Punjab 2027: AAP under siege, Congress finds its Pilot

The crucial Assembly election barely five months from now will decide whether the jhaadu sweeps Punjab a second time or gets swept out of the state.

For chief minister Bhagwant Mann, virtually every road seems barricaded with barbed wire. Start with the sant-sipahi confrontation that no sitting Punjab chief minister has faced in living memory. On 15 June 2026, the Akal Takht declared Mann guru dokhi and Khalsa Panth virodhi (anti-Guru, anti-Panth) — over a video allegedly showing him sprinkling liquor on images of the Sikh Gurus and Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale — and directed the sangat to cut ties with him.

The Takht’s word still carries the force of scripture for lakhs of Punjabis. For a party that built its brand as a clean alternative to VIP culture and communal politics, being excommunicated by the highest temporal seat of the Sikhs struck at the heart of Mann’s legitimacy.

The AAP camp, meanwhile, is restless. Ministerial staff, computer teachers and an alphabet soup of employee unions have been on and off dharna for months over unhonoured pay promises. Farmer bodies under the Samyukt Kisan Morcha banner have twice gathered at the Chandigarh-Mohali border, reminding Mann that ‘sarkar badlo’ cuts both ways.

The political has also turned personal. A retired Punjab and Haryana High Court judge has accused the chief minister’s wife Gurpreet Kaur of taking a Rs 5-crore bribe to bury a rape case. The NHRC has sought action-taken reports, and the SAD has demanded a CBI probe into what it calls an institutionalised ‘loot model’ running out of the CMO.

Mann, for his part, embraced Gurpreet Singh Sekhon — prime accused in the 2016 Nabha jailbreak that sprang Khalistan Liberation Force chief Harminder Mintoo — into the AAP fold at a Zira rally, only a decade after Kejriwal called that very jailbreak proof of the “complete breakdown of law and order” in Punjab.

Two further episodes bear mentioning. A Sikh youth, Mohanjit Singh, waved a black flag at Mann’s convoy in Sangrur to protest the drug menace. He was allegedly given electric shocks and had his kakaars (the five articles that Sikhs wear at all times) desecrated in custody. The Akal Takht jathedar compared the state government to Zakariya Khan.

Days later, Gulzar Singh, a Dalit daily-wager from Sangrur, questioned finance minister Harpal Cheema about chitta (drugs) in his own village. Subsequently hounded by the local sarpanch and police to apologise publicly, Gulzar took poison. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes has since issued notices to Punjab’s top officials; Rahul Gandhi has called it nothing less than “crushing those who question”.

Layer onto this the perennial chargesheet — drugs, gangsterism, corruption, a chief minister widely seen (fairly or not) as answerable more to Kejriwal’s durbar in Delhi than to Chandigarh — and it is clear that AAP is fraying across too many battle lines. While its opponents are, for once, organising rather than merely complaining.

Sukhbir Badal is crisscrossing the state with ‘Punjab Bachao’ rallies focusing on drugs, healthcare, drinking water, roads, education. Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) has pitched jailed MP Amritpal Singh as its 2027 chief-ministerial face and is fielding candidates from families of Sikh ‘martyrs’. Their bet is that the drug issue and Amritpal as a ‘millenarian’ solution will help them reap rich political dividends.

Even the BJP, a bit player in rural Punjab, senses an opening in the very same drug and law-and-order narrative Mann once tried to own. The saffron party has started a 12-day anti-drug campaign and pitted its Rs 2,100 per month Haryana Lado Lakshmi Yojana against the AAP’s Rs 1,000 Mawan Dhiyan Satkar Yojana for Punjab’s women.

Against this backdrop, the Congress high command’s decision to remove Bhupesh Baghel as Punjab in-charge and hand the state to Sachin Pilot looks like a routine reshuffle. Read closely, it’s a course correction.

Baghel, former chief minister of Chhattisgarh, was appointed in February 2025 to try and unite the party’s Punjab unit, which was split at least three ways — Charanjit Channi and Sukhjinder Randhawa in one camp, Partap Bajwa’s LoP camp in another and PPCC president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring (backed by the district presidents he had appointed) in the third.

Instead of uniting them, Baghel became a faction unto himself, seen (fairly or not) as too close to Warring. Even Rahul Gandhi’s July reorganisation, which retained Warring but made Channi campaign-committee chief and Randhawa core-committee chief, did not bring peace to the party ranks.

Eighteen months on, the Punjab Congress was no closer to a single chain of command than the day Baghel arrived — a costly stagnation for a party that is seen as the AAP’s prime challenger.

Pilot’s appointment indicates that the Channi camp (comprising most senior Congress leaders) needed accommodating before Rahul Gandhi’s proposed statewide yatra (expected to open at the Golden Temple and cover all 117 constituencies).

Channi, Randhawa and Warring have all publicly welcomed Pilot’s appointment — a rare moment of unanimity for a triad that has agreed on virtually nothing since 2022. Whether Warring survives as PPCC chief is the question now being asked in Chandigarh’s corridors. There is talk the high command may summon him to Delhi for ‘another responsibility’ — Congress-speak for a graceful exit.

There is a lesson here. The Congress high command, whatever its faults, is at least willing to course-correct — listen, reshuffle, accommodate — where the BJP’s central leadership simply imposes. It is a democratic instinct the party can be proud of. It has also cost the Grand Old Party dearly — three to four crucial months of an election year were lost to infighting it could scarcely afford.

Pilot is, on paper, an ideal choice. He carries no baggage from Punjab’s factional wars, enjoys acceptability (by most accounts) across camps, and comes from Rajasthan, which geographically and temperamentally sits closer to Punjab than Chhattisgarh ever did. Pilot’s formal, deliberative and consultative style is a relief to Punjab leaders exhausted by Baghel’s abrasiveness.

Former bureaucrat and senior Punjab Congress leader Hardip Singh Kingra finds that the young and energetic Pilot “connects well with party rank and file”. His political creed, road-tested over a decade, is instructive. “There are many leaders and many views,” Pilot told Congress workers once, “but there are no factions”. He has already begun one-on-one consultations with state leaders ahead of Rahul’s visit, and colleagues say Pilot’s message to Punjab is much the same: every faction must become a stakeholder, and discipline is non-negotiable.

Baghel, Punjab hands say, never struck that balance. He arrived a first-time in-charge with a small team and never quite learned the state’s grammar. His disconnect and communication gap with senior leaders outside the Warring camp was attributed to cultural ignorance, temperamental shortcomings and the lack of a ground network.

Whether Pilot can accomplish in five months what Baghel could not in 18 will decide whether Congress emerges as a genuine challenger to AAP or remains trapped in a familiar cycle of self-sabotage. In politics, as in a multi-cornered election, the party that spends too long setting its own house in order often discovers that the voters have already moved on.

Harjeshwar Pal Singh teaches history in SGGS College, Chandigarh. More of his writing here