Sidhu, Pargat Singh's new party puts Kejriwal's AAP in a spot in Punjab
Arvind Kejriwal, whose political stock is plummeting fast, has lost Sidhu for now. Photo: PTI
When former cricketer Navjot Singh Sidhu quit the BJP and his namesake wife cited the AAP as a reasonable option for her husband, it appeared AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal had played a masterstroke by poaching one of the state's most famous Jat faces for next year's electoral battle.
But nothing concrete materialised between the two strong-willed politicians.
And on Friday, the ex-batsman hit a reverse sweep, when he announced a new Aawaaz-e-Punjab front in partnership with former hockey captain Pargat Singh.
"Along with Pargat Singh and the Bains brothers, we have formed a front. This will be against those are working against Punjab," Sidhu told reporters.
Now, that's not good news for Kejriwal and his conflict-ridden AAP.
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A large number of Punjabis were almost ready to offer a chance to a non-Congress, non-Akali political party to rule the state beset by chronic corruption, drugs and rising unemployment.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's AAP was seen as an alternative primarily because they wanted to rid the state of dynasts - locally, the Badals, and remotely, the Gandhis.
In January, the maverick leader stole the entire show when people attending his rally marking the annual Maghi festival in Muktsar outnumbered the crowds at the public meetings of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and Congress.
That was the time when Kejriwal was backed by strong tailwinds from Delhi, where he had just introduced an odd-even scheme to fight air pollution. But severe turbulence, of his own making, rocked his political navigation soon.
That began when he virtually defaced Delhi's landscape and airwaves with his hoardings and radio messages to promote the second phase of his car-rationing scheme in hot April. The city probably sensed its chief minister had lost moderation.
He then displayed his intemperance ad nauseam through his Tweets and news conferences that selectively targeted prime minister Narendra Modi or L-G Najeeb Jung. Accusations, which of course his party denied, also surfaced that he was part of a bigger RSS plan for him to eat into Congress votes wherever the BJP had weakened.
Images that broadcast out of Delhi this week to the rest of India, when rains almost drowned the city of 1.8 crore people, sealed his reputation as a nonchalant administrator. Around the same time, he fired a minister purportedly over extra-marital sex.
There's nothing positive about him and his style of functioning that is reaching Punjab. Rather, his own cadre and support-base is falling apart in the state where he ambitiously wants to create electoral history early next year.
An alleged sting on Sucha Singh Chhotepur has apparently triggered a trust deficit within the rank and file of the Aam Aadmi Party's Punjab unit. It's a natural for mutual suspicion to set in if allegations fly thick and fast that AAP insiders are out to sabotage each other in their race to power. And that phenomenon will certainly percolate down to party workers in the state.
At one point, the Aam Aadmi Party had been able to garner support of a big section of wealthy diasporic Sikhs, who have a strong aversion to the Badals and Congress alike for religious reasons.
In elections, politicians are the product and voters the buyers. For anyone who understands Jat psyche, Sidhu is a bankable product in Punjab. Kejriwal, whose political stock is plummeting fast, has lost him for now.
But if he also loses Punjab, the AAP leader will become an Indian case study of what happened after the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movements: no new sustainable political order emerges out of revolutions that are built more on noise and less on consensus.