Kejriwal pulls curtains on INDIA in Punjab, Chandigarh; says AAP will contest all 14 seats

Kejriwal made the announcement while addressing an event at Khanna in Punjab, where he inaugurated the Bhagwant Mann-led AAP government’s “Ghar Ghar (home-delivery) ration scheme” to provide wheat or flour at the doorstep of the beneficiaries.

“Two years ago, you gave us (AAP) a huge blessing of 92 seats out of 117 (in the Punjab Assembly polls). You created history,” Kejriwal said. “I have come to you with folded hands today to seek another blessing. In two months, there will be Lok Sabha elections. In these elections, there are 13 seats. There is another seat in Chandigarh. In the coming 10-15 days, AAP will announce its candidates. Now, I request you all to bless AAP the same way to win 14 seats.”

The seat-sharing troubles between the Congress and the AAP for the Punjab seats have been persistent, with senior leaders from both parties openly making statements against the tie-up. However, their coming together for the recent Chandigarh mayoral polls had signalled that the differences were being resolved.

On January 24, CM Mann had said the AAP would not ally with the Congress in Punjab. However, even after the CM’s announcement, the AAP’s general secretary (organisation) Sandeep Pathak had said the final call would be taken by the party leadership.

A few weeks earlier, Mann had sought to nuance his hardline position over the possibility of the AAP’s tie-up with the Congress, saying the INDIA bloc’s main aim was to defeat the BJP and “save the country”.

However, with Kejriwal’s announcement now, the INDIA alliance seems to have unravelled in Punjab.

The development is a major setback for the alliance which has already been reeling from the exit of the Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) in Bihar and is now staring at likely switch of the Jayant Chaudhary-led RLD to the NDA in Uttar Pradesh. It also comes amid reports that the estranged NDA allies BJP and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) have started talks to explore the possibility of restoration of their alliance.

Senior Punjab Congress leaders have opposed the party’s alliance with the AAP right from the beginning, alleging that the Mann government was “weaponising” the Vigilance Bureau to book their party leaders in corruption cases.

After the arrest of Congress MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira in January, Leader of the Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa charged that his arrest was an example of “vendetta politics”.

The Congress is the principal Opposition in Punjab. A senior state Congress functionary had told The Indian Express earlier that leaders across the party ranks, including former ministers, had been voicing their “issues” with a pre-poll partnership with the AAP.

On January 16, the two parties however announced an alliance for the January 30 Chandigarh mayoral elections, a move that was looked at as the INDIA bloc’s first electoral test before the Lok Sabha polls.

At the time, AAP MP Raghav Chadha hailed the alliance and said: “This will be an election where for the first time it will be INDIA vs BJP… After this election, the scorecard will be INDIA 1, BJP 0.” Senior Congress leader Pawan Kumar Bansal had also echoed similar views.

The mayoral polls had however descended into chaos with the AAP-Congress combine questioning the manner in which eight of its votes were declared invalid by the presiding officer, tipping the scales in favour of BJP candidate Manoj Sonkar who was declared the winner. The matter is now pending before the Supreme Court.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls in Punjab, the Congress had won eight seats as against the SAD’s two seats and the BJP’s two. The AAP had then won just one seat. The Chandigarh seat was won by the BJP’s Kirron Kher.