Mission Punjab 2027: AAP under pressure, Congress adrift; can BJP spring a Bengal-style surprise?

Can BJP spring a Bengal-style surprise in Punjab?

NEW DELHI: Mission 2027 in Punjab would mean different things to different stakeholders. For the ruling AAP, it is a do-or-die battle to retain the only state it governs. For the Congress, it is a fight to reclaim the political ground it lost in 2022. For the Shiromani Akali Dal, it is perhaps a fight for survival. And, finally, for the BJP, it is an attempt to add a new state to its kitty — an art it has almost perfected post-2014.Punjab is among the seven states where assembly polls are due in 2027, the other six are Goa, Gujarat, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Punjab remains a unique electoral challenge because it is the only state where the BJP has never been in power on its own.So, can the battle-ready and battle-hardened BJP spring a surprise in Punjab, like it did in West Bengal in 2026 or in Odisha in 2024? Well, this is what makes the 2027 assembly elections in Punjab such an interesting political battle.

AAP’s civic poll boost and Mann’s 2027 pitch

While the BJP has made an aggressive start to its campaign, the ruling AAP remains confident, helped by its strong performance in the recently-concluded civic polls.The AAP won 958 of the total 1,977 wards in the civic polls and was way ahead of all its rivals. The Congress, with 397 wards, was a distant second, followed by the Shiromani Akali Dal with 192 wards and the BJP with 172 wards.

AAP swept Punjab civic polls with 958 wards; Congress trailed at 397, followed by SAD at 192 and BJP at 172.

Chief minister Bhagwant Mann wasted no time in claiming that the scale of this victory reflected broad public satisfaction with his government’s welfare-oriented and development-focused policies.

However, rivals alleged that the AAP government heavily misused official machinery to swing the results.Mann has also played a major welfare card to woo women of the state, who have played a decisive role in several elections across states. Starting July 1, eligible women in Punjab will receive direct financial assistance in their bank accounts — Rs 1,000 per month for women from general categories and Rs 1,500 per month for women from Scheduled Caste categories.

The government has earmarked Rs 9,300 crore for the scheme.

Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann confident of AAP's win

Sacrilege video row: A sensitive test for Mann

But before his doles turn into votes for AAP, Mann has to pass a sensitive test - a row over a sacrilege video involving him that has now turned into a full blown political controversy.The video, which purportedly shows a man resembling Mann involved in an objectionable act near the photographs of Sikh Gurus, has triggered a religious and political storm in the state.

The Akal Takht, the supreme temporal seat of Sikhs, took a serious view of it and issued an edict against Mann on June 15. The Akal Takht declared Mann 'Guru Dokhi' (anti-Guru) and 'Khalsa Panth Virodhi' (anti-Khalsa panth) after the chief minister was accused of lying about the purported objectionable video that hurt Sikh sentiments.Opposition parties have sharpened their attack on Mann, but the chief minister has rejected the allegations saying the video was a politically motivated “deepfake” generated using artificial intelligence to defame him.

He said political opponents are unable to challenge him politically, so they are trying to defame him on religious grounds.

AAP’s internal churn and the Raghav Chadha factor

And while Mann battles this controversy, the road ahead for the ruling AAP in Punjab remains riddled with challenges. The state has already seen the beginning of a churn ahead of next year’s vote. In a significant political realignment in April this year, seven Rajya Sabha AAP members left the party to join the BJP.Ironically, this coup was led by Raghav Chadha, who was once one of Kejriwal’s most trusted lieutenants and, more importantly, one of the main architects of AAP’s sweeping win in Punjab in 2022. The group of seven also included Sandeep Pathak, who, for the last 10 years, was a core strategist for AAP and was also the party’s co-incharge for Punjab from 2022.

What AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal said after big win in Punjab civic polls

The high-profile mass defection surprised AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal and forced him to return to the drawing board to redraw his 2027 plans.Meanwhile Mann played down the rebellion by labelling defectors as “leaders without popular base”, but at the same time he quickly went for a trust vote to secure his government and ensure that the AAP MLAs stayed with the party.While AAP may have managed to keep its MLAs intact for now, the party’s struggles are far from over. The MPs who quit the party levelled serious allegations. Harbhajan Singh accused AAP of selling Rajya Sabha seats.

Some of its state leaders are now under the scanner of investigative agencies. Punjab industries minister and AAP leader Sanjeev Arora was arrested last month in connection with an alleged Rs 100-crore money-laundering and fake GST transactions case.

Raghav Chadha joined BJP after being removed as Rajya Sabha deputy leader

The AAP would be wary of these moves, especially after the party’s Delhi experience where most of its top leaders, including Kejriwal, had to face investigative agencies in the run-up to elections.

Whether or not this mass defection has weakened AAP only time will tell, but one thing it has done for sure — provided a glimpse of the BJP’s plans for Mission 2027 in Punjab.

Punjab: The next big frontier for the BJP

The BJP is treating Punjab as its next big frontier, hoping to replicate the historic scripts it wrote in Odisha in 2024 and West Bengal in 2026 - when it dethroned long-standing governments in the two states.The saffron party has already given a strong, aggressive push to its campaign in Punjab and has declared that the countdown for the Bhagwant Singh Mann government’s exit has started..BJP president Nitin Nabin, who recently concluded a three-day trip to the poll-bound state, cited the party’s victory in West Bengal to urge party workers to dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to setting up a "double engine" government. Nabin also announced that the BJP is preparing to contest all 117 assembly seats on its own in the next year’s assembly elections - making its intentions clear.

Punjab: The next big frontier for the BJP

For a very long time, the BJP in Punjab was happy playing second fiddle to its former ally — the Shiromani Akali Dal.

Every time the SAD did well, the BJP gained. But once their alliance collapsed in September 2020 over the now-repealed farm laws, the BJP signalled its resolve to become the main player in the state.In 2022, the BJP contested the assembly elections alone and opened its gates for disgruntled Congress leaders, who were then caught in the power tussle between Captain Amarinder Singh and Navjot Singh Sidhu. Several top Congress leaders, including former chief minister Amarinder Singh and former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Kumar Jakhar, eventually joined the BJP.While the BJP could win only two seats in 2022, its solo contest then set the stage for the party’s future plans in the state.

Kewal Singh Dhillon, the first Jat Sikh face to head the BJP in Punjab, has a challenge at hand. He is confident of the BJP forming its government in 2027. His appointment triggered a mini-storm in the BJP with Captain Amarinder Singh expressing concern amid reports that he was unhappy. But that seems to be settled for now, at least on the face of it.

SAD’s survival battle

For the Shiromani Akali Dal, the journey since its September 2020 split with the BJP over the now-repealed farm laws has been downhill.For over two decades, the SAD-BJP alliance successfully combined rural Sikh votes with urban Hindu votes. Together, the two parties won elections in 1997, 2007 and 2012. But stripped of that alignment, the SAD is now fighting a battle to remain relevant.

Bhagwant Mann on Punjab 2027

The 2022 assembly elections saw the party hit a historic low, with most of its top leaders losing the electoral contest.

The party that once ruled Punjab with the BJP was reduced to three seats with a vote share of 18.38%. In 2017, the SAD had won 15 seats despite a vote share of around 25% — which perhaps was the beginning of its decline.For a party that has ruled Punjab for decades, this electoral decline raises questions about its future. The party put up a disappointing show in the civic body polls, winning just 192 wards. However, with 51 independent councillors joining the party, its final strength went up to 243.The ongoing sacrilege video row gives the SAD an issue to reclaim some political space, especially among voters who see religious dignity as central to Punjab’s politics. But whether the party can convert that into a larger revival is another question.

Congress vacuum: Main opposition without momentum

Meanwhile, the Congress, which remains the main opposition party in Punjab, has shown little urgency to rebuild itself after the 2022 rout. The grand old party was reduced to 18 seats in 2022 from 77 in 2017, but has spent much of the last four years battling internal drift and leadership confusion.Its leaders are still caught in a game of one-upmanship to fill the leadership vacuum left by Captain Amarinder Singh’s exit. Amarinder was the undisputed leader of the Punjab Congress till the high command removed him ahead of the 2022 assembly elections.

Charanjit Singh Channi, who gained in the fight between Amarinder Singh and Navjot Singh Sidhu in the run-up to 2022 and led the party as chief minister, has been largely out of action since the party’s humiliating defeat five years ago.

In fact, Channi himself lost both the seats he had then contested.The Congress high command has, as it often does, avoided taking a clear decision on state leadership for a very long time. It was only last Sunday that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi met five senior Punjab leaders and asked them to fight the upcoming assembly elections collectively, asserting that the party has a "very good chance" in the state. The party named Ajay Maken, Meenakshi Natarajan and Bhajan Lal Jatav as AICC observers to assess and submit a report on the current political scenario in the state.So, while the AAP and even the BJP are aggressively preparing for the elections next year, Congress leaders in the state are keeping their fingers crossed on who gets to lead the party. And that perhaps remains the party’s biggest problem as it gears up for the 2027 challenge.If the Congress plan was to wait silently and gain from anti-incumbency against AAP, the party may perhaps get its calculations wrong once again as the BJP has now actively entered the Punjab fray and will go all out to present itself as a more credible option.

Can BJP spring a surprise in Punjab?

Both the Congress and the AAP should not underestimate the BJP’s potential to spring a surprise. The saffron party has already done that in some states.In Odisha, the BJP had just six seats in 2009 with a vote share of 15%. In 2014, it went up to 10 and five years later, in 2019, it reached 23. However, between 2014 and 2019, the party’s vote share increased significantly by over 15 percentage points. With that base, in 2024, the BJP jumped to 78 seats in the assembly and dethroned Naveen Patnaik’s BJD.

The Congress, which was the main opposition party till 2014, was relegated to third place by 2019.

Now, let’s analyse West Bengal.The BJP could not win a single seat in the West Bengal assembly in 2011 and won only three in 2016. But in 2021, the BJP displaced both the Left and the Congress to win 77 seats with a vote share of nearly 38%. And five years later, it scripted history by displacing Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and storming to power with over 200 seats.

The BJP, with the kind of resources it has at its disposal at present and the amount of power it wields, has the potential to spring a surprise in Punjab. True, the party has never managed to get double-digit vote share in the state on its own and its best performance till now has only been 19 seats, which it won in 2007. But we have seen the BJP make huge electoral gains from similar situations in other states.

Why Punjab may still be difficult for BJP

Punjab, however, may not be easy for the BJP. The party still has to overcome the legacy of the farm laws, its image as an urban party, the trust deficit in rural Punjab and the challenge of stitching together a social coalition that can compete with AAP’s welfare base, Congress’s traditional vote bank and SAD’s residual rural Sikh support.

It will be interesting to see if the BJP uses its position of dominance and considers reviving its alliance with the SAD to launch the final assault in the state.Whether or not the BJP manages to trump AAP next year, we will have to wait and see. But perhaps, one thing can be said with a certain amount of certainty: if the Congress does not get its act together in the state, it risks being pushed to the fringes of Punjab politics by the BJP.