Punjab’s political crisis: Power games over public welfare

Over the last few years, political shifts under pressure or for profit, the practice of calling each other black instead of presenting themselves as clean, and the use of money, power, and state machinery to win elections, rather than introducing and implementing any systemic policy to address the state’s issues, have become rampant among political parties in Punjab. Election after election, populist promises have been made. Since Independence, the Congress and the SAD alternated in power until 2022, after which the AAP took control; meanwhile, the BJP remains impatient to take the reins of the state in the future.

The Congress and the SAD have long offered freebies, a practice to which the AAP has added, instead of creating meaningful employment and enacting a minimum wage law. The culture of freebies conflicts with the Punjabi ethos of ‘earn with both hands and share your earnings with others’, thereby diluting a positive cultural value of the state. The BJP-led central government proposes to industrialise agriculture in Punjab and disengage a large section of the 35-40% of the population dependent on it, without presenting a solid and reliable policy for alternative employment to absorb such a displaced population; yet it hopes to form a government in the state in 2027.

Instead of offering long-term structural solutions to unemployment, inequality, climate change, declining groundwater levels, compromised education and healthcare services, and other religio-cultural issues in the state, national and regional BJP leaders are offering the promise of a “double-engine Sarkar”, implying that people must elect the BJP in order to receive gains from the central pool. Furthermore, it has promised to enact an “anti-(religious) conversion law” if elected, although it recently triggered a storm in state politics by engineering large-scale political conversions, namely the defection not only of six Punjab Rajya Sabha MPs from the AAP, but also of several other prominent leaders from different political parties. It has also encouraged defections from the families of prominent leaders of rival parties.

The response from the AAP, and earlier from the Congress, both of which have suffered staggering blows from political conversions, or defections, has not been politically mature or meaningful for the state and its people. Instead of recognising its inadequate selection of candidates for the Rajya Sabha, the AAP chose to stage protests outside BJP offices, thereby handing the BJP a victim card.

It was, in fact, an act of ingratitude by the AAP high command towards the people of Punjab to nominate ‘political sophomores’ from other states to some of the most powerful positions in the state and the Rajya Sabha, overlooking many individuals of high calibre within Punjab itself. None of them has delivered in terms of formulating policy, generating resources, or creating a political discourse capable of addressing the state’s issues. Ironically, before defecting from the AAP to the BJP, Raghav Chadha, the AAP Rajya Sabha member, had condemned the BJP as “a party of goons” and “a washing machine” that cleanses the crimes of those it absorbs from other political parties. Such remarks by Raghav Chadha, alongside the BJP’s celebration of his defection, invite considerable interpretation. The seamy side of political conversion as quid pro quo is personified by the stormy ED raid on an AAP Rajya Sabha member before his defection, followed by silence after the conversion. These members justified their defections by citing “suffocation” within the parent party, yet failed to explain what they meant by suffocation, especially in the absence of any pro-people agenda proposed by them. It was not that they wished to implement pro-people policies but were prevented from doing so; Sandeep Pathak enjoyed significant political clout, while Raghav Chadha enjoyed immense comfort and power without holding any constitutional office in the state. They were nominated to the Rajya Sabha without notable hard work, but with the expectation that they would serve the people. Yet, for them, their own “suffocation” appeared more urgent than the suffocation of the people of Punjab under the burden of their politics.

At another level, central investigating agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate have been active in Punjab in attempts to uncover corruption in the state; yet the credibility of their purpose remains questionable until proven otherwise. Circumstantially, the raids are alleged to be politically motivated against the ruling party in the state in order to create a discourse of corruption. Raids without conclusive action, apart from traces of money, merely generate a political atmosphere in which the ruling party alone can be blamed. In such a political circus, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, the people of the state are in no way the beneficiaries.

Corruption in Punjab, as in other states of India, is incontrovertible. Therefore, the issue is not merely to uncover corruption, but to root it out. Eliminating corruption requires concrete policy and decisive action, both of which are unfortunately absent from the dominant political discourse in the state. Political discourse is often reduced to short-term populism focused on votes, where immediate electoral gains are prioritised over sustainable reforms. In continuation of the practice of “saying, saying, and only saying, but doing nothing”, a systemic breakdown persists, as state policies often exacerbate or reproduce the very same problems, while political actors continue accusing one another of corruption instead of presenting evidence of their own integrity.

With the state machinery functioning primarily to serve elite interests, the government increasingly fails to serve the general public. Finding the political class and the bureaucracy, by and large, corrupt, self-serving, and detached from public welfare, the masses survive on whatever is offered by political leaders during elections and by the state before and after elections in the form of freebies. This gradually erodes the dignity of the people, while the state suffers from a threefold poverty: poverty of resources, poverty of consciousness, and poverty of politics.

The writer is a retired Professor at Guru Nanak Dev University and a member of INTACH; Views presented are personal.