New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party on Tuesday alleged that Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann was detained for nearly three hours at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport after returning from Paris, and was issued a challan of Rs 50,000.
AAP’s Punjab media in-charge Baltej Pannu said Mann was held on the pretext that his “luggage is still arriving” and was being checked. According to Pannu, officials rushed to the Chief Minister’s vehicle as he was about to leave the airport and issued the Rs 50,000 challan, claiming they were under “tremendous pressure from above.”
The AAP did not specify the reason for which the challan was issued. Customs sources, on the other hand, said the challan pertained to undeclared items flagged during scans of the luggage of the delegation that had accompanied the Chief Minister on the Paris trip.
Mann had travelled to Paris for SIAL Paris 2026, the international food exhibition held from October 17 to 21, where the Punjab government’s Markfed had put up a stall. The trip had already courted controversy: the Centre had denied political clearance for the visit, a decision the Punjab and Haryana High Court subsequently set aside.
The airport episode had been flagged even before Tuesday’s allegations. Shiromani Akali Dal leader Bikram Singh Majithia had earlier claimed that customs officials had stopped Mann and his wife Gurpreet Kaur for three hours over suspected excess luggage — a claim that now sits alongside the AAP’s account of the same detention.
Airport authorities had not issued an official response to the allegations at the time of publication, leaving two sharply different accounts on record — the AAP’s claim of a politically motivated detention, and the customs sources’ account of undeclared items flagged in the delegation’s luggage scans.
Pannu’s allegation that the officials acted under “tremendous pressure from above” is the sharpest edge of the AAP’s charge, implying that the action against a sitting Chief Minister was driven by considerations beyond routine customs procedure. The party has stopped short of naming who, in its telling, applied that pressure.
The incident adds another flashpoint to the already fraught relationship between the AAP government in Punjab and the Centre — a relationship strained further by the political-clearance row over the very Paris visit that preceded the airport detention. Until the airport authorities speak, the Rs 50,000 challan and the three-hour hold will remain a contested episode in that larger tussle — one that is unlikely to fade from Punjab’s political conversation any time soon.
