3 min readMay 13, 2026 03:06 PM IST
What could have been a veritable ammunition for the Congress in Punjab, turned into an issue that ended up exposing internal differences in how the Opposition party stands divided in framing its response to politically sensitive developments.
As the CBI conducted searches at the Punjab Vigilance Bureau headquarters in Mohali, in connection with a Rs 13-lakh bribery, state Congress president Amrinder Singh Raja Warring chose not to express surprise and instead trained his guns primarily at Union Home Minister Amit Shah and the central government. Describing the CBI action as the “Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)” of the BJP-led Centre, Warring said central agencies first target politicians, then bureaucrats and police officers to send a message: “fall in line and do our bidding, or face the consequences.”
He linked the timing of the raid to the approaching Assembly elections in Punjab, terming it “yet another assault on democracy.” While acknowledging that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government under Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann had earlier misused the Vigilance Bureau against Congress leaders, with several cases later quashed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Warring was categorical that the latest development represented “dictatorship” rather than democracy. “Both the BJP and AAP need to realise this,” he said.
Warring added that the party leadership is fully prepared for what comes next: the targeting of Congress leaders. A short while later Punjab BJP posted a statement of the party’s state president Sunil Jakhar on X saying that neither “Warring nor (former chief minister Charanjit Singh) Channi should worry, “everyone’s account will be settled”.
In sharp contrast, senior Congress leaders Partap Singh Bajwa — the Leader of Opposition in Punjab Vidhan Sabha — and Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa — the Lok Sabha MP from Gurdaspur — in their reactions, focused almost exclusively on the alleged corruption within the AAP government’s Vigilance apparatus. Bajwa called the raid a clear exposure of “the deep rot within the system under the AAP Punjab government.” He pointed to the irony of the institution tasked with fighting corruption now being “entangled in it,” and demanded answers on “how deep does this network go, and who is protecting whom?”
Randhawa described the development as a “shocking and shameful day for Punjab.” Noting that CM Mann holds the Vigilance portfolio, he said the alleged involvement of the Vigilance Chief’s reader in a corruption deal “exposes the corruption ecosystem institutionalised under Mann’s government.”
He demanded an independent investigation into “every questionable vigilance case registered during this tenure,” suggesting many may have been used to “arm-twist those who refused to strike deals.”
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The contrasting reactions come at a time when the Congress is attempting to wrest the control of the state from the AAP in next year’s Assembly polls.
Political observers note that such divergences within the Congress camp have surfaced earlier as well on sensitive matters involving central agencies, reflecting differing assessments of how aggressively the party should confront the Centre versus the state government. With the CBI probe now underway at the Vigilance Bureau premises, the episode is likely to fuel further political debate in the days ahead.
