Aap Is Down In Punjab

Plagued by allegations of corruption and sexual impropriety, and the mass resignations by members, things are suddenly looking down for the party

- Asit Jolly

Remember the delirium? The lusty slogans that greeted Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal at the Maghi Mela in January as he made his first big foray into Punjab. Pointedly, he was even wearing a Bhagat Singh­ style basanti (yellow) Sikh turban then. At his belligerent best, Kejriwal had promised to weed out corrup­tion, drugs and all other evils that ail Punjab. He even named names—if voted to power, he promised to “drag Bikram Majithia (SAD minister and deputy CM Sukhbir Badal’s brother­in­ law) by the ear and throw him in jail”. The crowds lapped it all up, and just six short months after it began building its organisation, AAP was already looking like a sure thing—the hot ‘new­ kid­ on­ the ­block’ of Punjab’s political arena.

But suddenly, things aren’t look­ing so hot. Amid a succession of highly serious allegations, ranging from the sale of party tickets for the coming assembly polls to central observers seeking sexual favours from pro­spective candidates, on September 4, AAP’s long­ standing zonal in­charge of the Amritsar Lok Sabha constituency, Gurinder Singh Bajwa, 50, announced his decision to quit the party. As many as 85 other office­bearers, some say over 80 per cent of AAP’s core cadre strength in the Amritsar­ Gurdaspur border belt, have also resigned.

The mass resignations followed the central AAP leadership’s August 27 decision to sack state convenor Sucha Singh Chhotepur, a political vet­eran and former Akali leader who had been instrumental in building the party across Punjab. Chhotepur, who has since been replaced by the TV comic Gurpreet Singh ‘Ghuggi’, was removed after a sting operation—widely said to have been conducted at the behest of AAP’s Delhi leadership—caught him taking Rs 2 lakh from a party worker.