Maiserkhana suspension: AAP punishes dissent instead of fixing Punjab's teacher shortage | Opinion
PTC Web Desk: Within an hour of Maur MLA Sukhveer Singh Maiserkhana posting an emotional video on Saturday, the Aam Aadmi Party suspended him for "anti-party activities". The speed of the action says a lot. A party that can decide on discipline in 60 minutes should be able to respond to a complaint in 60 days. It did not.
Maiserkhana's complaint was not political theatre. He said government schools, including the ones his own two children attend, do not have enough teachers. Apparently, he is the only MLA in the 117-member Assembly who sends his children to a government school. When he says the system is failing, he is speaking as a parent whose children sit in those classrooms. He also says he raised the issue repeatedly with Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann and with Manish Sisodia, and was ignored.
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The party's reply was to call his allegations false and accuse him of defaming it. Yet it offered no figures on teacher vacancies and no action plan. A government confident of its record would have put the numbers on the table. Suspension is what a party does when it has no answer.
This matters because "education revolution" is not a minor slogan for AAP. It is the core of its pitch to Punjab, borrowed from the Delhi model. When an insider says the reality in his own constituency does not match the claim, the right response is to check the claim, not to remove the person.
Nor is this a one-off. Amritsar North MLA Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh was suspended for five years in June 2025 after questioning how the Vigilance Bureau handled the Bikram Singh Majithia case. Sanour MLA Harmit Singh Pathanmajra criticised the flood response and the role of Delhi leadership in September 2025. His security was then withdrawn and he was booked in a three-year-old case. He calls it politically motivated. The AAP says the law is simply taking its course. The government is entitled to that defence, but the timing makes it hard to accept without questions. When action follows criticism this closely, the public will draw its own conclusions.
AAP state general secretary Harchand Singh Barsat says dissent exists in every family and should be raised within the party. That is fair as a principle. But Maiserkhana says he did raise it within the party, repeatedly and nothing happened. Public airing is usually the last resort of someone who feels the internal door is shut. If the party wants issues raised privately, it must first show that it listens privately.
The wider picture is worse for AAP. In April, seven of its 10 Rajya Sabha MPs moved to the BJP, six of them from Punjab. Now sitting MLAs are speaking out. A party that won 92 of 117 seats in 2022 is entering the February 2027 elections with visible cracks. Opposition parties will exploit this, as Congress state president Pargat Singh has already done by calling it "dictatorship". They have an easy target, but AAP handed it to them.
Voters will not judge this episode by party statements. They will look at their local school and count the teachers. The government's task is to fix that, not to silence the person who pointed it out.
A suspension can end one MLA's membership. It cannot end the teacher shortage and it will not end the questions. If anything, it has made them louder.
- PTC NEWS
