-TV star-turned-politician Sidhu, who took charge as state party chief recently, leaving the chief minister sulking but with no other option than to accept the changed realities. Sidhu’s appointment as state Congress chief is being seen as an attempt by the party to create a new leadership in Punjab as Amarinder is nearing 80. Sidhu, after getting the “pivotal responsibility”, said his “journey has just begun. He is kind of an anti-establishment voice within the establishment and this could help the party ward off some sort of anti-incumbency.

Sidhu, who had joined Congress in 2017 after a 13-year stint with BJP, had an uneasy relationship with Amarinder and at a point had said “Rahul Gandhi and not Amarinder Singh was my captain”. He also belongs to the Jat Sikh community to which the two-term chief minister also belongs. This widely leaves open the issue of representation of other communities particularly Hindus, the second most dominant group.

Also read: Navjot Singh Sidhu takes over as Punjab Congress chief

The party has tried to address it by appointing four working presidents — Sangat Singh Gilizian, belonging to the backwar

d class, Sukhwinder Singh Danny, an MBA from Regents Business School in London belongs to the Scheduled Caste community, Kuljit Singh Nagra is a Jat Sikh and Pawan Goel, from Vaishya Hindu community. Currently the CM, the PCC chief and the working president hail from the Jat Sikh community and it remains to be seen how the party further finetunes its social engineering in the “secular and progressive” state.

After taking over the position, Sidhu raised issues like Farm Bill and ongoing protests and unemployment and said he would make himself available to workers at the party office from August 15 onwards. The party feels that the issues raised by Sidhu have traction among people and has set the agenda for the upcoming elections. As long as the two leaders smoke the peace pipe, Congress does not have much to worry but any rebellion by Amarinder will do it in.

Sikh-Dalit consolidation

The Akali Dal, which walked out of the NDA last year, deserting its 23-year-old ally BJP, has entered into an alliance with Mayawati’s BSP. The coalition hopes to work out a Sikh-Dalit consolidation, which seems to be a tough call given the social realities in the state. The SAD will contest 97 seats and the BSP on the remaining 20. Of this, the BSP would be contesting eight seats from Doaba, where SCs have a substantial presence.

The SAD-BSP alliance had contested the 1996 Lok Sabha polls together and won 11 out of 13 seats in Punjab but the very next year, the Akali Dal allied with the saffron party for the state polls. Thereafter BSP and SAD never came together on a political platform. The alliance created unease within the BSP, which had to expel its state chief Rachpal Raju, who minced no words in criticising the alliance. BSP’s OBC wing president in the state Sukhbir Singh Shalimar also tendered his resignation.

While 57.75 per cent of the electorate are Sikhs, Hindus are 39.49 per cent. Dalits, who are 31.94 per cent, are found among both Sikhs and Hindus. This leaves virtually no room for Muslim politics in the state with the non-Sikh, non-Hindu population being below 3 per cent. The SCs have never voted en bloc even though Punjab is the home state for the architect of Dalit politics Kanshi Ram, who hailed from Doaba region. The BSP had clocked its best performance in 1992 Assembly polls, winning nine seats and getting more than 16 per cent votes but in the last decade, it has been on a downhill journey. While in 2007 and 2012 state polls, it got a little more than 4 per cent votes, it plummeted to a new low of just 1.5 per cent in 2017 state polls.

SAD is now trying to broaden its alliance by roping in two Left parties - CPI and CPM. The SAD and the CPM had joined hands in 1967 and formed the first non-Congress government in Punjab in which late Communist leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet had played a key role.

The AAP, which had won 20 seats in the 2017 Assembly polls, was hoping to capitalise on the growing feud in the Congress and there was also a buzz that Sidhu would join the party. The Delhi party will need a serious narrative to woo the voters as the crisis in Congress seems to have sorted, for the time being. Following the Delhi model, the AAP recently announced free electricity to Punjab, if voted to power and waive off unpaid power bills at a time when the Amarinder government is facing criticism for mounting power tariffs.

Though it went to the polls without a CM face in 2017, the AAP has categorically said this time that it will have a leader from the Sikh community if it comes to power. In 2017, many felt the AAP was on the cusp of winning Punjab but it gradually lost steam. The party needs to balance its actions and words as well. However, post-2017, AAP has lost badly in by-polls. After a third consecutive victory in Delhi, a win in Punjab could propel Arvind Kejriwal into the national league of Opposition leaders ahead of the 2024 general elections.

Despite having Prime Minister Narendra Modi and master strategist Amit Shah, the BJP is in a tight spot in Punjab. In the last Assembly polls, the BJP had contested 23 seats in alliance with the SAD. With no prominent pan-state face and the total absence of a cadre base, the party is struggling to find candidates for the 117 Assembly seats. The saffron party is also facing farmers’ anger over the three contentious farm laws enacted by the BJP-led government at the Centre.

BJP plans to lap up disgruntled leaders from other parties, who are denied tickets. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, it had got 9 per cent votes in Punjab. In the past, the party had made a serious bid to reach out to SCs in the state. Union Minister Som Parkash and former Union minister Vijay Sampla are the party’s known SC leaders in Punjab.

To counter the anti-BJP campaign on farm issues, the saffron party is attacking Congress on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and highlighting Modi’s efforts on the Kartarpur corridor and the Centre’s big bang celebrations of the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak in 2019.