Analysis: Drugs, Not Panthik Grievances, Are Driving Punjab's 2027 Race

Chandigarh: 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.Amit Shah's recent string of visits made the change plain. Instead of touching the usual flashpoints, he went straight to families of anti-drug activists and ordinary people killed or driven to despair after they confronted peddlers - cases in Mansa, Gurdaspur and Sangrur. He talked about synthetic drugs, overdose deaths and the targeting of those who speak up. For most voters in the villages and towns, the urgent questions are basic security, jobs for young people and keeping families away from chitta (synthetic drugs). Identity politics does not put food on the table or stop a syndicate.The ruling AAP is under pressure. Eradicating drugs was a central promise of its 2022 win. 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.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.The principal fight remains between AAP and Congress. Both have had turns in power - Congress from 2017, AAP from 2022 - and both failed to bring the drug problem under control. 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.Sacrilege still sits underneath. The 2015 Bargari case, the Behbal Kalan and Kotkapura firings that killed two protesters, and the decade of stalled trials continue to anger people. Successive governments promised quick justice and delivered little. That memory does not vanish just because drugs have taken the headlines.But for now, the shift the piece describes is real but incomplete. Drugs and law-and-order have moved to the front of ordinary conversation 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. 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. That makes AAP's 2022 promise look unfinished and keeps the Mann government answering questions about policing rather than about free power or clinics.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. 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. Any joint message would have to paper over those contradictions; many voters would notice.Congress sits in a similar bind. It governed from 2017 to 2022 and could not reverse the drug trade. Its current critique of AAP therefore sounds familiar rather than fresh. 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.Drugs have earned their place as the leading practical issue because they produce bodies every week and have survived two different ruling parties. That is not a media construction; families in the villages can name the dead. The BJP is right to keep pressing it. The visits, the calls for central probes, and the refusal to treat the problem as solved are politically effective because they match what people already see. AAP is weakest exactly where its 2022 mandate was strongest.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. 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. Voters who already feel let down by both Congress and AAP will give the BJP a hearing. They will not treat it as a blank cheque if the party appears mainly interested in keeping the issue alive for 2027.Sacrilege still matters for a different reason. It is not the daily emergency that chitta has become, but it is the clearest example of a promise that every party has made and none has fully kept. As long as those trials remain unfinished, any party that campaigns only on "we will fix drugs" while remaining silent or evasive on the older cases will look selective. Punjab's electorate has a long memory for both kinds of failure.The ground has shifted enough that pure Panthik mobilisation is harder than it was a decade ago. It has not shifted so far that identity and institutional questions can be ignored. The BJP can keep AAP on the defensive and force the conversation onto policing and patronage.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.