Punjab politics has shifted from valuing elite pedigree to seeking leaders who feel relatable. Voters now ask if a politician is one of them, rather than checking their family background. This change became clear in the 2022 Assembly election, where many established political families lost their seats to commoners.
For most of Punjab's post-Independence history, the first question a voter asked about a politician was " Banda khandaani hai? (is he a man of pedigree?)" Khandaani meant a kothi with a long driveway, ancestral acres, a surname that opened doors in Chandigarh and Delhi, and English posh enough for a Doon School reunion.
Over the last decade, that question has quietly been replaced by another: " Saade varga hai? (is he one of us?)" That tiny shift is arguably one of the most profound changes in Punjab politics in a generation.
It is not that the common man has ousted the elite. It is something subtler: Punjabi voters now demand psychological proximity with those who rule them. Consider the old order. Captain Amarinder Singh -- scion of the Patiala royal house, soldier, historian, gracious host at Moti Bagh palace, a darling of the Lutyens elite and famously hard to reach, even for his own ministers.
The Badals -- Parkash Singh Badal, five-time chief minister and his MBA son who turned a party of the Sikh peasantry into a family fiefdom where father, son, daughter-in-law and in-laws all boarded the gravy train.
Partap Singh Bajwa, from an established Congress family with parliamentary polish. Sunil Jakhar, the genteel, sophisticated son of a Union minister. Simranjit Singh Mann, former IPS officer from a landed political household, whose radicalism came wrapped in the biography of establishment.
Their common currency was status: dynasty, money, an English-medium education, bureaucratic networks and the ability to talk policy in the corridors of Delhi. Politics worked like a Mughal durbar. The petitioner waited at the gate; the message travelled from worker to jathedar to MLA to leader -- a relay race in which the baton seldom reached the finish line. These families have not vanished. They still have the land, the money and the networks. What they have lost is the monopoly on legitimacy.
.Waris Punjab De's street cred and the BJP's solo flight. The 2022 Assembly election made that brutally clear: Amarinder lost Patiala, Parkash Singh Badal lost Lambi, his son Jalalabad and the once-mighty Akali Dal was reduced to three seats.
Who replaced them? Bhagwant Mann, a stand-up comedian from Satoj village in Sangrur, whose voice Punjabis knew from cassettes and television long before they knew his manifesto. Charanjit Singh Channi, who climbed from municipal politics in Kharar to become Punjab's first Dalit chief minister in 2021. A state where nearly a third of the population is Dalit had never, until then, seen one of its own at the top.
Amritpal Singh, an outsider who returned from Dubai in 2022, took over Waris Punjab De and -- even while detained under the National Security Act in faraway Dibrugarh -- won Khadoor Sahib in 2024 by close to two lakh votes, without a party, a poster budget or a single rally.
Their toolkit is the antithesis of the old guard's: grassroots origin, raw emotion, theth Punjabi instead of drawing-room English, unvarnished vocabulary and a smartphone that works as a personal broadcasting station. The old politician said "I represent you"; the new one says "I am one of you".
This revolt against the elite is not an isolated phenomenon. Punjab is not an island. Across democracies, citizens have turned on their elites for their distance, arrogance, insensitivity. Three decades of neo-liberal reforms made winners very visible and losers very angry. The 2008 crash taught ordinary people that bankers get bailouts while workers get pink slips. COVID twisted the knife -- the image of migrant labourers walking home on highways sits in collective memory like a bruise. Rising inequality did the rest.
Into this vacuum marched the populists: Donald Trump promising to "drain the swamp", Narendra Modi setting himself up as the chaiwala against the Lutyens' elite, Arvind Kejriwal in his muffler as the original aam aadmi . The ideologies differ wildly; the grammar is identical -- the people versus the establishment.
.Punjab: The arithmetic of appeasement. Then there's the smartphone revolution. The old chain ran voter → worker → party → newspaper → leader. The new one runs leader → phone → voter. Reels, soundbites, memes, live videos and WhatsApp forwards reward exactly what the old elite distrusted: emotion, humour, rage, spontaneity, the language of the chowk rather than the chamber.
The traditional gatekeepers -- editors, party bosses and pundits -- have been bypassed. While that empowers the outsider, it also opens the floodgates to misinformation and echo chambers. The Punjabi ethos rewards authenticity.
Sikh tradition was built on sangat and pangat -- in the langar, the prince and the pauper sit in the same row and eat the same dal. Punjabi culture prizes directness, anakh (self-respect), individual courage and an ingrained suspicion of hierarchy. It also has a long memory of mass mobilisation, most recently in the 2020-21 farmers' movement, where the kisan unions pointedly kept politicians off their stages. At such a table, authenticity isn't the garnish, it's the main course.
Entertainment has increasingly become a form of political capital in the age of mass communication. Modern politics is no longer conducted only through speeches, manifestos and policy documents; it is also performed through stories, humour, slogans, emotional moments and catchy one-liners. Politicians who can grab attention and connect with audiences have an edge in an environment dominated by social media.
Bhagwant Mann illustrates this transformation particularly well. His background as a popular comedian and performer helped him hone his humour, storytelling, timing and audience engagement. These entertainment skills have subsequently become political communication skills, very handy in making complex political messages more accessible and memorable.
Mann the satirist, Channi the representative of the un(der)represented and Amritpal the renegade-preacher are the three contemporary Punjab politicians that stand out. Ideologically, they are far apart, but structurally they share a DNA.
. Each is seen as a people's hero rather than a party product. Each speaks in the idiom of the village, not the secretariat. Each projects defiance. Each built a direct, emotional connection that skipped the party ladder. And each is, above all, an outsider -- someone who stood at the palace gate rather than inside it.
There is, however, a catch that every outsider eventually discovers. You begin by attacking the establishment; the day you win and are sworn in, you become the establishment.
Mann is now judged not by his punchlines but by his record on drugs, debt, jobs and law and order. Authenticity may get you elected; but only delivery gets you re-elected (unless of course you have the ECI in your pocket!).
Meanwhile, the old elite is learning the new language. Rahul Gandhi traversed the whole country on foot to shed the image of naamdar and pappu , calling out the establishment, becoming Gen Z's darling and the RSS's foe.
In Punjab, while Sukhpal Khaira and Bikram Majithia are donning the mettle of fearless public crusaders, leaders such as Partap Singh Bajwa, Raja Warring, Sukhbir Badal and Captain Amarinder Singh are still struggling to connect with the people.
The lesson of the last decade is not that Punjab prefers commoners to aristocrats. It is that Punjab has staged a revolt against political aloofness. The traditional elite can still win -- but only if they emerge from the drawing room to sit on the takhtposh in the village sath , shoulder to shoulder with everyone else.
Harjeshwar Pal Singh teaches history in SGGS College, Chandigarh. More of his writing here
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