An anti-drug activist shot dead in broad daylight. A father refusing to cremate his son until justice is delivered. And a hashtag that has already begun trending. AAP Rajya Sabha MP and party spokesperson Raghav Chadha levelled a blistering attack on the Bhagwant Mann-led Punjab government on Tuesday, 13 October 2026, holding the state administration directly responsible for the killing of Parvinder Singh Jhota, an anti-drug activist from Mansa district.

A bullet in broad daylight in Mansa

Chadha's post describes a chilling sequence: Jhota was shot dead while confronting the owner of a medical store over alleged drug sales, and the incident was recorded live. According to Chadha, Jhota had spent years speaking out against the 'chitta' network — a term widely used in Punjab for synthetic opioids — that he alleged had expanded significantly since the Aam Aadmi Party came to power in March 2022. His reward, the MP argues, was an assassin's bullet rather than state protection.

The post states that Jhota's father has refused to cremate him until the shooters and local drug sellers face action, and has 'openly blamed the AAP government for his son's death.' Chadha underscores the detail that the family has reportedly appealed to the Centre for basic safety — a pointed signal, in his reading, that the family no longer trusts the state machinery to act.

'Yudh Nashean Virudh' — a war in name only?

The sharpest line in Chadha's post may be the one aimed at the government's own flagship programme. Yudh Nashean Virudh — literally 'War Against Drugs' — was the Mann administration's centrepiece anti-narcotics campaign, launched with considerable fanfare after its landslide victory in 2022. AAP had campaigned explicitly on dismantling drug supply networks in a state where pharmaceutical and synthetic drug abuse has devastated youth across multiple generations and multiple governments.

Chadha inverts the slogan with precision: 'Bhagwant Mann's Yudh Nashean Virudh has turned into a war against those who still try to fight it.' The accusation is that the accused in Jhota's killing roam free, the alleged supply chain operates undisturbed, and the only people paying a price are the activists and the youth they were trying to protect.

An MP from within AAP draws the sharpest line

What makes this attack structurally significant is its source. Chadha is not an opposition MP firing across party lines — he is an AAP Rajya Sabha MP and a senior spokesperson of the very party that governs Punjab. His willingness to publicly name CM Bhagwant Mann and the state unit, and to frame the murder as a 'direct outcome of the complete breakdown of law and order,' marks an unusually direct public rupture within the AAP ecosystem on Punjab governance.

Drug trafficking has been a persistent governance failure in Punjab across BJP, Congress, and now AAP administrations, with each incoming government inheriting — and then being accused of perpetuating — the same entrenched networks. The difference this time is that the harshest accountability is coming from inside the house. The family's reported appeal to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs adds a potential federal dimension that could bring parliamentary scrutiny, including possible questions on the status of the Yudh Nashean Virudh campaign's results.

The accused, Chadha says, remain at large. The alleged supply warehouse keeps operating. And Punjab's youth continue to pay the price. Until an arrest is made — or a government responds — the hashtag #JusticeForJhota is likely to stay lit.