Dubbed variously as arrogant, inaccessible and arbitrary, many a time by his own partymen, Capt Amarinder can take heart from the fact that he has increased the Congress’s vote share in the state by over 4 per cent, most of it in the countryside which has traditionally embraced the Akalis.The former soldier may not have been good at mingling with the hoi polloi but he succeeded in winning the admiration of many a farmer in the Malwa belt when he legislated the state out of the contentious inter-state river waters accord that necessitated the building of the Satluj Yamuna Link (SYL) canal. Bhola Singh of Jangirana village in Bathinda, and an Akali turned Congressman, put it aptly when he remarked: “Amarinder did in a day what the Akalis and others couldn’t achieve in over a decade of militancy.”Amarinder’s focus on the Akali citadel of Malwa—he made his son Raninder the campaign in charge of Bathinda district—paid off. In the cotton belt, which saw a bumper BT crop, it was a vote for Amarinder, not the individual candidate.One of the few CMs to stand up to the Centre—he was threatened with marching orders for abrogating the waters accord and pulled up for visiting Dubai without permission—the maharaja also played by his own rules when it came to forging ties with Pakistan Punjab. “Let’s pull down the border, I want to have my breakfast at Patiala and dinner at Lahore,” he had thundered at a CII meet in Chandigarh even as his counterpart Pervaiz Elahi turned a deep red. But Dr Ashutosh Kumar, head of the Political Science Department at Panjab University, says this dalliance with religion may have finally worked against Amarinder, especially in the urban belt which had so far stood by the Congress. From starting a bus to Nankana Sahib to celebrating every panthic occasion, Amarinder easily outshone the Akalis.
