“The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) winning 92 seats in the 2022 Punjab assembly election was a feat that most pollsters didn’t expect. No single party had won so many seats in the state since its reorganisation in 1966. The previous high was the Congress’s 87 in 1992, won while the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) boycotted the election; turnout that year was 23.82 per cent.

The SAD-BJP alliance won 93 seats in 1997, of which the Akali Dal’s share was 75. AAP won 92 single-handedly in a quadripolar contest, where the Congress and SAD had ruled the state several times, while the AAP was a newcomer, with 2022 being just its second assembly election contest in the state.

Even so, that victory cannot be attributed to AAP alone. The mandate suggests that by 2022, voters had lost faith in both SAD and the Congress. The Akali Dal still carried the stains of the sacrilege incidents of 2015 and the police firing at Behbal Kalan. It had left the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance over the farm laws, but the farmers’ protests had already turned rural Punjab against it………….”