Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi has shocked political observers by saying “don’t let ‘bhaiye’ from UP, Bihar, Delhi enter Punjab” during a campaign rally. ‘Bhaiye’ is a derogatory slur used for people from the Hindi-speaking states of UP and Bihar.

What is worse, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was standing right next to him and seen smiling and applauding after Channi made the offensive remark.

Channi started by introducing Priyanka as “Punjab ki bahu” (daughter-in-law of Punjab). Priyanka’s corruption-accused husband Robert Vadra’s father (late Rajendra Vadra) was of Punjabi descent – the family migrated from Pakistan at the time of partition and settled in Moradabad, UP. Robert’s mother Maureen McDonagh Vadra is of Scottish origin.

“Remember Punjabis, don’t let bhaiyye from UP, Bihar and Delhi come and rule here…don’t let them enter,” Channi added before handing the mike over to Priyanka, who let out two lusty renditions of the “Bole so nihaal” Sikh jaikara (clarion call).

No love for UP?

For decades, the Nehru-Gandhi family have claimed that they identify with people of UP. Jawaharlal Nehru’s ancestor Raj Kaul came down from Kashmir in 1716 CE to serve the Mughal Durbar in Delhi. There, the family name became Nehru. Jawaharlal’s grand-father was a police officer in Delhi for the British colonial rulers, but lost his job and property in the brutal British crackdown that followed the 1857 war of Independence and moved to UP.

Motilal Nehru was born in Prayagraj (then Allahabad) in 1861. He received education at home in Persian and Arabic and spoke Urdu as his mother tongue, and went on to become a rich lawyer-politician. Motilal’s eldest son Jawaharlal was born in 1889, also in Prayagraj. Their house Anand Bhawan has now been converted into a museum.

The family contests Lok Sabha elections almost exclusively from its pocket boroughs of Amethi and Rae Bareli in UP. In fact, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is leading the Congress campaign in the ongoing UP assembly elections, like her brother Rahul has done previously.

With what face will the party now ask for votes from the people of UP, after denigrating them as ‘bhaiye’ in Punjab.

Punjab’s radicalization problem

The dehumanization of Hindi-speaking people from UP and Bihar in Punjab is something that has accompanied the growing Jat Sikh radicalization in the state, that has become apparent in recent years.

Two men were brutally lynched to death in Golden Temple and a Kapurthala gurudwara recently, but no politician from Punjab condemned that violence. The man murdered in Kapurthala is believed to be a harmless vagabond Ankit Kumar from Bihar who was merely looking for some food, but even his identity has not been confirmed by police. Police charged the two dead men with ‘hurting religious sentiments’ (IPC 295), but has not taken any action against the mobs which lynched them as far as we know.

In 2017, Punjab Police named two accused hailing from UP as “Do Bhaiye” in an FIR. One just has to look at Punjabi pop music by likes of Jazzy B and Sidhu Moosewala (he is a Congress candidate for Punjab elections) to see the pro-Khalistani overtones, contempt for “Dilliye” (people or rulers of Delhi) and the glorificiation of violence and terrorists like Bhindranwale.

The contempt and mocking outlook for people of UP and Bihar was apparent even in the farmers protest, when protestors from Punjab were heard saying that the new farm laws will “reduce their condition to that of farmers in UP & Bihar”. One ‘funny’ song made during lockdown was about Punjab’s farmers missing the dhoti-clad bhaiya (labor from UP/Bihar) who did all the work for them.

The so-called farmers protests were hijacked by vested interests – rich/better-off farmer lobbies, Khalistanis, Maoists and anarchists – and one of the driving factors was this sense of entitlement and supremacism that sections of the Jat Sikh community, including NRIs, have developed.

Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s special love for Channi

CM Charanjit Singh Channi is the Congress’s official chief ministerial candidate in the upcoming Punjab election scheduled for February 20. Officially, Channi belongs to the Sikh SC (Dalit) community which constitute 32% of Punjab’s population. But unofficially, some suspect that he is a crypto-Christian, which made him the ideal candidate for Congress President Sonia Gandhi and her two children.

Channi’s sudden rise to the top post has been bewildering. The heavyweights that Congress high-command has brushed aside, often overruling their own MLAs, to back him include Amarinder Singh, Sunil Jhakkar, Navjot Singh Sidhu. Punjab is today grappling with a serious issue of predatory and unscrupulous Christian evangelism by cults like Pentecostals and self-styled Godmen like ‘Apostle’ Ankur Narula. The parallels between Channi’s meteoric rise and Sonia’s backing of the late evangelist CM YSR in undivided Andhra are eerily similar.

We hope the voters of both UP and Punjab are able to see through the cynical games of the Nehru-Gandhi family and their other dynastic clones which afflict Bharatiya politics.