WSN colum­nist Jasvin­der Singh makes sense of the de­ci­sion of the Pun­jab voter who de­feated the Shi­ro­mani Akali Dal but en­sured the vic­tory of the In­dian Na­tional Con­gress.

The Hin­dutva Ginny has emerged stronger af­ter the 2019 elec­tions. The Gin­ny’s pro­tégé -the Bhar­tiya Janata Party swept the en­tire coun­try ex­cept for the state of Pun­jab. Pun­jab voted for Con­gress. Pun­jab did the same in the 2017 As­sem­bly elec­tions too.

Why did the peo­ple of Pun­jab vote for the Con­gress which has a his­tory of giv­ing count­less scars on the face of Pun­jab and has butchered their youth in a mer­ci­less man­ner not very long ago, in the last decades of the past cen­tury?

Per­haps, the vote in Pun­jab was more anti-Akali than pro-Con­gress. The vic­tory of Sukhbir Singh Badal and his wife Har­sim­rat Kaur Badal is a proof of the fail­ure of the Pan­thic lobby to chan­nelise the anger of the peo­ple in a pos­i­tive man­ner. With the AAP los­ing all faith, there was no third choice also.

With­out ap­por­tion­ing blame on the peo­ple, Pan­thic groups and ac­tivists need to do in­tro­spec­tion and brain­storm as to why they are so clue­less about un­der­stand­ing the nerve of the com­mu­nity.

To­day, af­ter the re­sults, Sikhs seem to be cry­ing over spilt milk. Paral­ysed into a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion, where they had to choose be­tween a thief and a mur­derer, they chose a thief -a lesser evil, even though tem­porar­ily.

The Sikhs of Pun­jab need to be aware that the Panth is not just the Sikhs of Pun­jab.  Think­ing about the larger frame­work of the Sikhs with­out com­pro­mis­ing their sit­u­a­tion is an­other as­pect, not to be ig­nored by Pan­thic groups and ac­tivists.

There are still some hard lessons, if learnt and worked upon can cer­tainly bear some fruit in the fu­ture. The Pan­thic lead­ers will have to learn the tricks of the elec­toral trade of trans­lat­ing the love and re­spect of the Panth into votes.

Good in­ten­tions with­out a se­ri­ous com­mit­ment will not mean much.  Pun­jabis are rebels and the Pan­thic groups need to re­alise how to ma­noeu­vre the dif­fi­cult sce­nario for the good of the Panth.