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On February 20, the 21 million voters of Punjab will have to choose carefully. The question before them is: who should lead them out of this dangerous quagmire? For the first time, they have a smorgasbord of parties and contestants to select from. In the past two decades, they have given decisive mandates to one or the other party to rule the state’s 117-seat-strong legislative assembly. But this time around, even political pundits are puzzled. Pramod Kumar, development economist and political analyst, says, “It’s actually 117 mini-elections, with each constituency an election by itself. No party seems to have any well-defined programme or distinct ideology, except freebies. They may sound different, but they don’t look different. For the first time in 50 years, I find it difficult to sense which way a Punjab election is headed.”
Punjab was a bipolar contest between the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Shi romani Akali Dal (SAD), partnered by the Bharatiya Janata Party, till the Aam Aadmi party entered the fray in 2017. The three-cornered contest that year saw the Congress led by Captain Amarinder Singh, the titular maharaja of Patiala, win with an impressive majority of 77 seats. Five years later, the Congress is badly divided and struggling to put up a good fight. After a bitter and messy dethronement just five months before he could finish his term, a humiliated Amarinder formed his own party, the Punjab Lok Congress (PLC), and entered into an alliance with his lifelong adversary, the BJP, to contest this election. The Congress pulled off a mini-coup when it nominated Charanjit Singh Channi as the state’s first Dalit chief minister—Punjab has India’s largest Dalit population ratio, with this caste grouping accounting for a third of the vote across religions. But the party still faces dissidence from the sulking cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu, who had dumped the BJP to join the Congress, and just nine months earlier emerged as its president.
If all this isn’t confusing enough, the SAD, led by Sukhbir Singh Badal, broke away from its traditional alliance with the BJP in September 2020 in the wake of the now-repealed central farm laws. To compensate for the loss of pooled votes from that side, and simultaneously try and dent Channi’s Dalit support, it has tied up with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Promising change, the AAP has nominated as its chief ministerial candidate the two-term Lok Sabha
