ABSTRACT
Defying the Modi wave in North India, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won four Lok Sabha seats out of thirteen from Punjab in the 2014 general elections while it lost everywhere else in the country where it fought. This chapter attempts to explain this puzzle through highlighting the political specificity of Punjab. Two aspects of this specificity are central to the explanation of AAP’s electoral success: one is the rise of the Sikh militant movement in the 1980s and its suppression, and the other is the rise of the Maoist Naxalite movement in the late 1960s and its suppression in the 1970s. AAP contributed significantly to defeating the spread of the so-called Modi wave in Punjab, but its less than expected performance in 2017 has mauled its pretensions to replace Congress as the all India alternative to BJP.
