As the lines between personal and public issues become increasingly blurred in a poll-bound Punjab, voters and rural opinion-makers, village elders and local elites, are asking whether the state’s real challenges are getting lost in the political din.

With elections to the Punjab Vidhan Sabha just six months away, all the major political parties have so far failed to raise the challenges staring the state in the face. Be it illicit drug smuggling, the sagging agricultural economy and poor fiscal health of the state, the rapidly depleting water table, the slow pace of industrialisation, the growing grip of gangsterism or the decaying public infrastructure, none of these problems has found prominence in the political discourse. Instead, the parties are squabbling, on X and other social media platforms, over personal issues ranging from moral conduct to allegations of financial corruption.

While the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) remain busy trading barbs over whose leadership failed to act as a true Sikh and custodian of the community’s religious identity, seemingly forgetting what voters expect from their political leadership, the Congress has been consumed by infighting, with its leaders trading charges against one another instead of collectively and effectively raising the state’s real problems. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has emerged from the shadow of its former political ally, the SAD, to stake its claim in the state’s political arena, also appears to be assessing the battlefield rather than raising its voice on these concerns.

“The 2027 elections will be the first of their kind, where real issues are lost and relegated to the back burner, while all parties in the fray are concerned only with shaping their own political perception. In a state where freebies dominate electoral choices and ideology-based traditional politics takes a back seat, the electoral process becomes unviable — both economically and for the democratic system,” warns eminent sociologist and political observer Prof Manjit Singh, formerly of Panjab University, Chandigarh.

It may be recalled that the outcome of at least the past five Assembly elections in the state has largely been decided by one or two dominant issues. In the 2002 elections, the Congress, led by Capt Amarinder Singh, defeated the Parkash Singh Badal-led SAD-BJP alliance on the issue of corruption. In the next election, rural anti-incumbency and farmers’ unrest swung the 2007 polls in favour of the Parkash Singh Badal-led SAD-BJP alliance, which then retained power in 2012 largely on the back of its delivery of welfare schemes that helped overcome anti-incumbency.

In 2017, the sacrilege incidents and promises to improve the lot of farmers helped the Congress return to power, only to be ousted in 2022 by the now ruling Aam Aadmi Party, which campaigned on the promise of honest governance and jobs.