‘6.6% votes, 86% seats by force’: BJP sees Rajya Sabha seats spike in Punjab, but assembly polls remain a challenge

WBiddy hexad of AAP's sevener Punjab Rajya Sabha MPs walked into the BJP endure hebdomad, they handed the party something it had never achieved in Punjab through elections alone — a dominant presence in the Upper House of Parliament from a state it has never won on its own. Assembly elections are next due in about 10 months.The numbers are stark. In the 2022 Punjab assembly elections, the BJP secured 6.6% of the vote and won two of 117 seats, when the AAP won 92 and removed the Congress from power.This was after decades that the BJP was not in alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). The Congress got 18 seats, the SAD just three, with the BJP following with two, and the rest of smaller parties or independents.The BJP thus sent no Rajya Sabha members from Punjab.Its prominent Punjab face and Union minister Ravneet Singh Bittu, who came in from the Congress and lost the 2024 Lok Sabha election from Ludhiana, represents the party in the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan.The AAP got to nominate people for all seven seats, and its choice of relative outsiders like Chadha, and some rich businesspeople raised brows.Now through the “merger” of the AAP MPs — Raghav Chadha, Sandeep Pathak, Ashok Mittal, Vikramjit Singh Sahney, Rajinder Gupta, and Harbhajan Singh from Punjab, besides Swati Maliwal from Delhi — the BJP holds six of Punjab's seven Rajya Sabha seats. Environmentalist spiritual leader Balbir Singh Seechewal remains with the AAP, and he has underlined that Chadha had “a lot of power” and allegedly did not him speak in Parliament on Punjab's issues.Historic high, historic ironyCongress treasurer Ajay Maken spoke of the arithmetic on Monday: “How will the BJP face the people? These Rajya MPs are chosen by MLAs' votes. The BJP has just two MLAs.”He said this would bolster “the separatists' argument that people are not heard, not given justice". "Today, the BJP has done exactly what separatist forces want to prove," Maken said at a press conference in Delhi on Monday, “How will Narendra Modi and BJP leaders explain this to the people of Punjab?”BJP national general secretary Tarun Chugh, who was present at Friday's joining ceremony in Delhi and has roots in Punjab's Amritsar, said, “These (AAP) MPs left a party where corruption has been institutionalised and they were suffocated. Their coming into the BJP fold will definitely be good for the party. A bugle has been blown against evil in Punjab.”Punjab BJP chief Sunil Jakhar called it “the beginning of AAP's decline”.As for the BJP, data shows that it was only between 1998 and 2022 that the party had Rajya Sabha MPs from Punjab — that too just four across 24 years. And that was largely because, as the junior alliance partner of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), the party at best contested only 23 of 117 assembly seats, winning 19 at one point nearly two decades ago.Their alliance broke in 2020 as the SAD backed the farmers' protest against PM Narendra Modi's later-repealed agriculture-related laws. In the 2022 polls, both parties lost badly.What BJP gains — and what it doesn'tIn the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, contesting alone, the BJP secured around 19% of Punjab's vote but won no seats.But Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, at a press conference in Chandigarh on Friday, dismissed the defecting MPs as people who "were not mass leaders" and said “none of them is capable of becoming even a village sarpanch”.He was asked why these MPs had been chosen at all by the AAP — with Chadha even being termed “super CM” by opposition parties up to 2024, after which he drifted from the party — to which Mann said, “They were all eminent people in their fields. There is no machine to read minds, though.”Congress MP Manish Tewari, speaking in Chandigarh on Monday, pointed towards his years as a Punjab MP and period as a Union minister to argue that the defection would rebound on its architects. "Punjab does not like such things, and this will directly benefit the Congress party in the upcoming elections in Punjab," he said. SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia even demanded a floor test in the Punjab assembly, claiming the AAP government was now in a minority — a claim AAP has rejected, given that the defections involved Rajya Sabha MPs, not MLAs, so far.A Congress MP from Punjab, speaking to HT earlier on condition of anonymity, mentioned the limits of the BJP's new acquisitions. "None of the seven really had a voter base which the BJP could draw upon," he said.He did identify two immediate advantages the BJP was counting on: boosted parliamentary numbers, and a potential image lift ahead of the West Bengal assembly election second phase on April 29.A medium-term benefit, he said, was the possibility of Chadha and others persuading AAP MLAs in Punjab to defect. Reports said Punjab AAP incharge Manish Sisodia has been speaking to state ministers and MLAs to keep the flock together.Chadha has called Punjab his “soul”, but not made it clear if he or others would be contesting in Punjab. He last voted in Anandpur Sahib segment in the LS polls of 2024. AAP's MP there, Malwinder Singh Kang, has said the party should have chosen ground-level workers for the RS seats in the first place. Seechewal and even Mann have said Chadha “enjoyed power from Kothi No 50”, an official address in Chandigarh.