Across rural Punjab, formal state institutions are often experienced as distant, opaque, and unreliable. In this context, intermediaries occupy central roles in the everyday political and social life of villages. This article examines how their authority is built and sustained through dhara bandi (a Punjabi term for factional loyalty and social-political alliances, maintained through everyday acts of mediation, presence, and performance). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bhi Nagar, a pseudonym for a central Punjab village, I show how intermediaries’ practices – hosting gatherings in baithaks, mediating disputes, navigating bureaucracies, and cultivating digital visibility – both bind villagers in durable networks of allegiance and render the state locally intelligible. These actors are not merely brokers who facilitate access to resources; th ...