The crucial Assembly election barely five months from now will decide whether the jhaadu sweeps Punjab a second time or gets swept out of the state.

For chief minister Bhagwant Mann, virtually every road seems barricaded with barbed wire. Start with the sant-sipahi confrontation that no sitting Punjab chief minister has faced in living memory. On 15 June 2026, the Akal Takht declared Mann guru dokhi and Khalsa Panth virodhi (anti-Guru, anti-Panth) — over a video allegedly showing him sprinkling liquor on images of the Sikh Gurus and Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale — and directed the sangat to cut ties with him.

The Takht’s word still carries the force of scripture for lakhs of Punjabis. For a party that built its brand as a clean alternative to VIP culture and communal politics, being excommunicated by the highest temporal seat of the Sikhs struck at the heart of Mann’s legitimacy.

The AAP camp, meanwhile, is restless. Ministerial staff, computer teachers and an alphabet soup of employee unions have been on and off dharna for months over unhonoured pay promises. Farmer bodies under the Samyukt Kisan Morcha banner have twice gathered at the Chandigarh-Mohali border, reminding Mann that ‘sarkar badlo’ cuts both ways.

The political has also turned personal. A retired Punjab and Haryana High Court judge has accused the chief minister’s wife Gurpreet Kaur of taking a Rs 5-crore bribe to bury a rape case. The NHRC has sought action-taken reports, and the SAD has demanded a CBI probe into what it calls an institutionalised ‘loot model’ running out of the CMO.

Mann, for his part, embraced Gurpreet Singh Sekhon — prime accused in the 2016 Nabha jailbreak that sprang Khalistan Liberation Force chief Harminder Mintoo — into the AAP fold at a Zira rally, only a decade after Kejriwal called that very jailbreak proof of the “complete breakdown of law and order” in Punjab.

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© National Herald