For most of Punjab’s post-Independence history, the first question a voter asked about a politician was “Banda khandaani hai? (is he a man of pedigree?)" Khandaani meant a kothi with a long driveway, ancestral acres, a surname that opened doors in Chandigarh and Delhi, and English posh enough for a Doon School reunion.

Over the last decade, that question has quietly been replaced by another: “Saade varga hai? (is he one of us?)" That tiny shift is arguably one of the most profound changes in Punjab politics in a generation.

It is not that the common man has ousted the elite. It is something subtler: Punjabi voters now demand psychological proximity with those who rule them. Consider the old order. Captain Amarinder Singh — scion of the Patiala royal house, soldier, historian, gracious host at Moti Bagh palace, a darling of the Lutyens elite and famously hard to reach, even for his own ministers.

The Badals — Parkash Singh Badal, five-time chief minister and his MBA son who turned a party of the Sikh peasantry into a family fiefdom where father, son, daughter-in-law and in-laws all boarded the gravy train.

Partap Singh Bajwa, from an established Congress family with parliamentary polish. Sunil Jakhar, the genteel, sophisticated son of a Union minister. Simranjit Singh Mann, former IPS officer from a landed political household, whose radicalism came wrapped in the biography of establishment.

Their common currency was status: dynasty, money, an English-medium education, bureaucratic networks and the ability to talk policy in the corridors of Delhi. Politics worked like a Mughal durbar. The petitioner waited at the gate; the message travelled from worker to jathedar to MLA to leader — a relay race in which the baton seldom reached the finish line. These families have not vanished. They still have the land, the money and the networks. What they have lost is the monopoly on legitimacy.

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© National Herald