Congress has opted for a self-destructive pursuit in Punjab. All the party had to do was wait for six-odd months, wait for the election campaign to begin, get Sidhu and Captain Amarinder Singh (CAS) together in what would have been an engineered yet imminent and indispensable power transition. The election was anyway in the Congress' bag, given the way the farmer protests had played out, and all they had to do was plead before the farmers in a few rallies, and the job would have been done.

Yet, Rahul Gandhi woke up and opted for chaos, to put it in the language of the meme universe. The Akalis, however, relatively are in a far better position than they were six months ago, for they could now, like the Congress, play the caste card, build upon the political debris of the Congress, and capture the Jat-Sikh vote that had been critical to their victories in 2007 and 2012.