The New Gladiators

The electoral battle in Punjab has suddenly come alive with the Congress deciding to raise the stakes for the Badals. In an act of political confidence, the Congress leadership has asked its Punjab chief, Capt Amarinder Singh, to take on the incumbent Chief Minister, Parkash Singh Badal, in his home turf of Lambi. Nor will the Deputy Chief Minister and the Akali heir-apparent, Sukhbir Badal, be allowed to go un-roughed up; the Congress will pit its young gun, Ravneet Singh Bittu, in his lair, Jalalabad. With the former cricketer and popular television personality, Navjot Singh Sidhu, formerly joining it and becoming its candidate in Amritsar, the Congress has boldly positioned itself as the principal opposition to the Badals’ Akali Dal. The game has changed.

The name of the game so far was who — the AAP or the Congress —would be able to harness the anti-Badal ambience in the state. As the ruling party for a decade, the Akali Dal naturally suffers from the debilitating phenomenon called anti-incumbency mood. At one point, the AAP’s young and agitated cadres did threaten to run away with the anti-Badal ball but its leaders — both in Delhi and Punjab — became too greedy, too cocky, too fractious, and too ambitious; the promise of ‘new politics’ turned out, disappointingly, to be an unexciting replica of the old politics. The contrived ploy of Arvind Kejriwal-could-be-the-chief-minister revealed a bizarre disdain for the Punjab voter’s intelligence. The Congress, on its part, seemed preoccupied with its internal protocols and processes of command and control. The Akalis’ grand calculation was for a near-perfect division of the anti-Badal votes; they hoped to laugh their way to a marginal victory in a three-way contest.

Now, by frontally taking on the Badals, the Congress appears to have re-arranged the battlefield, though it remains to be seen if in the next three weeks the party can re-energise its cadres, regroup its district-level leaders, and re-invent a positive, forward-looking message. The party is not without its factional headaches and irritations, and various Congress leaders can still be relied upon to display their capacity for internal sabotage. All in all, Punjab is in for an exciting finish.