In the run-up to the Punjab Assembly by-elections 2024, political leaders seem to have sidestepped pro-people issues

Elections are usually a good opportunity for political leaders to make public statements and seek public feedback on their pro-people works and policies. But the scene in the Punjab Assembly by-elections 2024 eludes the expectation.

Along with other states in India, there are by-elections in four Assembly constituencies of Punjab for which voting is to be held on November 20, 2024. In the absence of any public-interest manifestos, political parties rely on the ‘candidate-winnability’ supporting political apostasy and dynastic politics. Most political leaders in the campaign are relying on defamatory garrulous speeches and irresponsible false claims. The trust deficit of the people in political parties and the confidence deficit in their leaders is so high that the oldest and traditionally strongest political party of the state, Shiromani Akali Dal, has preferred to not contest the elections.

A conglomeration of its disgruntled leaders, the Akali Dal Reform Movement, is also out of the election contest. The contest is triangular among the ruling party in the state- Aam Aadmi Party, the ruling party in the centre- Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian National Congress. In one constituency, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate is a cousin of the Akali Dal chief and has been a minister in the Akali and the Congress governments. He has apostatised three political tastes before joining the Bharatiya Janata Party, while the Aam Aadmi Party candidate left the Akali Dal shortly before the current by-elections.

The Congress party candidate is the wife of the Congress State party president and a 2024-elected Member of Parliament. In another constituency, the Aam Aadmi Party candidate is the son of a 2024-elected Member of Parliament from the same party; the MP had defected from the Congress just before the 2024 parliamentary elections to contest and win as an Aam Aadmi Party candidate, while the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate has defected Shrimoni Akali Dal; he has been a minister in the SAD government.

In the third constituency, the Congress party candidate is the wife of its party MP and a former Deputy Chief Minister. In contrast, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate is a former Akali MLA and the son of a Punjab Assembly speaker in the SAD government.   In the fourth constituency, the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate has been a former senior Vice –President of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee and a Congress MLA before deserting the Congress to join the Bharatiya Janata Party, while the Aam Aadmi Party candidate is said to be a favourite of an MP and a former minister, ignoring its former district chief who is contesting as a rebel.

The four vacancies arose because the MLAs in all four contested and won parliamentary elections held in June 2024. In three of the four, the contesting candidates are the immediate family members of the 2024-elected MPs. As the family members of the MPs, they are assumed to be the ‘winning’ candidates because their mentors have already proved it by winning the Assembly and then parliamentary elections sequentially.

The question arises whether the political parties do not have any other members from any other section of society who can be ‘winning’ candidates or if some leaders have turned electoral politics into a family monopoly aka ‘nepotism’, in which there is no room for other party workers, however sincere and hard-working they may be.

The current situation is so ridiculous that these leaders and the political parties criticize each other for dynastic politics, nepotism and party defection. Still, when the opportunity arises, they play the game and present their spouses, children and relatives as the only ‘winning’ candidates and strengthen political dynasticism justifying it in various ways.

Claiming himself the next Chief Minister of the state during his campaign for the BJP candidate, a Government of India Minister compared ‘the peasant leaders in protest’ with ‘Talibans’ and threatened action against them after the elections. Not only his threat is defamatory and against the spirit of a democracy, but also an unbecoming rambling coercing votes for the candidate of his party.

Addressing an election meeting in favour of an Aam Aadmi Party candidate, its supremo dubs the sitting Congress MP as "corrupt Randhawa" inviting defamatory threat from him. Further he charges him with ‘dynastic politics’ ignoring the similar practice by AAP in another constituency where he has campaigned for the candidate on the same day.

Thus the Punjab 2024 By-elections are riddled with defection, dynasticism, defamatory rhetoric, irresponsible rambling, bringing with it a sense of deterioration in democracy which both the people and political parties must address.   

(The writer is retired professor, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar; views are personal)