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Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge are going to canvass for their parties’ candidates in Odisha on Wednesday, the penultimate day of the campaign for the seventh andfinal phase of the Lok Sabha polls to be held on June 1.
The blazing sun has set but the heat lingers in the summer evening. In the Muslim-majority Dugni village of Dhuri in Sangrur district, Parveen Begum, the wife of the sarpanch, is busy arranging flower petals and garlands. The flag of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) flutters outside the house.
The scene in Satoj is like any other. The road to the village awaits repair, a self-help group’s building is under construction, the local pond is as dry as a bone, and the tree guards around the pond do not have trees. Only as a posse of police personnel guarding a house come into sight does one realise it is not a village but the home of Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.
In the countdown to the Lok Sabha elections in Punjab, a conversation icebreaker these days is a question, “Hawa kedi hai? (Which way is the wind blowing?)”.
Addressing a rally in Khetla village in the Sangrur Lok Sabha constituency on May 18, the Congress’s candidate Sukhpal Singh Khaira had called for bringing a law in Punjab along the lines of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, which would bar a migrant, he said, from buying land or becoming voters or getting government jobs if that person does not fulfil certain state-stipulated conditions.
Commandeering his first Lok Sabha election without his father, the late Akali patriarch Parkash Singh Badal, by his side or the BJP as an ally, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal is maintaining a blistering pace in Punjab. In rally after rally, he targets the ruling Aam Aadmi Party’s “jhooth da pand (sack of lies)”, reminds the audience of the Operation Bluestar ordered in the Golden Temple by a Congress government, and declares that, no matter what, one should not vote for a “polarising” BJP.
In 1996, Hoshiarpur elected Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Kanshi Ram to the Lok Sabha. Almost three decades later, Jeevan Singh Tamil, previously known as Jeevan Kumar Mall, is looking to revive the BSP founder’s legacy with his Bahujan Dravid Party (BDP) and some help from Guru Nanak Dev, the first Sikh guru.
Former Union minister Preneet Kaur, 79, is again contesting the Lok Sabha elections from her home turf Patiala –this time on the BJP’s ticket. Preneet, the wife of former Punjab chief minister and Congress heavyweight Captain Amarinder Singh, had won the Patiala seat four times earlier as the Congress candidate. She formally joined the BJP in March this year, one-and-a-half years after Amarinder merged his fledgling outfit Punjab Lok Congress with the BJP. Amarinder quit the Congress after the party leadership replaced him with Charanjit Singh Channi ahead of the February 2022 Punjab Assembly polls.