Punjab Pensioners Issue Poll Warning to AAP: Implement DA or Lose Our Vote on May 26

A Punjab pensioners’ association has called on retirees and employees to vote against AAP candidates on May 26 in the civic body elections, citing pending DA, court order defiance, and 40,000 deaths in waiting.

North Desk Correspondent

Chandigarh, May 20

Six days before Punjab’s urban local body elections, an organised body of Punjab pensioners has issued a blunt political ultimatum: unless the Bhagwant Mann government implements long-pending Dearness Allowance demands, it will mobilise its members to vote against AAP candidates in every Nagar Nigam, Nagar Council and Nagar Panchayat constituency across the state. Elections will be held for 105 civic bodies, including 8 municipal corporations.

The warning comes from the Punjab Pensioners Association, Finance Commissioners Secretariat, Punjab — one of the more active pensioner organisations in the state — in a pamphlet circulating widely among employees and retirees ahead of the May 26 polls. It is addressed directly to Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema and Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, and makes no effort to soften its language.

The association’s core accusation is not about money alone. It is about what the pensioners describe as a pattern of promises made, deadlines missed, court orders defied, and meetings called only to be postponed — a four-year accumulation of grievances that has now found a political outlet.

The court backdrop

The pamphlet draws its sharpest force from a legal battle North Desk has been tracking for weeks. On April 8, a Single Judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court ruled that the Government of Punjab cannot plead financial hardship to deny DA to its employees and pensioners while simultaneously paying full DA to IAS, IPS and IFS officers from the same Consolidated Fund. The court ordered all pending DA installments — from 46% to 58% — to be cleared by June 30, 2026, and directed the Chief Secretary to file a compliance affidavit by July 2.

That June 30 deadline is now in serious doubt. PSPCL — the state’s power utility — has already moved a Division Bench of the same High Court seeking to stay and set aside the April 8 order. And the Punjab government itself has filed Letters Patent Appeals challenging court orders that had directed it to implement the DA judgment. The association’s pamphlet specifically names these LPAs as evidence that the government is fighting in court against its own employees and pensioners rather than complying.

Six grievances, one demand

The Punjab pensioners association has framed its call to action around six specific questions directed at the state government.

The first concerns the 2.59 multiplication factor recommended by the Pay Commission — a figure Finance Minister Cheema had publicly cited, and which the association says he had earlier opposed. Why, it asks, has implementation not happened?

The second goes back to June 18, 2021, when the Punjab Cabinet formally accepted the Sixth Pay Commission’s recommendations, including a commitment to follow the Central Government pattern for DA with no time lag. That Cabinet decision is now nearly five years old and has not been fully implemented. The association wants to know why.

The third — and most pointed — is the discrimination question. State employees and pensioners are being paid DA at 42%, the pamphlet says, while IAS, IPS, IFS and Judicial Officers receive 60% DA funded from central government resources, with Punjab topping it up from its own treasury. This is precisely the disparity the High Court called out in April. The association notes that even after Supreme Court orders dated February 5 and March 10, 2026, and an HC order on civil writs dated April 8, the government chose to file LPAs against its own retirees rather than comply.

The fourth grievance of the Punjab pensioners is the most viscerally stated. The pamphlet says 40,000 pensioners have died while waiting for DA payments at the 2.59 factor. It holds the Finance Minister and Chief Minister personally accountable for these deaths.

The fifth and sixth questions cover process: repeated meetings that produce no decisions, and meeting schedules that are announced and then cancelled, which the association describes as a deliberate humiliation of employee and pensioner leadership.

The political ask

The final paragraph makes the electoral consequence explicit. The association holds AAP’s government responsible for non-implementation because, it says, employees and pensioners contributed fully to bringing AAP to power in 2022 on the basis of specific promises. Those promises have not been kept.

It concludes with a direct appeal to all Punjab pensioners and employees to withhold their votes from AAP candidates in the May 26 elections — signing off with the slogan: “Aseen jitange, zaroor jaari jang rakhio” — We will win, keep the fight going.

Gurbaksh Singh, union leader, told North Desk that in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections too, they had opposed the Aam Aadmi Party. “The difference is this time we are going all out against the ruling party which earlier we didn’t,” he said, adding that during the Lok Sabha elections they still had hope the government would accept their demands “but all our hopes have been belied.”

Background

The High Court’s April 8 ruling, which this association is invoking, found the government’s austerity defence hollow on its own facts. As North Desk reported, Punjab had a standing policy until 2019 of releasing DA to its own employees before releasing it to All India Service officers — a deliberate prioritisation of its own workforce. That policy was reversed in 2019. Since then, the position has flipped entirely, with state employees and pensioners falling steadily behind.

The court also struck down a government payment plan that would have made pensioners below 75 wait until January 2028 for arrears owed since 2016 — describing it as unconstitutional on grounds that inflation falls equally on every retired person regardless of age.

With the June 30 HC deadline approaching and the Division Bench of the High Court yet to rule on PSPCL’s stay application, the space between the courthouse and the ballot box has, at least for Punjab’s pensioner community, collapsed entirely.

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