Dear Express reader, As turmoil in the ruling party in Punjab continues to be the big story, we need to step back from the headlines just a bit, perhaps, to look at what it says. The high command culture, and more specifically the Congress high command is, of course, to blame. It seems to have been inactive and inert while the Captain Amarinder Singh government was, by all accounts, losing popularity among the people and the support of its own MLAs. And then, with just about four months to go for assembly polls, it became overzealous — unceremoniously bundling out a veteran chief minister, picking a Dalit leader in his place, pushing a chattering newcomer to the fore. The first was arguably a belated step, the second may well turn out to be a last-minute gamble that pays off for the party. It is the last, however — the rise and rise of Navjot Singh Sidhu, more famous for having played cricket and laughing out loud in a TV show — that is the most remarkable phenomenon in a state known for its hard-boiled politics. I had travelled to Amritsar even as the Congress was changing chief ministers in Chandigarh, and the centrality of one of the city’s own in the political drama — Sidhu is the MLA from Amritsar East — seemed to speak less about him, more about others, and the state of our politics. It is not Sidhu who led to the present Congress churn, many point out. He has only benefited from a sequence of events set in motion by what was seen to be an increasingly detached and disdainful leadership in a state with many unresolved crises, with the government's unwillingness or inability to nab the guilty in a prominent sacrilege case becoming the turning point. In this story, Sidhu is not the agent, but only the beneficiary. He became the beneficiary of mounting unease against the Amarinder Singh government because he was more outspoken and more visible. But both the greater visibility of Sidhu, and the credit he seems to get for his outspokenness, point more to the perceived absences and silences that had gathered around him. A deep cynicism is roiling the electorate of a state that is seeing its hard-won self-confidence undermined by the missteps of governments and abdications of the political leadership. Punjab has seen the abundance of the Green Revolution and then its long plateauing. Here, the lack of diversification in agriculture and in the economy, and a decade lost to terrorism, have set back industrialisation. Punjab’s young no longer see their future in the state, and they are heading abroad in larger and larger numbers to prove it. The spreading cynicism which sees all politicians as corrupt and colluding with each other behind the people’s backs also fuels the anti-politics of the farmers’ movement against the Centre’s three farm laws, now going on for more than a year. Add to this mix the institutionalised arbitrariness of decision-making within the political party — there are no clear routes of upward mobility and advancement, no demarcated rungs of the political ladder to climb, tickets are handed out with only days to go for the campaign, for reasons that are secret or whimsical — and you have the perfect backdrop for the emergence of a Sidhu-like figure. Someone who already has name recognition, and therefore does not need the (damaged) vehicle of the party. Someone who can collect a crowd, and therefore is attractive to the party that is hard put, when elections come, to offer to the people a record of its government’s achievements. And more importantly, someone who is seen by the people as an Outsider, untainted by the corruptions and collusions of “politics”. Of course, these factors may have carried the Sidhu phenomenon thus far, but there is no guarantee that they will take it any further. Politics-as-usual has engendered cynicism in Punjab but it has also fostered a healthy scepticism of the tall claim. As elections draw closer, we will be keeping an eye on the state. Till next week, Vandita | 
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