After intense churning within the party, AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal finally announced two-time MP from Sangrur and party’s Punjab unit president Bhagwant Mann as its chief ministerial face for the February 20 assembly election. With the party’s attempts to get a Sikh face from outside who would be the ‘pride of Punjab’ failing to fructify and Mann relentlessly pitching himself for the coveted top job, the central leadership finally bit the bullet and decided to go ahead with the Lok Sabha lawmaker.
The clincher for the talented comedian-turned-politician, though, came from the overwhelming support that poured in his favour on the phone line that Kejriwal had announced on January 13, which was open until 5pm on January 17. Kejriwal gave an open call to voters of Punjab to pick their chief ministerial face: age, sex, religion, profession no bar. With more than 24 hours left for the deadline, it was clear that Mann had taken an unassailable lead over the rest.
Kejriwal had already ruled himself out of the race and the votes in his name were counted as invalid. The AAP’s ‘referendum’ or the ‘janata chunegi apna CM’ (the public will pick its CM) drive only reaffirmed the Sangrur MP’s striking popularity on the ground, something that the Aam Aadmi party chief had noticed time and again whenever he campaigned along with Mann by his side. The party hopes that the ‘Delhi model of development’ along with the combined appeal of Kejriwal and Mann would see it through the assembly polls. According to sources, Bhagwant Mann is likely to contest from the Dhuri assembly constituency in Sangrur district.
In the first week of January, the top leadership of the party was slowly zeroing in on Mann as its probable chief ministerial face. However, there were pressing concerns. While Bhagwant Mann was undoubtedly popular, would the people of Punjab accept him as their chief ministerial face? His rustic appeal notwithstanding, he had no administrative experience to bank on if and when catapulted to the office of chief minister, especially of a complex state like Punjab.
Declaring Mann as the chief ministerial face of AAP in Punjab would silence political opponents like Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) chief Sukhbir Badal who have maintained that Kejriwal has been eyeing the chair, but it could also change the narrative from ‘Kejriwal vs the rest’ to ‘Mann vs the rest’. Lacking in political heft, added to his very public struggle with alcohol, would give political opponents ammunition to embarrass the party in what is being seen as a closely fought multi-cornered contest.
Additionally, there had been uneasy spells between Mann and the party’s central leadership in Delhi, particularly when he had upped the ante while Kejriwal was away in Jaipur attending a ten-day Vipassana course around the end of August 2021 and even earlier when the Punjab leader had resigned in protest as the party’s president of the state in March 2018 following Kejriwal’s apology to Bikram Singh Majithia, only to be re-appointed.
Kejriwal, who has repeatedly referred to Mann as his ‘younger brother’, has said that it was indeed Mann who suggested that the people should decide the CM face. With stakes running high, the AAP chief had a tough call to make and fell back on the ‘referendum way’ to explore all possibilities for one last time: gauge Mann’s acceptability among the people not just as a popular leader but as a chief ministerial face of AAP, draw the voter in an exercise of ‘direct democracy’ and keep the door open for a surprise choice.
The party leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher the lakhs and lakhs of unique responses that poured in. By 5 pm on January 17 when the phone line closed, more than 21 lakh responses had been received. AAP has an in-house team with IT professionals based in Punjab who managed the show. Responses were well tabulated and percentages were plotted against each name that was suggested. The party’s Punjab co-incharge Raghav Chadha, who was monitoring the responses, said he was overwhelmed with the reaction and that the party had its own checks and balances to ensure that the process was transparent.
Incidentally, even in 2017, AAP’s maiden assembly elections, Mann, a Jatt Sikh, was seen as a probable Punjab chief ministerial face within a section of the party. However, AAP decided to go ahead without declaring a CM pick, a mistake that the party wanted to avoid this time. AAP strategists also hesitated as they waited for chief rival Congress to reveal its cards. However, even as the Congress decided in favour of fighting the elections with the ‘collective leadership’ of Channi-Jhakar -Sidhu, targeting Dalits, Hindus and Sikhs, AAP took the plunge under tremendous pressure to name a homegrown leader and fight off the ‘outsider’ tag.
Punjab chief minister Charanjit Channi has targeted AAP as ‘outsiders’, who did not have an understanding of Punjab or its people, while Congress state unit president Navjot Singh Sidhu constantly hammered on the slogan ‘Punjab, Punjabis and Punjabiyat’. The fact that the AAP supremo is not a Sikh and yet the face of the campaign in Punjab was being milked by the opponents. Chadha points out that none of the other contestants in the fray, the Congress, Akalis, Punjab Lok Congress or the Samyukt Samaj Morcha, have declared their chief ministerial face yet.
Saurabh Bhardwaj, AAP MLA from Greater Kailash in Delhi, who has been on the campaign trail in Punjab, says that Bhagwant Mann’s appeal cuts across all divisions of caste and religion when it comes to the poor. “He is tremendously popular amongst all the poor: Dalits, Sikhs and Hindus,” he said.
Mann’s popularity can be gauged by one fact: in the 2014 general elections, AAP had won four parliamentary seats with a vote share of 24.80%, which plummeted to just 7.38% in 2019 and one seat. The winning candidate in 2019 was Bhagwant Mann from Sangrur, who defeated his nearest rival, Congress’s Kewal Dhillon, by a margin of 1,10,211 votes and held on to the seat for the second consecutive time. So while the party fared very poorly, Mann’s own performance was way above that, his acceptability amongst people and approval in his constituency was in stark contrast to how the party fared in the rest of Punjab. Currently, he is the sole elected AAP MP in Parliament.
In the 2017 Punjab assembly elections, Bhagwant Mann was not only AAP’s star campaigner, apart from party chief Arvind Kejriwal, but agreed to take on the-then deputy CM Sukhbir Badal from the latter’s stronghold of Jalalabad, as well as Congress’s Ravneet Bittu when asked to do so within a few days left for polling and lost.
As the years went by and the party saw many desertions, Mann stayed, playing the role of the party’s lone voice in the Lok Sabha. His interventions were dramatic if not very effective given the party’s low strength in Parliament. He courted controversy when he live-streamed the security lapses in Parliament in July 2016 that led to him being barred from attending the House for a brief period and, also when he, along with AAP’s Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Singh, held placards and raised slogans against contentious farm laws in the central hall of Parliament while Prime Minister Narendra Modi, among others, were paying floral tributes to Madan Mohan Malviya and Atal Bihari Vajpayee on their birth anniversary in December 2020.
The 48-year-old Mann, born on October 17, 1973, in Sartoj village in Sangrur, was not always a politician. He broke off from his long and very successful career as a popular comedian in multiple formats to join Manpreet Badal’s People’s Party of Punjab in 2011. He contested on the party’s ticket from the Lehragaga assembly constituency but lost. In 2014, he quit the party to join AAP and contested from Sangrur, winning by a margin of over two lakh votes. Mann also has his own charitable foundation, the Lok Lehar Foundation, with focus on children with special needs. He has also worked to get stranded Indians back from Iraq. It is his oratorical skills and sense of humour that endear him to the masses. Once a king of comedy and controversy’s child, Mann is on the threshold of transitioning into a leader who is taken seriously.
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