Punjab's loved patriarch who misread one key moment

Parkash Singh Badal, a five-time Punjab chief minister, was soft-spoken and polite to his many interlocutors and still had an iron grip on panthic politics – until he started losing that control after his record victory in 2012. Enormous influence built over a political career that started with his election as sarpanch in 1947 eroded rapidly.Badal’s hold on panthic politics kept the Shiromani Akali Dal at the forefront of electoral politics in the state even after he hitched his wagon to BJP’s in 1996. The alliance formula was simple – SAD was the big brother in Punjab and BJP had precedence at national level. Badal, who had a three-month stint as Union minister in the Morarji Desai government in 1977, preferred to stay connected to Punjab politics. So involved was Badal in Punjab politics that he never seriously considered expansion to other states with significant Sikh populations.Badal’s control over Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee and over the appointment of Akal Takht Jathedar helped him sideline stalwart Akali colleagues, including Gurcharan Singh Tohra. ShowBlurbsBut it’s this tight control over panthic institutions that boomeranged on the Badal family. First, when the then Akal Takht Jathedar granted pardon to the Dera Sacha Sauda head Gurmeet Ram Rahim in a blasphemy case of May 2007, which the community believed was at the behest of the Badals. Ram Rahim was accused of imitating Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Sikh Guru.Then came the Bargari sacrilege and subsequent police firings in 2015.Ironically, Badal Senior was on Tuesday, April 24, named co-conspirator and facilitator of the Kotkapura firing case of October 14, 2015, and Sukhbir was named mastermind in the second challan presented by the Punjab police SIT in a supplementary challan before Faridkot illaqa magistrate.It was this growing anger over the Bargari sacrilege and police firing that decimated SAD to a mere 18 seats in the 2017 assembly polls, pushed to the third spot by AAP, which had already demonstrated its impact by winning four Punjab seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.The Akali slide continued in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, where it was reduced to mere two seats, won by Badal’s son Sukhbir Singh and his daughter-in-law Harsimrat Kaur. The 2022 assembly elections were hard on the Badal patriarch, who was initially reluctant to contest the poll. He lost his first election after 10 consecutive victories. His party won just three seats.A part of this decline was the waning importance of SGPC and Akal Takht within the Sikh community – and that was thanks to the anger against the Badal family’s control of these two religious institutions.The last straw for many Akali voters was the Badals’ strong initial support of the three contentious farm laws introduced by the Modi government. Farm laws also ended SAD’s 25-year alliance with BJP. But voters saw it as too little and too late.Akali voters were so alienated that they preferred Simranjit Singh Mann, whose party has been floundering in all elections, in the Sangrur bypoll last year.True, despite the 2007 controversy, SAD won the 2012 state polls. Badal senior handed over the party to his son Sukhbir. But the seeds of decline, of both SAD and Badal’s influence, had been sowed. It was telling that in the rebellion that followed 2017’s big defeat, senior party Taksali leaders like Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa focused on Sukhbir’s shortcomings as party president and ignored the Badal patriarch. The rebellion did not pan out. But SAD was never to recover from that loss.When he ruled supreme, Badal’s people connect was faultless. He made sure he visited homes of his constituents in the Lambi assembly segment, whether those families were celebrating or mourning. It says something about Badal the man and politician that even after his defeat in 2022 by 11,396 votes in Lambi, a constituency he had nurtured after winning five elections from there, he went on a thanksgiving visit to Lambi villages.It was this ability to connect and many voters’ affection for him along with his complete control over Akali Dal that gave Badal the control over panthic politics and made him CM so many times. But he lost his influence and his winning formula by failing to understand the depth of voters’ anger and despair over sacrilege.