Punjab elects AAP, thanks to Kisan Andolan and depoliticisation of politics

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," Yeats could have said this about Punjab's politics. As the fulcrums of power, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the Congress, both more than century-old parties, fell by the wayside, the country actually wants to understand - what did the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) do to score such a landslide win?

Well, it was there, and that was all it had to do.

The rest of the work was done by its competitors, who were not found wanting in working hard and wholeheartedly for their own defeat and for the AAP's victory that left the SAD and the Congress decimated to an extent where an eventual two-party system in the country could mean the BJP versus the AAP.

For the entire duration of the Kisan Andolan that had kept politics paralysed for more than a year in Punjab, politicians did the bidding of farm union leaders, afraid that any decision by them to jump headlong into the electoral arena would squeeze the traditional parties out.

And then, Modi's capitulation on the farm bills was followed by a complete mess from the farm union leaders. Within days, the massive gains of the Andolan were frittered away, its leaders’ unity fell victim to their egos and hardcore stances, and soon, any remnants of the Andolan adamant on fighting elections were pushed to the margins.

But the Andolan had stoked massive anger as well as consciousness about politics. Punjab was asking tough questions of politicians. From the random heckler at a street-corner election meeting to a farm economist raising complex questions in simple language, Punjab was in search of an alternative with a vengeance.

It wanted change. Punjabis translated it as badlaav. And no one who looked and acted the same as they did for decades, could be that change.

Also Read: What turned fortunes for the AAP in Punjab?

Between the Congress government, first led by Amarinder Singh and later, for a little over 100 days, by Charanjit Singh Channi, and the principal Opposition party the SAD, led by Badal father and son duo, they had earned enough public opprobrium over the years as being the same side of the same coin but never felt the need to address the issue.

Amidst all this, Arvind Kejriwal and his Sancho Panza Bhagwant Singh Mann emerged as the biggest beneficiaries of a wave of anger consuming the people. While the rest of India saw the robust year-long Andolan merely as a resistance movement against three farm laws, in Punjab it had played out as a rejection of the way politics had been done by traditional parties for decades.

Both the Congress and the Akali Dal were seen as parties that thrived in their close connections with big business. Nearly all major business sectors, including real estate, liquor, sugar, sand, transport, cable, education and health, came to be suffixed with a word from the Queen's language that even the most illiterate of the Punjabis could understand and pronounce perfectly to the satisfaction of Professor Henry Higgins - 'mafia'. And politicians of one hue or the other were part of all these businesses.

The AAP was successful in spinning it into a people versus mafia narrative.

The SAD had borne the brunt of people's anger on the issue of sacrilege of holy Sikh scriptures in 2017, but neither the Badals nor the beneficiary of that anger, the Congress, could address the highly surcharged issue in the last five years.

In the past few years, a number of issues emerged in Punjab that found resonance with the Sikh community. In fact, the agitational phase of politics in Punjab saw both the Left liberal stream and the Sikh radical stream working together as well as clashing with each other. At times, the debate got very robust too though much of the national media either skipped it or simply did not pay attention.

Kejriwal's AAP had suffered in 2017 because he was doing the tango with some questionable radical Sikh elements. This time, he took a leaf from the BJP's playbook and directly appealed to the hardcore BJP voter as well as the middle class urban and rural Hindu population, talking of national security, carrying out tiranga yatras and peace marches in Punjab.

And he was promising the Delhi model of governance - to the utter exclusion of any politics. Free units of power, hard cash to women, sundry stuff to different demographics, plus the promise that you will not have to pay bribes at government offices. As posters of Kejriwal's guarantees, shorn of politics and easily quantifiable, splashed the countryside in Punjab, it also set a grammar of politics for others.

Only the ownership of the Sikh/peasantry constituency could have been claimed by the SAD, but it decided not to do politics on its traditional turf of federalism, Centre-Punjab relations or the larger questions of peasantry. The Congress, too, followed suit.

No more was there any talk about any conflict with the Centre. No questions were raised about why the Centre was denuding the states of powers through instruments like the National Investigation Agency or Dam Safety Act or sundry other laws or how Punjab is a major stakeholder in South Asia peace or conflict and must be consulted when it comes to Indo-Pak ties. Neither party wanted to indulge in serious talk about land reforms in Punjab, a hot-button issue that could have galvanised the entire Dalit spectrum, largely landless, because parties are led by land-owning honchos whose politics is often defined by the interests of upper caste peasantry or middle-, upper-class business sections.

Instead, the Akalis and the Congress decided to match free units of electricity, threw in collateral-free student loans and health insurance covers and claimed as their USP their intent to implement what they were promising. This was exactly the turf that Kejriwal could claim ownership of. "We have done it in Delhi. We will do it here," he told Punjabis.

Also Read: 'Oh guru!' Sidhu's semantics cost Congress its pride in Punjab

The intra-Congress power theatre played out to its utter disadvantage as Navjot Singh Sidhu proved he could keep the audience glued to the edge of their seats with his latest one-liners but never recognised that subtle difference between the show world and hard politics.

When the anti-farm bills agitation stoked the latent hatred of politicians, mainstream parties of all hues, except the BJP, rushed to climb on to the farmers' bandwagon, but by then, they had been seen as poseurs. What India has heard repeatedly in its political journey as Mera Neta Chor Hai translated in Punjab as both the Akalis and the Congress being one and the same thing.

The fact that a raid on miracle CM Charanjit Singh Channi's kin, howsoever politically-motivated, yielded Rs 10 crore of hard cash, hardly helped cement the first Dalit chief minister's probity credentials, particularly when Kejriwal had made imaandari a buzzword in his narrative.

For years, the Akali Dal kept alive the issue of federalism and Punjab's legacy wishlist of control over river waters and Punjabi-speaking areas and the Congress would work hard to keep up, often proving that it was one up on the Akali Dal in guarding the state's interests. The 2022 election was unique: It was depoliticised to the core and both the Congress and the SAD will live to regret it.

Meanwhile, the key issues that Punjab faces continue to stare it in the face. Peasantry continues to be in a crisis, unemployment remains rampant, law and order remain an issue, the state of Dalit and landless labourer remains pitiable, and an ecological crisis is threatening civilisational decimation.

Better governance promised by the AAP could possibly provide some relief in the education and health sectors but how will the AAP live up to its promise of punishing those who looted Punjab for decades when many of its MLAs have actually come from the same traditional parties, including the richest one. If even during a highly charged political campaign, not one contestant makes a single reference to the issue of electoral bonds, then you can safely assume that the politics will revolve merely around Kejriwal's guarantees.

The Kejriwal model of governance will have no element of Punjabiyat, a concept outside the remit of this piece, but his model for Punjab seems to be cast in the Modi mould: Link party and government, ensure service delivery to citizens, keep the free power unit supply line running, ensure teachers are in schools and do not let go of the narrative of nationalism.

Let me quote from Arvind Kejriwal's speech immediately after the election results: "Nothing was done earlier. We have wasted 75 years. Let us start building now. Bharat Mata Ki Jai, Vande Matram!"

It could as well have been Narendra Modi's first speech in 2014.

Has Punjab elected a BJP-Lite government? Only time will tell, or the next wave of agitational politics. Even after such a stupendous victory for the AAP, Punjab is rife with the signs.

(SP Singh is a Chandigarh-based senior journalist who has covered Punjab politics for more than two decades.)

Check out latest DH videos on Assembly elections 2022 here