Punjab polls: Rahul recasts Congress battle around drugs, crime and Delhi control

Bourgeoning drug menace and “gangsterism” across Punjab took centre stage as Rahul Gandhi launched the Congress’s campaign for the state’s upcoming assembly polls from Sangrur on Wednesday (November 4).

In a no-holds barred attack, the Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of destroying Punjab’s farmers and the MSME industry, Union Home Minister Amit Shah for proliferation of drugs in the state and Bhagwant Mann of being a chief minister whose reins were jointly controlled by Shah and AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal from Delhi.

The choice of Sangrur

The political significance of the party’s decision to sound the poll bugle from Sangrur can’t be overstated. Sangrur is not just the home turf of Mann but also of AAP’s Punjab chief Aman Arora and state Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema. Situated in the heart of Punjab’s Malwa region that contributes 69 seats to the state’s 117-member assembly, of which the AAP had bagged 66 when it romped to power in 2022 with an unprecedented tally of 92 MLAs, the district also serves as a barometer of the state’s political mood.

Also read: Punjab anti-drug activist Parvinder Singh shot dead in Mansa

More recently, it was from Sangrur that the Congress mounted its most aggressive broadside at the ruling AAP on the issue of drugs when a Dalit man from the district’s Toor Banjara village publicly confronted Cheema on the rampant availability of drugs in the area and expressed helplessness and anger at his son’s drug addiction. Days later, the man, Gulzar Singh, died by suicide after leaving a video message saying he was being driven to take the extreme step due to the harassment he faced ever since he took on the state’s finance minister, who represents Sangrur’s Dirba assembly seat.

The Congress had latched on to the row, with Rahul personally reaching out to Gulzar Singh’s family and slamming both the AAP and the BJP for their failure to curb proliferation of drugs in the border state.

By now choosing Sangrur as the venue for the Congress’s Insaaf Rally and making it clear that drug abuse and the wider law-and-order mess in the state would be the party’s principal poll pivot, Rahul has sought to define the contours of his party’s poll campaign while simultaneously painting Modi, Shah and Mann—the mascots of power at the Centre and in Punjab—as the villains Punjab should be wary of.

Rahul’s overcomes a shortcoming

That Rahul did not digress from Punjab-centric problems to his otherwise relentless campaign against vote chori, the SIR and the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar as Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) also gave a rare glimpse of his willingness to distinguish between issues of greater relevance in a state election than those on which he is mounting a determined campaign nationally. The inability to do so in the past has often been a shortcoming in Rahul’s campaigning style.

Also read: Amit Shah asks Punjab CM to hand over drug-related death cases to CBI, targets AAP

This is not to say that the Lok Sabha LoP completely abandoned his pet peeves to go hyperlocal. There were the predictable references to Modi’s alleged crony capitalism, jibes at Shah’s incompetence on maintaining law and order, and scorching jibes over the centralization of power. These, however, were tied well into the matrix of Punjab’s grievances.

Mann, for instance, came in for a stinging, and somewhat personal, attack. Asserting that “if you want to fight drugs in Punjab, you can’t be consuming alcohol every evening”, Rahul minced no words about the Punjab chief minister’s penchant for the amber stuff. Recalling the time when Mann was a Lok Sabha MP, Rahul said, “He used to sit with us and tell us jokes in Parliament… at 11 am, you could smell alcohol on his breath.”

Perhaps aware that fondness for alcohol may not be unique to the Punjab chief minister and could just as well be weaponised against some of his Punjab Congress colleagues who may enjoy a tipple privately, Rahul adroitly qualified his comment. “Alcohol can be his personal choice and I have no problem with that,” Rahul said, before placing his attack in context by stating that the addiction doesn’t behove someone espousing to eradicate Punjab’s drug menace.

Punjab vs Delhi

Rahul also accused Mann of ceding a proud state’s levers of power to “those sitting in Delhi”. “If Congress comes to power, Punjab will be run from Punjab, not from Delhi; our CM in Punjab will run Punjab, not the home minister of the country or a former CM of Delhi,” Rahul said.

Also read: Punjab elections 2027: AAP announces first list of 40 candidates, fields Mann from Dhuri

To anyone familiar with Punjab’s history, the political weight behind this jab would be evident. The Congress is no stranger to the electoral price the state extracts from those who seek to control Punjab from Delhi; it has had a chequered past of attempting to do so and, without exception, failed each time. The most recent reminder of this pattern had jolted the Congress five years ago when the party high command, particularly Rahul, tacitly endorsed Navjot Singh Sidhu’s shenanigans against then chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh and then foisted Charanjit Singh Channi as the state’s first Dalit Sikh CM only to be decimated in the 2022 assembly polls.

Whether Rahul’s repeated refrain at the Insaaf Rally about a Punjab governed from Punjab and not Delhi was a quiet confession of his past mistake or an assurance of not repeating the same if the Congress is voted to power in next year’s polls may not be prudent to predict. What can, however, be said safely is that Rahul’s assertion about Mann’s reins—a euphemism for Punjab’s seat of power—being “half with Amit Shah and the other half with Arvind Kejriwal” will find breathless repetition in the Congress’s Punjab campaign.

Likewise, with both Rahul and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge repeatedly alleging at the rally that drugs in Punjab were “coming from Adani’s Mundra Port”, the Congress has sought to link Modi, Shah and their BJP-led government at the Centre with what Rahul called, “Punjab’s biggest threat”.

Law and order

If Rahul identified drugs as the state’s biggest threat, a close second in his estimation, perhaps, was Punjab’s deteriorating law-and-order situation; something he spoke of at length.

Recalling the daylight assassination of singer and Congress member Sidhu Moosewala within days of the Punjab government’s decision to downgrade his security detail, Rahul said, “What happened to Sidhu Moosewala has now become a normal everyday crime in Punjab.” He then cleverly lassoed Shah in with a barely veiled reference to how gangster Lawrence Bishnoi continues to operate his syndicate despite being lodged in Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati Jail.

Also read: SIR issue: Shah dares Rahul for debate, says govt ready to convene special session of Parliament

“Amit Shah talks of law and order, pura desh jaanta hai Amit Shah ne toh jail mei apne gangster pale hue hain (the whole country knows that Amit Shah is nurturing his gangsters in jail) … He should not talk of law and order, and if he wants to, then he should talk about Manipur. The PM can’t visit Manipur because of law and order,” Rahul said.

A glaring omission

From Sangrur, Rahul has set the template of the Congress’s broadside at the AAP and the BJP for the impending polls. What remains to be seen, however, is how effectively the Congress’s deeply divided Punjab leadership is able to build on the campaign as elections draw closer.

Unlike in the past, Rahul made no mention of a united fight by his party’s many factional leaders—a glaring omission considering that the party had, for the past three months, made a recurring public spectacle of its deep divisions. The chinks were visible at the rally, too, when the loudest cheers came not for the newly appointed state Congress chief Pargat Singh, his predecessor Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, state in-charge Sachin Pilot or any other leader, including Kharge, Rahul named in his speech, but for Channi, who has been trying desperately to be projected as the party’s CM face.