In the dusty, charged political atmosphere of Jalandhar, Punjab, the air was thick with more than just the seasonal haze. It carried the weight of grief, outrage, and the familiar rhythm of electoral blame. On October 21, 2026, Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief Pargat Singh stepped forward to answer Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s recent visit to the state, and he did not hold back. The trigger was not just a routine political tour, but a deeply sensitive human tragedy: the murder of Parvinder Singh Jhota and the continuing protest by his family in Mansa. They had demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe, and Shah had met the family, offering words of assurance and promising that the case would be taken seriously. Soon after, a CBI team arrived late at night in Mansa and registered an FIR based on the family’s statements. On the surface, that looked like a responsive government. But for Pargat Singh, it was nothing more than a theatrical gesture, part of a pattern of political promises that have been made and broken for more than a decade. He wanted to make one thing clear: he did not oppose the family’s demand for a CBI investigation. In fact, he supported it. What he opposed was the hypocrisy of a party that, in his words, had spent thirteen years making assurances and delivering nothing but disappointment. This was not just about one case, one family, or one murder investigation. It was about trust, and in Punjab, trust in the Bharatiya Janata Party, he argued, had long since evaporated.
Pargat Singh’s critique was sharp and personal, aimed at the very core of the BJP’s political style. He accused the party of being experts at making promises but strangers to fulfilling them. Over the past thirteen years, he said, the people of Punjab and India had heard endless commitments from the central government, from the prime minister’s chair to the home ministry. Yet, when they looked at their own lives, they found little had changed. The CBI visit to Mansa, he suggested, was simply another example of this pattern: a dramatic gesture made to capture headlines, not to deliver justice. He questioned why the assurance to the Jhota family had to wait so long, why the CBI had to be pushed into action by protests and public pressure, and why the Home Minister himself had to make a personal visit to convey what should have been routine procedure. For Pargat Singh, this was not compassion; it was calculated politics. He reminded everyone that the BJP had been in power at the center for years, and the same people who now promised justice in Mansa were the ones who had hesitated, delayed, and sometimes denied accountability in countless other cases. He urged the public to look beyond the television cameras, beyond the folded hands and solemn expressions, and remember the long list of unfulfilled pledges. The people, he insisted, are no longer naive. They have seen enough elections, enough visits, enough promises. And they know the difference between a leader who serves and a leader who simply performs.
The drug issue became the centerpiece of Pargat Singh’s attack, and it struck at a wound that runs deep in Punjab. For decades, the state has struggled with the devastating impact of substance abuse, tearing apart families and robbing young people of their futures. Pargat Singh turned the spotlight on Gujarat, a state where the BJP had been in power for roughly thirty years. If the BJP was so effective in governance, he asked, why had drug abuse not been brought under control there? He went further, making a serious allegation that medicinal drugs were coming to Punjab from Gujarat and Maharashtra, suggesting a pipeline that fed the very crisis the BJP professed to fight. This was more than a political score; it was an attempt to expose what he saw as a double standard. The central government liked to project itself as tough on drugs, but in reality, Pargat Singh argued, the problem had only grown, and the states governed by the BJP could not escape responsibility. He described a situation where parents in Punjab lived in constant fear, where young men and women fell into addiction because of easy availability and inadequate prevention. He accused the BJP of doing nothing to stop the supply, and instead using the issue as a weapon to blame Punjab’s own leaders. This was a human tragedy, not a political slogan, and Pargat Singh wanted the people to understand that the BJP’s record in its own strongholds showed no real success. He pointed to the irony: a party that claimed to stand for order and discipline, he said, could not manage to protect the youth of Gujarat, where it had governed for a generation. If it had failed there, why should Punjab trust it to do better? For the families who have watched their loved ones suffer, he suggested, the answer was obvious.
From drugs, Pargat Singh moved to the beating heart of Punjab’s identity: its farmers and laborers. He accused the BJP of working directly against the interests of those who fed the nation. He brought up Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-publicized promise to deposit fifteen lakh rupees into the bank accounts of ordinary people, a promise that had been made with great fanfare and, in his view, quietly forgotten. He also reminded his listeners of the assurance to double farmers’ incomes, a pledge that had become a source of bitter laughter in the villages of Punjab. Instead of seeing their incomes rise, Pargat Singh alleged, farmers had seen their protests brutally suppressed. He spoke of the 700 farmers who, he claimed, lost their lives during the long, painful farmers’ protest that shook the country. These were not statistics, he said. They were fathers, sons, brothers, neighbours. They were people who had believed in the system enough to raise their voices peacefully, and they had paid with their lives. Pargat Singh’s words carried the raw memory of those months of encampments, tractor rallies, cold nights on highways, and families waiting desperately for news. He accused the central government of ignoring the suffering, of treating farmers as enemies rather than partners, and of dismantling the safety nets that had once protected rural India. Labourers, too, had been forgotten, he added, especially those from Punjab who worked outside the state, often without legal protection or social security. The BJP, he claimed, was a party of the rich and the powerful, not of the people who tilled the soil or built the cities. In a biting remark, he told the audience that they needed to interpret the Prime Minister’s statements in the opposite sense. If Modi promised prosperity, expect hardship. If he promised justice, expect delay. It was a dark, sarcastic line, but it was spoken with the frustration of a man who believed he had watched too many promises evaporate into thin air.
Yet Pargat Singh’s attack was not just aimed at national policies; it was also a defense of Punjab’s special place in India’s political landscape. He framed the BJP’s moves as a threat to the state’s interests, a pattern of interference disguised as outreach. The visit by Amit Shah, the sudden CBI action, the carefully placed media stories—all of it, he suggested, was part of a larger campaign to undermine Punjab’s elected government and centralize power in New Delhi. He reminded people that Punjab had always been a frontline state, through partitions, wars, and agricultural revolutions. It had given the nation its bread, its soldiers, and its resilience. Yet the BJP, in his view, treated Punjab as a problem to be managed rather than a partner to be respected. He accused the party of trying to divide Sikhs and Hindus, of exploiting communal sentiments for electoral gain, and of ignoring the specific needs of a state that lived with an international border and the legacy of a painful history. The CBI investigation into the Jhota case, he argued, was not about justice but about control. By sending the agency to Mansa, the central government could claim credit and simultaneously signal that it could override local authorities. This was not governance, he said; it was power projection. And the people of Punjab, he believed, saw right through it. They knew that the BJP had no intention of addressing the real issues: unemployment, farm debt, industrial neglect, the rising cost of living, and the erosion of trust in institutions. Pargat Singh called on everyone to look at the bigger picture. One family’s grief had been used as a political stage, he said, and the real needs of millions were still hidden behind the curtains.
In the end, what stood out from Pargat Singh’s remarks was not just anger, but a plea for honesty. He was not only speaking as a Congress leader; he was speaking as a Punjabi who had watched his state struggle, as a human being who understood that behind every political statement there is a family waiting for justice. The Jhota family, the farmers who died on the borders of Delhi, the young people lost to addiction, the labourers who never received their rightful wages—these are not weapons in a political war. They are human beings, and their stories deserve more than hollow promises. Pargat Singh’s harsh words about the BJP were an attempt to strip away the polish of political theatre and expose the raw gap between what is said and what is done. He reminded the people that they have the power to demand better, to look at records rather than rhetoric, to measure leaders by the changes they bring and not the gestures they make. He did not offer easy solutions, and he certainly did not pretend that his own party was perfect. But he insisted that the people of Punjab, and of India, deserve a politics rooted in truth, compassion, and action. The CBI will investigate the murder of Parvinder Singh Jhota, and that is important. But the investigation must not become a smokescreen. The promise must not become another forgotten pledge. As the sun set on Jalandhar, Pargat Singh’s words lingered in the air, not as a roar, but as a reminder: trust is the most fragile thing in politics, and once broken, no amount of visits, no number of FIRs, no television appearances can fully repair it. What the people need, he said, is not more assurances. They need a reason to believe again. And that, perhaps, is the hardest promise of all.