Sweeping to victory: Punjab tunes into Arvind’s Mann Ki Baat

NEW DELHI: Almost every regional party has at one point of time or the other ventured beyond its "home state"; some have even harboured ambitions of "going national". Think TMC, Shiv Sena, SP, BSP, JDU, NCP… They have without exception come a cropper.

That is what makes the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party’s ascendance to office in Punjab historic. And that too, within a decade of its creation. (DMK has been in coalition governments in Puducherry, a tiny Union territory). It also gives a fillip to Kejriwal’s efforts to position his party as an alternative to Congress, a space Mamata Banerjee was trying to carve out for TMC.

It was a victory celebration delayed by five years, but AAP has made up for lost time, racing to a crushing win over storied rivals Congress, Akalis and BJP and, in the process, forcefully reviving its claim to being an “alternative” model in politics that can be replicated outside Delhi.

The big win is a shot in the arm for the Delhi chief minister as it breaks a barrier that the party has been trying to breach almost since inception. Its ambitions in the 2014

Lok Sabha

elections came up against

Force Modi

, and in 2017, a seeming victory in Punjab slipped out of its grasp. Not this time, as even a last-minute attack on Kejriwal by dissident Kumar Vishwas accusing him of Khalistani sympathies failed to sway voters in the border state who were fed up with traditional choices.

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