A chemist shop raided ten times in four years, its licence suspended three times — yet its doors stayed open. Congress leader and general secretary Sachin Pilot seized on that single, damning detail on Thursday, October 15, to demand accountability from Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann over two violent incidents he says expose the state's festering drug crisis.

Two deaths, one chemist shop, a mountain of questions

Pilot linked the suicide of Gulzar Singh and the broad-daylight murder of Parvinder Singh Jhota to what he described as the unchecked, unauthorised sale of medicines and synthetic drugs in the state. The detail at the heart of his charge is stark: a single pharmacy that survived ten raids and three licence suspensions and kept selling regardless. 'Who is protecting the unauthorized sale of medicines and synthetic drugs?' he asked, directing the question squarely at Chief Minister Mann.

The incidents, as Pilot framed them, are not isolated tragedies. They are, he argued, evidence of a systemic failure — one that survives inspections, outlasts suspensions, and operates in plain sight.

AAP's zero-tolerance pledge under the microscope

Bhagwant Mann and the Aam Aadmi Party rode to power in Punjab in March 2022 on an explicit promise of zero tolerance against drugs — a pledge that was central to their landslide mandate. Punjab's drug problem is not new. The state has carried the weight of pharmaceutical abuse and synthetic drug trafficking for over a decade, and successive governments have faced the same accusation: tough talk, inadequate enforcement on the ground.

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 gives state authorities clear powers to cancel licences, prosecute sellers, and shut down offending pharmacies. The political charge Pilot is levelling is not that the law is weak — it is that enforcement was repeatedly attempted and repeatedly failed, which points to something more troubling than bureaucratic inertia.

Pilot's pointed formula: accountability or credibility collapses

'Zero-tolerance without accountability has no credibility,' Pilot wrote, in a line designed to detonate. It cuts directly at the gap between the AAP government's brand promise in Punjab and the on-the-ground reality he is describing. By tagging @INCPunjab and @INCIndia, he was also amplifying the attack as an official Congress line, not just a personal observation.

The Punjab government has not yet issued a formal response to Pilot's charges or announced any inquiry into the specific chemist shop or the two incidents he named. With the state's youth and drug-affected families watching, that silence will not hold for long.