Chandigarh: The ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Punjab led by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann failed its “mid-term test” Tuesday, winning only three of the state’s 13 Lok Sabha seats. Its vote share fell to 26.02 percent from a whopping 42 percent in the assembly elections held in March 2022.
Sangrur, Hoshiarpur and Anandpur Sahib are the only seats won by AAP, an INDIA alliance partner, though it contested 22 seats across Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Assam. It was on Mann’s insistence that the AAP decided not to enter into an alliance with the Congress in Punjab even though the Congress high command was inclined to it.
Apart from Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, the Punjab sports minister who registered a resounding victory from Sangrur by a margin of 1.72 lakh votes, four other cabinet ministers fielded by AAP and three MLAs lost on their seats, the electorate clearly giving a thumbs down to Mann’s form of governance.
Mann who had campaigned extensively across the state for all candidates had claimed that his party will win all 13 seats in Punjab as part of ‘Mission 13-0’. The CM held 122 rallies across the state in the past 25 days. Party leader Raghav Chadha and Delhi CM and AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal too had campaigned in the state. Apart from the loss of face, the chief minister’s position as the leader of the party in Punjab stands dented.
“These elections are bound to push the AAP into a structural crisis in the state. They might be in power but they have lost their legitimacy,” Dr Jagrup Singh Sekhon, former professor of political science, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, told ThePrint. “The Aam Aadmi Party took the people of Punjab for granted imagining that they can repeat their performance of 2022. But they failed to deliver on the major concerns of the state like drugs, illegal mining law and order and corruption.”
Historian Paramjit Singh Judge said it was Mann’s ego that led to the party’s poor performance in the state. “Arrogance and good politics cannot go together. Had Mann agreed to a tie-up with the Congress, the results today would have been way different,” he said in a conversation with ThePrint.
Dr Rajkumar Chhabewal, who left the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha elections to join AAP, won from Hoshiarpur with a margin of over 44,000 votes, while the party’s chief spokesperson Malwinder Singh Kang won from Anandpur Sahib by over 10,000 votes.
Cabinet ministers Dr Balbir Singh lost from Patiala, Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal from Amritsar, Gurmeet Singh Khuddian from Bathinda, Laljit Singh Bhullar from Khadoor Sahib, while MLAs Jagdeep Singh Kaka Brar lost from Ferozepur, Ashok Parashar Pappi from Ludhiana and Amansher Sherry Kalsi lost Gurdaspur.
Defectors Sushil Kumar Rinku (who joined BJP from AAP) and Gurpreet Singh GP (who moved to AAP from Congress) lost their respective seats of Jalandhar and Fatehgarh Sahib. Mann’s friend and comedian-turned-politician Karamjit Anmol lost from Faridkot.
Punjab expert Col (Retd) J S Gill said CM Mann needs to understand that always playing to the gallery doesn’t translate into public satisfaction on ground. “The pulling down of opponents in public doesn’t pay off electorally when people want your vision for the future and matching performance on ground.”
“There are three types of politics — electoral, governance and legislative. You can’t use the same template for all three in your speeches. The CM has to be a wise person who takes every segment of the population along with his vision of Rangla Punjab because his opponents are also in his care as CM. He is not CM of AAP but Punjab,” Gill told ThePrint.
The only saving grace for Mann was that six of his party’s candidates came in second — in Amritsar, Bathinda, Faridkot, Fatehgarh Sahib, Ferozepur, Patiala — and four came in third, in Gurdaspur, Jalandhar, Khadoor Sahib and Ludhiana seats.
AAP’s loss in Congress’s gain
Congress got a major boost in Punjab, winning seven seats and increasing its vote share from almost 23 percent in the 2022 assembly elections to 26.30 percent, the highest for any party in the state this election.
The party’s top contenders stood the test of the elections. Former chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi won the Jalandhar seat by a margin of over 1.75 lakh votes, former deputy chief minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa won the Gurdaspur seat, wresting it from the BJP with a margin of over 83,000 votes. State Congress chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring won from Ludhiana, defeating Congress MP-turned-BJP candidate Ravneet Singh Bittu by a margin of almost 21,000 votes.
The Congress’s sitting MP from Amritsar Gurjeet Singh Aujla retained his seat, as did Fatehgarh Sahib sitting MP Amar Singh. Dr Dharamvir Gandhi defeated sitting MP and BJP candidate Preneet Kaur in Patiala while Sher Singh Ghubaya, a former Akali, won the Ferozepur seat. Ghubaya had lost to Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal in this seat in 2019.
The party was however not able to repeat its performance of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections when it had won eight seats and garnered 40.12 percent of the votes. It remained in the second position in four seats (Anandpur Sahib, Hoshiarpur, Khadoor Sahib, Sangrur) and third position in two seats (Bathinda and Faridkot).
BJP & SAD, better together?
The graph of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) went down further this election, with the party winning only one seat, Bathinda. Former Union minister and sitting MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal repeated her victory for the 4th time in a row on the seat, winning by a margin of almost 50,000 votes. She is the wife of SAD chief Sukhbir Badal and sister of senior Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the Akali Dal had won two seats and gathered 27.45 percent of the vote share. In the 2022 assembly elections, the party’s vote share had gone down to 18.38 percent. On Tuesday, the party managed to get only 13.42 percent of the votes, its lowest ever in several decades, pointing towards the continuing disenchantment of the rural Sikh peasantry with the panthic party.
The Akali Dal remained in the fourth position on most seats in Punjab.
Although the BJP did not win any seat in the state, its vote share increased to 18.56 percent from 9.63 percent in 2019 parliamentary elections and 6.6 percent in the 2022 assembly elections. At the current vote share, the BJP has more voters in Punjab than the SAD.
The combined vote share of the two parties is almost 33 percent. However the two parties decided to go solo after talks of reuniting failed.
Most of the BJP candidates’ poll campaigns were disrupted by protesting farmers who had decided not to allow BJP candidates to enter their villages in wake of the farmers’ agitation on the Shambhu border near Patiala.
The BJP lost the Gurdaspur seat won by actor-turned-politician Sunny Deol in 2019 to the Congress, and Hoshiarpur — won by bureaucrat-turned-politician Som Prakash in 2019, to AAP’s Raj Kumar Chabbewal.
The party was in second position in Gurdaspur, Jalandhar and Ludhiana, and in the third position in Amritsar, Anandpur Sahib, Fatehgarh Sahib, Ferozepur, Hoshiarpur and Patiala.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)