Punjab: Why lone Assembly bypoll has turned into high-stakes AAP-Oppn battle

A lone Assembly bypoll is seldom of great political import, especially when the ruling party enjoys a brute majority and its government is just midway through its term. The June 19 bypoll for Punjab’s Ludhiana West assembly seat, campaigning for which ended on Tuesday, however, has much riding on it not just for the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) but also for its rivals in the state.

The AAP, which has fielded its Rajya Sabha MP, Sanjeev Arora, from the seat, hopes that a victory in Ludhiana West will silence critics who have been predicting doom for the party since its February rout in Delhi. The Opposition, comprising the Congress party, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the BJP, on the other hand, have elevated the bypoll to a referendum against the ruling party.

Kejriwal calling the shots?

For the AAP, the odds have stacked up steeply since February. With the haunting shadow of the party’s Delhi rout still looming large, the AAP in Punjab has also been henpecked by the Opposition’s accusation of “surrendering the state government, resources and dignity to the coterie from Delhi”. A sizeable section of the AAP’s own flock in Punjab has been openly criticising chief minister Bhagwant Mann for functioning like a figurehead “remote-controlled” by party boss Arvind Kejriwal.

Also read | The Killing Call: BBC documentary unravels why Sidhu Moose Wala was killed

Having lost both his own seat and the party’s government in Delhi, Kejriwal had arrived in Punjab in early March, ostensibly for a 10-day vipassana retreat. Since then though, he has largely stayed put in the state and visited Delhi for only three public events. Video footage and images, including those officially released by the party and its Punjab government, have frequently shown Kejriwal “reviewing” state-run hospitals, schools, projects and other works.

Claims that the former Delhi CM and not Mann has been directing the Punjab bureaucracy for the past four months have become a regular affair as have reports of Kejriwal thrusting his aides from Delhi across various commissions and boards of Punjab.

“This bypoll for Ludhiana West has become more important than even a regular state assembly election,” Congress candidate Bharat Bhushan Ashu tells The Federal, adding that the bypoll result would “decide whether Punjab will be run by Punjabis or by Kejriwal and his gang from Delhi who see the state as an ATM to fund their political and personal ambitions”.

Kejriwal eyeing RS seat: Oppn

Ashu is an old Congress warhorse in Ludhiana West, having won the seat twice earlier – in 2012 and 2017 – before losing it by a narrow margin of just over 7500 votes to the AAP’s Gurpreet Gogi in 2022. The bypoll has been necessitated by Gogi’s untimely demise in January this year.

The AAP’s decision to announce Arora’s candidature for the bypoll had triggered its own political storm. An industrialist and real estate developer, Arora isn’t a ‘professional’ politician and had made his political debut as recently as in April 2022 when the AAP, having swept to power in Punjab earlier that year, nominated him to the Rajya Sabha. With nearly three years of his term in Rajya Sabha still remaining, few had expected him to risk entering the electoral arena in a bypoll and that too when the AAP and most of its top leadership had just suffered a humiliated electoral defeat in Delhi.

Arora’s nomination for the Ludhiana West bypoll immediately triggered rumours that if he wins the seat, his spot in the Rajya Sabha would be taken by Kejriwal. Congress’s Leader of Opposition in the Punjab Assembly Partap Singh Bajwa and his former party colleague and current Punjab BJP chief Sunil Jakhar still maintain that Arora was “told to contest the bypoll” so that Kejriwal’s return to public office could be “secured”.

“Even if Arora loses, the AAP will still make him resign from Rajya Sabha on grounds that he could not win a simple by-election... this is all a ploy to get Kejriwal in Parliament because that man, who refused to step down as Delhi CM even while he was in jail for months, cannot live without some position of power,” Bajwa told The Federal.

Fake propaganda: AAP

Arora, of course, rejects all such rumours as “fake propaganda” being spread by the AAP’s political rivals. “This by-election has proved that the Congress, Akali Dal and BJP only act as if they are fighting each other but in reality, they are hand in glove with each other. They want to defeat the AAP at any cost,” says Arora.

The AAP candidate says he is “confident of victory” and that the “people of Punjab and Ludhiana West, in particular, have seen the good work that has been done in Punjab’s interest, be it cracking down on the drug mafia or ending corruption, ever since the AAP came to power and they will vote once again for the AAP in the by-election.”

The Congress, Akali Dal and BJP claim the “exploitation of Punjab and its resources” is so apparent across the state that they “don’t even need to tell the people that this is happening”.

BJP slams Kejriwal, Mann

Ever since the AAP came to power in Punjab, all that Bhagwant Mann has done is to “surrender the state to his boss in Delhi”, alleges the BJP.

“Even before AAP lost power in Delhi, decisions that should have been taken by the Punjab chief minister for the people of Punjab were being taken by Kejriwal. Files were sent to him for approval, (bureaucratic) transfers and postings were made on instructions from him, Punjab was forced to sign an MoU with the previous AAP regime in Delhi which allowed AAP direct interference in Punjab’s affairs,” says Union minister Ravneet Bittu, who won the Ludhiana Lok Sabha seat on a Congress ticket in 2014 and 2019 before switching to the BJP in 2024 and losing the constituency to the Congress’s Amarinder Singh Raja Warring last year.

Also read | Who is Kamal Kaur? How her murder has sparked fear among Punjab's influencers

“After they lost Delhi, this has become more rampant. Kejriwal is only seen in Punjab now, he doesn’t go to Delhi. Nearly three dozen important appointments were made by the Punjab government last month in various commissions and boards but Bhagwant Mann couldn’t find people from Punjab for these posts; most of them were filled by outsiders on Kejriwal’s orders,” he added.

Interestingly, though while Bittu lost the 2024 Lok Sabha election to Raja Warring, he had secured a comfortable lead in the Ludhiana West assembly segment. This had given the BJP, reduced to just two seats in the Punjab Assembly in 2022 after the backlash it faced over the farmer agitation, some hope of wresting the seat in the bypoll. BJP insiders, however, concede that the party’s prospects in Ludhiana West do not look bright anymore.

BJP’s poll prospects grim

“Unlike in many seats across Punjab, the anger that is still there among farmers against the BJP is not a big factor in Ludhiana West because it is an urban, trade-driven constituency. In fact, the reason the Mann government went from supporting farmers to cracking down against them earlier this year was the Ludhiana bypoll because traders from Ludhiana had been bitterly complaining about the financial losses they had been facing for the last few years due to the blockades being done by agitating farmers. This is why even during the Lok Sabha polls, BJP did not fare poorly in Ludhiana and though we lost the seat, the Congress’s victory margin was just about 20,000 votes,” an office-bearer of the BJP’s Ludhiana unit told The Federal.

Claiming that the BJP was banking on its “good show in Ludhiana West and the political clout of Bittu” to help party candidate Jeevan Gupta win the bypoll”, the BJP office-bearer said, “things are no longer looking very positive and the fight is basically between Ashu and Arora”.

“Many of our central ministers, MPs and our chiefs ministers from Delhi and Haryana have come to campaign for our candidate but the campaign hasn’t taken off the way we had hoped it would... the AAP has managed to successfully hype the Bhakra Beas water sharing dispute between Punjab and BJP-ruled Haryana to damage the BJP in the bypoll,” he added. Last week, as Haryana chief minister Nayab Singh Saini arrived in the constituency to campaign for the BJP candidate, he was met with angry protesters chanting “pani chor wapas jao” (water thief go back).

Bipolar contest

Political commentators in the state too believe that the bypoll contest, which could have been a four-cornered fight with the AAP, Congress, BJP and Akali Dal each having sizeable pockets of influence in Ludhiana West, has largely turned into a bipolar one between the AAP and the Congress.

“It is a very tight contest for AAP, their candidate may have the government machinery and huge personal financial resources on his side but he is fighting a battle of perception. Even historically, Punjab always stood firm and tall against Delhi’s farmaans (diktats); this remains a deeply emotive issue in Punjab, whether you are in a rural area or an urban area and the ordinary Punjabi will never appreciate that the state government and chief minister are being remote-controlled by outsiders from Delhi,” says veteran journalist Kanwar Sandhu, himself a former AAP MLA who had a bitter parting with the party and has since quit politics.

Also read | Akal Takht head priest justifies murder of social media influencer Kanchan Kumari

Sandhu adds, “Despite being a high command-oriented party, the Congress always tried to show in Punjab that its government was fully autonomous; when that perception changed in 2022 because of the way Amarinder Singh was replaced with Charanjit Channi, the Congress faced its worst defeat. Now, the Congress and other Opposition parties have managed to a large extent to convince the people that under AAP, Punjab is being run by the Delhi coterie, though I must say the people would not have needed much convincing as the Mann government is visibly undermining its autonomy on a daily basis.”

A defeat for the AAP in Ludhiana West, Sandhu believes, could be “catastrophic” for the party even though the government is just halfway through its term. “After the Delhi defeat, if they lose this bypoll, it will demoralise the workers further and you may see more people from the party publicly criticising the interference of Kejriwal and other Delhi leaders; there could be major defections too even though the AAP has a huge majority and it will not be possible to dislodge the government. The biggest blow will be for Kejriwal himself if they lose,” says Sandhu.