For decades Punjab’s politics ran on Panthik lines – Sikh identity, religious institutions, historical grievances, and the old Akali-versus-everyone axis. That frame is losing ground. The drug crisis and the everyday sense that the streets are not safe have pushed identity questions to the side. People are more worried about whether their sons will survive than about old theological or autonomy debates.
Whether this turns into votes for the BJP is less certain. The party is using the issue to look like a serious alternative in a state where it has long been weak outside urban trading pockets. It is still building a rural organisation. That is why talk of some understanding with the Shiromani Akali Dal keeps surfacing. Both sides have reasons to send a message, even if the Akalis carry their own baggage on Panthik questions and an alliance would not be simple. For the BJP, the calculation is straightforward but narrow. By staying on drugs, it can damage AAP’s core claim and present itself as the only party not yet stained by a full term in power. The difficulty is conversion. The party’s rural presence remains thin outside a few pockets. Without local faces and cadres, public anger at AAP does not automatically become BJP votes. That is why the idea of some understanding with the Shiromani Akali Dal keeps returning. Any joint message would have to paper over those contradictions; many voters would notice. Congress sits in a similar bind. The main contest remains AAP versus Congress, with the BJP trying to turn itself into a viable third pole on a single issue. Whether that works depends less on rhetoric than on whether the drug numbers keep rising and whether the BJP can look like more than a Central agency operating through local intermediaries.
Its current critique of AAP therefore sounds familiar rather than fresh. It governed from 2017 to 2022 and could not reverse the drug trade.
The Akalis bring residual rural networks and a Panthik vocabulary the BJP lacks, but they also carry the memory of the earlier drug years and the sacrilege period under their own watch.
The ruling AAP is under pressure. By keeping the spotlight on continuing supplies, deaths and activist killings, the BJP has hit the party where its credibility is thinnest. Shah’s visits and calls for CBI probes force AAP into a defensive crouch – explaining its policing record instead of talking about free power or clinics. The Centre’s charge that the trade needs political cover adds heat and draws sharp replies from the Bhagwant Mann government. The principal fight remains between AAP and Congress. The BJP’s opening is the chance that enough people will treat it as a third option that might actually do something about the daily toll. If the drug issue stays primary and the Panthik ones stay secondary, the party can squeeze the others. If not, the old lines reassert themselves. But for now, the shift the piece describes is real but incomplete. Those facts cut across caste and party lines in a way that older Panthik grievances sometimes do not. When Amit Shah visits the families of people killed after confronting peddlers in Mansa, Gurdaspur or Sangrur, he is not inventing the problem; he is forcing the camera onto it. Yet the strategy has a ceiling. Treating every death and every stalled case as pure proof of AAP’s unique failure ignores the longer record. The trade flourished under previous governments as well. Voters who already feel let down by both Congress and AAP will give the BJP a hearing. Turning that into a durable vote share still requires the party to show it can operate in rural Punjab without looking like an outsider or simply a vehicle for Central agencies. If the drug deaths continue and the older cases stay unresolved, enough voters may decide that trying the remaining option is worth the risk. They will also notice if that option treats the deaths mainly as campaign material. Punjab rarely abandons one set of grievances for another in a single cycle; it usually carries both.
Because the numbers are visible and personal: overdose deaths continue, young men disappear into addiction, and a string of anti-drug activists have been killed or threatened, drugs and law-and-order have moved to the front of ordinary conversation. Eradicating drugs was a central promise of its 2022 win. Both have had turns in power – Congress from 2017, AAP from 2022 – and both failed to bring the drug problem under control. That makes AAP’s 2022 promise look unfinished and keeps the Mann government answering questions about policing rather than about free power or clinics. They will not treat it as a blank cheque if the party appears mainly interested in keeping the issue alive for 2027.
If the BJP’s message stays only at “AAP failed,” it risks sounding like another party using the crisis rather than a party prepared to run the police and the borders differently.
