A 13-day, 4,000-kilometre yatra across 117 assembly constituencies ended in Jalandhar on Wednesday, September 30 — and Union Home Minister Amit Shah used the closing rally to mount a pointed attack on the Aam Aadmi Party government in Punjab, accusing it of burying the state deeper in the drug crisis it had promised to fix.

Shah's post in Punjabi was unsparing: 'Nasha mukt Punjab da naara de ke satta vich aayi 'Aap-da' sarkar ne Punjab nu nashian de daldal vich dhakk ditta hai' — 'The AAP government that rode to power on the slogan of a drug-free Punjab has pushed the state into the swamp of narcotics.' The charge strikes at the heart of what was arguably AAP's most resonant 2022 campaign promise.

Pathankot to Jalandhar: what the yatra covered

The Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatra began in Pathankot — a border town at Punjab's northern edge — and wound through villages and towns before concluding in Jalandhar. According to Shah, the campaign reached every corner of the state's 117 constituencies in under two weeks, holding awareness events at the village level. The yatra format is a familiar BJP playbook: sustained ground contact ahead of an election cycle, combining political messaging with a social-welfare frame.

Punjab's drug problem is not a manufactured controversy. The state — sharing a long border with Pakistan — has been at the epicentre of the synthetic-drug and opioid crisis for over a decade, with border districts particularly exposed to cross-border smuggling routes. The central government's own Nasha Mukt Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2020, identified Punjab among the priority states for coordinated awareness and rehabilitation work.

AAP's broken promise — BJP's central accusation

Aam Aadmi Party swept to power in Punjab in 2022 with a historic mandate, and anti-drug eradication was front and centre in its manifesto. Shah's intervention is designed to weaponise that promise: if Punjab is still mired in narcotics four-plus years later, who is accountable? It is a question BJP intends to keep alive in public memory heading toward the next state assembly elections.

Shah also issued a deadline of his own, declaring that BJP is 'committed to uprooting this drug trade by its roots before December 31, 2029' — a pledge that implicitly signals a BJP return to power in Chandigarh as a precondition. The specificity of the date is deliberate: it benchmarks accountability and gives the party a measurable promise to campaign on.

Why Punjab's drug crisis is a national security argument

For Shah, who also holds the Union Home portfolio, the drug issue in Punjab is inseparable from border security. Cross-border narcotics smuggling — using drones, tunnels, and human carriers — is a documented challenge for central security agencies operating in the state. Framing the drug trade as a law-and-order and national-security failure of the state government allows BJP to simultaneously critique the AAP administration on governance and invoke the Home Ministry's own mandate.

The crowds that turned out in Jalandhar, Shah said, signal that Punjab's people 'have made up their minds to remove the AAP government that is fuelling the drug trade.' Whether that energy converts to votes remains the central question — but the yatra's conclusion marks an unmistakable gear-shift in BJP's Punjab campaign machinery.