Charges of being yet another dynastic outfit are already doing the rounds. Its candidate list, featuring relatives of former militants and reformed gangsters, enhances its street cred while leaving drawing rooms cold. Urban Punjab and the state’s Hindu and Dalit voters remain, for now, entirely unmoved. Can a movement built on absence and grievance mature into a party capable of governing?
For all its scars — the beadabi blot, the drug charges, the steady desertion of taksali leaders to Waris Punjab De and AAP — SAD remains Punjab’s only Panthic outfit with actual experience of running the state. Its century-old organisation, Sukhbir Badal’s combative leadership and deep roots in rural Malwa give it a grounding that newbies lack. Recent by-poll and local election results suggest a slow, grinding recovery though, rather than a resurrection.
Sensing the threat to its traditional Panthic votebank, Sukhbir Badal has trained all his guns on Waris in recent rallies. The irony of Punjab’s Panthic politics in 2026 is this: the party everyone loves to declare dead keeps refusing to lie down and die, even as the party everyone is excited about is yet to prove it can get up and walk.
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The BJP goes it alone
For the first time since 1996, the BJP has indicated it will contest the 2027 Assembly election alone. Some see the decision to contest all 117 seats as the boldest political gamble in Punjab since AAP’s 2017 debut; others as a case of ambition getting ahead of itself. Either way, Punjab’s crowded political bazaar has another new and noisy stall.
The BJP’s pitch rests on crime, corruption and chitta. Its Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatra runs from Pathankot in the Kandi belt through Fatehgarh Sahib down to Talwandi Sabo in the deep cotton-and-drugs corridor of Malwa, with Patiala thrown in for royal vibes. The route is shrewdly chosen — drugs are the one issue on which every Punjabi household, Jatt or Dalit, Sikh or Hindu, grimly concurs.
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