A Chief Minister who still gets his hair cut at a neighbourhood barbershop, stops for samosas at the same stalls he haunted as a university student, and actively keeps his security detail lean — Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu shared an unusually candid self-portrait on 7 August 2026, pushing back against what he framed as an inflated idea of political privilege.

The barbershop remark that started it

Sukhu's post opened with a disarmingly simple line: 'Sadharan dukaan mein hajaamat karwana koi badi baat nahin hai' ('Getting a shave at an ordinary shop is no big deal'). He followed it by noting that he rarely scrolls through social media, preferring to stay absorbed in his work — a quiet signal that the post itself was a deliberate, considered statement rather than an offhand reply. The Chief Minister also revealed a personal security timeline: he did not have a Personal Security Officer (PSO) until his third or fourth election campaign. Even after assuming the top office in Himachal Pradesh in December 2022, he said he has tried to keep his security footprint as small as possible.

Shimla streets, chai stalls, and the Coffee House habit

The post's most vivid passage was a tour of ordinary Shimla life: Sukhu described being regularly spotted walking among residents on the street, dropping into tea and samosa stalls he frequented during his university days, and sitting at the Coffee House — a Shimla institution with its own layered history of student politics and intellectual life. 'This is our way of living,' he concluded, in a phrase that doubled as both personal statement and political positioning. The imagery is deliberate. For a Congress leader governing a hill state where the gap between administrative Shimla and the rural interior can feel vast, projecting accessibility — physical, cultural, economic — carries real weight with voters who distrust the insulation of power.

Simplicity as a recurring political register in Indian state politics

Sukhu's messaging fits a well-worn but still effective pattern in Indian state-level politics: leaders across party lines have periodically used gestures of personal austerity — travelling economy class, visiting public hospitals, eating at dhabas — to signal that office has not severed them from ordinary life. The difference here is specificity. A named barbershop, a named city, a named snack, a personal PSO history — concrete detail that generic 'man of the people' rhetoric rarely supplies. Whether the statement was prompted by criticism, a viral moment, or simply a reflective mood, Sukhu chose to answer it not with policy but with biography. In a media environment saturated with curated imagery, a Chief Minister volunteering that he eats samosas at old student haunts is, at minimum, a calculated act of normalcy.