Mothers who lost sons. Sisters who lost brothers. Daughters who lost fathers. Union Home Minister Amit Shah sat with them in Jalandhar on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, at the conclusion of the Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatra (Drug-Free Punjab Journey) — and the grief he heard, he said, shook him to his core.

In a post on X, Shah wrote: 'The drug trade flourishing under the misrule of the Aap-da government has destroyed the homes of countless mothers, sisters and daughters. Hearing the pain of victim families who have lost their loved ones to drugs, my heart is deeply distressed.' The wordplay in the phrase Aap-da — a fusion of 'AAP' (Aam Aadmi Party) and the Hindi word for 'calamity' — is deliberate, framing Punjab's ruling party as a disaster in itself.

The pledge Shah made in Jalandhar

Shah did not stop at grief. He drew a sharp line of intent: 'A BJP government in Punjab will hunt down every single drug trader and put them behind bars, and will secure the future of the state's youth by making Punjab drug-free.' The language — chun-chun kar, meaning 'one by one, picking each out' — signals a targeted enforcement posture, not a sweeping policy statement. It is a message aimed squarely at the families in that room and the millions watching.

Why Punjab's drug crisis keeps returning to centre stage

Punjab has carried the weight of a documented narcotics crisis since the early 2010s, when successive governments — Congress and SAD-BJP alike — were repeatedly criticised in central and state reports for failing to stem trafficking routes from the northwest border. When the Aam Aadmi Party swept to power in the 2022 assembly elections, a core promise on its manifesto was to eliminate the drug trade within one month of taking office. That deadline passed without a decisive outcome, and the issue has remained a live political wound.

The Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatra is the BJP's vehicle to keep that wound visible. By closing the yatra with a public meeting of bereaved families — and by doing so in Jalandhar, Punjab's second-largest city — the party puts a human face on what can otherwise be reduced to statistics.

Electoral arithmetic behind the empathy

The BJP was, until 2022, the junior partner in Punjab's Shiromani Akali Dal-led governments, and the drug problem accumulated ground during those years too. Shah's post implicitly sidesteps that history, framing the crisis as a product of AAP's governance alone. That is a political argument, not a complete historical account — and it will be contested. What is not contested is that Punjab's youth population continues to bear a disproportionate burden of addiction and trafficking-related crime.

With the 2027 Punjab assembly elections drawing closer, every yatra, every public interaction with affected families, and every sharp tweet is a brick in the BJP's campaign architecture. The question is whether a party that has not held state power in Punjab since 2017 can convert sympathy — and a genuine crisis — into a governing mandate.