Sidhu adds another ‘awaaz’ to Punjab’s political chaos

However transient, former cricketer and commentator Navjot Singh Sidhu, who moved to an unusually lucrative career as a television comic, has finally found himself brand new political digs. 

This, in Awaaz-e-Punjab (voice of Punjab), a still-to-be-fleshed-out political outfit he floated, on September 2, alongside former Indian hockey captain Pargat Singh and Ludhiana’s belligerent Bains Brothers – Simarjeet and Balwinder – best known for their fearlessness in taking on the Badals in Punjab. 

Widely expected to pad up Team Kejriwal in Punjab after he handed in his terse, one-line resignation letter to quit as a BJP-sponsored, nominated member of the Rajya Sabha on July 18, Sidhu, tom-tommed as the "ultimate game-changer" who would give Aam Admi Party that extra momentum to edge past the resurgent Congress led by former chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, and kept everyone guessing.

AAP leaders and workers, hugely enthused at the prospect of Sidhu’s imminent arrival in the party, claimed that the former cricketer was merely awaiting an “astrologically accurate” moment. Excitedly, they even pointed to the fact that he sported a basanti (yellow) turban (AAP's chosen hue in Punjab) both when he drove to Parlliament with his resignation letter as also later, at his news conference in Delhi on July 25. 

But Sidhu’s induction was queered by a series of events and utterances that began with the publicly articulated misgivings over projecting him as the chief ministerial face of the AAP in Punjab by the then state convener Sucha Singh Chhotepur, AAP’s most visible Punjabi face Bhagwant Mann and former journalist and head of the state manifesto committee Kanwar Sandhu. 

Shortly after this, AAP leaders in Delhi and Punjab as well as the former cricketer’s small band of supporters began talking about how the "deal" fell through over Sidhu’s insistence of being given the key role (as CM nominee) in the Punjab polls as well as an Assembly constituency of her choosing for his wife Navjot Kaur. 

But what perhaps really spurred Sidhu into floating Awaaz-e-Punjab, a new party that will clearly compete for the very political space that the AAP is vying for, is the utter disarray that Team Kejriwal suddenly finds itself in, both in Delhi and Punjab. 

From what many saw as a commanding position when Arvind Kejriwal drew huge, enthusiastic crowds at his political rally on the sidelines of the Maghi Mela at Muktsar in January, the AAP is currently in a bit of a mess in Punjab amid large-scale resignation of cadres and leaders instigated by both the early announcement of assembly candidates as well as the recent decision to sack Chhotepur as state convener over corruption allegations. 

While many of the AAP’s Punjabi rank and file view Chhotepur as a "victim" of the machinations of the party’s non-Punjabi leadership in Delhi, revelations of sexual and other misconduct by the party’s ministers and MLAs in the capital have only added to a growing disillusionment. There’s still six months before Punjab goes to the polls in or after February 2017. And there is already an unprecedented proliferation of political voices in the state.

Besides the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal, the BJP and the opposition Congress and AAP, several new groupings have surfaced, including a section loyal to Yogendra Yadav’s Swaraj Lehar and about half a dozen other AAP splinter outfits.

With Navjot Sidhu’s Awaaz-e-Punjab also leaping onto the bandwagon, the cacophony can only grow.