Harish Khare

Punjab has opted for change, stability and coherence. The Badals’ Akali Dal stands comprehensively rejected; Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party has been spurned, and Capt Amarinder Singh’s Congress has been voted in with a decisive majority.

The change was inevitable; the Akalis had been asking to be kicked out. Top leaders’ individual wins apart, the vote is a massive rebuff to the Akali leadership’s cocky assertion of having written the blue book of ‘managing’ elections, as also a definite snub to all the deras and babas whose last-minute intervention was sought to override public disenchantment with the ruling party.

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A subtext to the vote is easily discernible: humongous dislike, bordering on near-hatred of the Badal family members and their arrogant commissars, known as halqa in-charges, who became synonymous with arrogance and corruption and represented an organised subversion of the conventional governing arrangements. Punjab could not possibly bear the burden of the Badals’ misrule for another five years.

Many citizens had prayed that AAP would be the party to deliver Punjab from the Badals. Its appeal was anchored in its promise of subversion of the status quo. AAP did produce a subaltern alliance of the extreme left and the extreme right, and that, in the end, proved to be its undoing. The voters were not sure of AAP’s ability to first create anarchy and then carve a working order out of the chaos. Punjab had lost its taste for anarchy once for all after the ‘militancy’ was defanged.

It is a vote for stability and purposeful governance. The faction-ridden Congress has too many prima donnas; but the old Congress culture should not be allowed to hobble Amarinder Singh, whom the party was rather reluctant to name as its chief-ministerial face. Admittedly, Amarinder Singh is a tired and aged man, but he should feel doubly invigorated by the very idea of showcasing Punjab as a model Congress state. It would be counterproductive for the new government to get lured by vendetta and vengeance; the voters did not approve of AAP leaders’ threat to send everyone to jail. Too much preoccupation with corruption produces neither sound administration nor jobs. The 2017 mandate clearly enjoins the Congress to give Punjab a firm and fair government.