Do we like Bhagwant Mann?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A clean record on harm and a real stand on corruption, set against an unresolved video row and a court case he keeps skipping.
Mann is a comedian who made it to the top job. He grew up in Satoj village in Sangrur, studied at Sunam, and became a Punjabi comedy star through youth festivals, the long-running TV show Jugnu Mast Mast and a 2008 turn on the Great Indian Laughter Challenge. His routines went after politics, business and sport, which is a handy apprenticeship.
His politics started in 2011 with Manpreet Badal's People's Party of Punjab, then he joined AAP and won the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat in 2014. It wasn't a smooth ride: he lost the 2012 and 2017 assembly races and quit as AAP's Punjab convener in 2014 after Kejriwal apologised to Bikram Majithia. In 2022 he was named AAP's CM candidate and took Dhuri as the party won 92 of 117 seats, a first for any party in Punjab.
The big story now is the video. A clip allegedly shows a man sprinkling alcohol on pictures of Sikh gurus, and on 15 June the Akal Takht called Mann a “guru dokhi” and a “Khalsa Panth virodhi”, citing it. The jathedar said forensic tests found the clip authentic. Mann denies it is him, said on 19 June the man was an actor who resembled him, and told critics “they try to defame me using religion.” AAP points to two private labs that found the man wasn't him.
Then it got messier. Gurugram Police arrested two men accused of preparing a forged forensic report on the clip, after a complaint alleging a forensic expert was pressured and offered Rs 10 lakh. The BJP demanded Mann's resignation and Congress and the Akali Dal accused the AAP government of using fabricated evidence. Nothing in the reporting we read links the alleged forgery to Mann himself, and the probe was still open when we last looked.
On the harm check, nothing turned up from Mann campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate, and we found no conspiracy-theory slide. The nearest thing is the sacrilege law his government passed in April 2026. The Akal Takht says it wasn't properly consulted on it, and a High Court challenge is pending. That's a fight about religion, law and process, not a campaign against a group. We found little on his own words about LGBTQ+ issues, so that's a gap, not a tick.
The good stuff is real. In May 2022 he confronted his own health minister with an audio recording, sacked him over an alleged 1% kickback on health tenders, and had police register a case; the minister was arrested. Mann's four-year scorecard lists free power, free treatment at Aam Aadmi Clinics and an anti-drug drive. Congress's Warring calls those claims “shameless lies”, and the BJP's Jakhar points to debt and gangsterism, so judge the delivery yourself.