Punjab’s drug menace has become the ruling Aam Aadmi Party’s ultimate vulnerability. Taking on drugs by arresting peddlers, smugglers, and addicts without forming a policy has proved to be a treatment without proper diagnosis. Because its high-decibel anti-drug campaign, Yudh Nasheyan Virudh, had flaws, but because it set a deadline, not.
A pledge to finish the drug trade in three to six months may have won AAP a historic mandate of 92 out of 117 seats in 2022, but the political cost the party is now paying is heavy.
AAP sought three to six months and won, but the situation further aggravated, and the trade spread to remote villages. BJP leaders, during the Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatra, are seeking an extended deadline of two years, as it is now clear that giving a short deadline won’t work. The then state party chief, Captain Amarinder Singh, promised to finish the trade in four weeks, winning voters’ trust. He formed the government but failed to achieve the target. Public admission by Punjab Assembly Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan that his government failed to fulfil the promise to end drug use, and increased admissions at rehab centres, suggest that the deadline to finish the drug trade was set in a hurry while the war was still active. AAP has now realised the problem was bigger than it estimated, and it can’t set a fresh deadline. The party leaders blame ports and drones for the drugs entering the state, but people ask why the government failed to stop the supplies from entering Punjab. Not really. AAP promised to finish it in four months and couldn’t finish it in four years. The party’s anti-drug campaign aims at exposing AAP’s failure to meet the deadline. His relatives say he was pressed to apologise. He consumed pesticide and died at DMCH Ludhiana. Opposition Congress suspects that the senior police officials posted at the highly sensitive border zones were also responsible for the failure of the anti-drug campaign. Former Punjab home minister and Congress MP Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa accused senior Punjab officials of being hand in glove with drug smugglers. He cited FBI findings that dreaded gangsters were carrying out extortion in connivance with corrupt cops.
The promise initially worked for the Congress in 2017. Is the BJP walking in the footsteps that the Congress made in 2017 and AAP in 2022? Days earlier in Tur Banjara, labourer Gulzar Singh, 47, asked Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema why heroin was as easy to get as buying salt.
A senior BJP leader, requesting anonymity, said the party is taking every step cautiously and its campaign is moving in the right direction.
