Managing perception will be the biggest challenge for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Punjab and other agrarian states following Shiromani Akali Dal’s (SAD) decision to end their 24-year alliance on controversial agricultural sector reforms.
The BJP would not be so bad without the SAD if it manages to establish a negotiating table with agitated farmers to limit forest fires. That will set the stage for you to exercise the alliance options you have and the Akalis do not in the sensitive border province.
Given the history of the Khalistan Movement in the 1980s, the Center’s initiative to find a middle ground should come sooner rather than later. Punjab is the key to both the country’s food security and its national security imperatives. The National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP can achieve the double objective by reaching the restless peasantry without having prestige.
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For its part, SAD, ridiculed as a fiefdom of the Badal family, has apparently freed itself from the NDA in search of its lost glory as a party of struggle and agitation. He had earned the spurs of the post-independence Punjabi Suba movement and the way it fought Indira Gandhi’s Emergence. His 1975-77 judicial arrest campaign lasted 19 months when his top leadership was in jail.
That was also the phase where SAD boasted such high-ranking leaders as Master Tara Singh, Sant Fateh Singh and Giani Kartar Singh (at the forefront of the Punjabi Suba uproar), Gurcharan Singh Tohra, JS Talwandi, HS Langowal and a Much younger parkash. Singh Badal.
The parallel that Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew a few years ago between Badal and Nelson Mandela was actually a tribute to their SAD ties, the years his leadership spent in prisons for the causes they were committed to.
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All of this is now part of the folklore that SAD inherited but failed to preserve. In its traditional support base of Jat Sikhs, the Dal today has a challenger in SS Dhindsa’s SAD (Democratic). The other separatist faction calling itself the Taksali group has since vanished and many of its prominent faces have joined Dhindsa.
Having served as a minister under Atal Behari Vajpayee, Dhindsa gained proximity to the BJP at the expense of his parent party. The Padma Bhushan granted to him by the Modi dispensation in 2019 had taken the Badals by surprise.
It’s no wonder then that Dhindsa is seen as a stand-in for the Badals in the NDA scheme in Punjab. One political observer who put it in other words is former Rajya Sabha MP Tarlochan Singh, who had arranged a meeting between Vajpayee and Badal to unite the SAD and the BJP in 1996.
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The Akalis had then rejected the efforts of the leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) HS Surjeet to support HD Deve Gowda. The latter became prime minister when Vajpayee was unable to display the numbers he needed in Parliament after being in office for 13 days.
The other reason the BJP could be sure to plow the furrow without the Badals is the inroads the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has made into Punjab through its front organization with the same acronym, the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat. Its activities have irritated the Sikh clergy, but on the ground it is believed to be making progress.
From their point of view, the SAD has come to see the BJP’s crisis of perception of farm laws as an opportunity for the urgently needed makeover. In the last assembly elections, the Dal lost the main position of the Opposition to the Aam Aadmi Party. That was after the 2014 parliamentary elections that saw it win as many seats (two seats each) as the BJP.
Also read: Agricultural bills get the consent of the president amid protests, the exit of SAD
The ground, therefore, slips under the feet of the SAD. As he struggles to regain his lost appeal, Dal’s historical proclivity to show himself as the sole advocate for the Sikh cause could divide what is essentially a farmers’ movement for economic rights along community lines.
The possibility of such an eventuality in the border state with Pakistan gives additional urgency to the dialogue between the Center and the organizations leading the farmers’ movement.
A useful model from the past could be the civil society interface that emerged after the events of 1984. The group consisted of serious men such as Indian Air Force Marshal Arjan Singh, Lieutenant General JS Aurora, Ambassador Gurbachan Singh and Inder Gujral.
A matching gray eminence panel could be the bridge even now between the Center and the leaders of the farming community. That could help pave the way for direct talks and a mutually acceptable agreement.
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