Arvind Kejriwal has told Aam Aadmi Party workers in Bathinda that Punjab’s assembly election could be advanced to November 2026, setting off an accelerated campaign pitch nearly nine months before the present House completes its term.
The AAP national convenor, addressing a roadshow to mark the party’s gains in Bathinda’s civic politics, said he had been told polling may not wait until February 2027 and urged supporters to prepare as if only four months were left. He also made his clearest endorsement yet of Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann as the party’s face for a second term, telling the crowd that their immediate task was to return Mann to office.
No formal election schedule has been announced, and the final call rests with the Election Commission. Punjab’s 117-member Assembly is due to complete its term on 16 March 2027, leaving room for a poll before that date if the election process is notified within the permissible window or if the House is dissolved earlier. The normal political expectation has been that Punjab, along with Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur, would vote in early 2027, broadly in line with the last cycle.
Kejriwal’s remarks are significant because they move AAP into a full campaign posture at a time when Punjab has become central to the party’s national standing. The party swept to power in March 2022 with 92 seats, leaving the Congress with 18, the Shiromani Akali Dal with three, the Bharatiya Janata Party with two, and the Bahujan Samaj Party and an Independent with one each. The majority mark in the House is 59.
The Bathinda event also gave AAP a platform to convert its civic poll showing into a statewide message. Punjab’s urban local body elections in May covered 102 civic bodies, with 1,977 wards going to the polls. Figures available from the count showed AAP ahead with 862 wards out of 1,765 counted, followed by the Congress with 348, Independents with 242, the SAD with 169, the BJP with 138 and the BSP with six. Turnout stood at 63.94 per cent across the municipal contests.
Kejriwal framed the next assembly election as a multi-cornered contest and attacked rivals without naming them directly. He described one opponent as linked to drugs and sacrilege, another as consumed by internal disputes, and a third as dependent on central agencies. He contrasted them with AAP’s claim of clean governance, repeatedly projecting Mann as an honest chief minister whose family and ministers had faced no corruption charge during the government’s tenure.
Mann used the roadshow to defend his government’s record, citing free power for households, health cover under the Mukh Mantri Sehat Yojana, education reforms and irrigation support for farmers during the paddy season. He said canal water availability had improved and told the crowd there would be no shortage for sowing, while pointing to higher water levels in the Bhakra reservoir.
The opposition is unlikely to allow AAP to turn the election into a referendum only on welfare delivery. Congress leaders have accused the ruling party of misusing state machinery during the civic polls, while sharpening constituency-level planning for the assembly election. Their strategy is focused on rebuilding booth structures, consolidating traditional support bases and preventing the BJP from expanding in urban and Kandi-belt constituencies.
The BJP, though still without a Punjab assembly majority in its history, has been attempting to grow beyond its older urban pockets. Its vote share rose from 6.6 per cent in the 2022 assembly election to 18.6 per cent in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and it finished first in 24 assembly segments despite failing to win a parliamentary seat. That rise has made it a factor in contests where the Congress, AAP and SAD once dominated the field more clearly.
AAP also faces strains within its own local organisation. Bathinda Urban MLA Jagroop Singh Gill was absent from the roadshow and had said he was not invited, while criticising the mayoral outcome that brought Padamjeet Singh Mehta to the top civic post. The episode underlined that AAP’s early campaign will need to manage internal resentments even as its leadership tries to project confidence, urgency and unity ahead of a poll that may arrive before the expected calendar.
