Amit Shah meets Badal: Why Akalis and BJP have no choice but to stick together

Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) national president Amit Shah was in Chandigarh on Thursday meeting the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leadership as a part of his outreach initiative towards the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. He participated in a meeting attended by around 25 leaders of both the parties including the Akali patriarch and former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal.

For both these parties, particularly the BJP at this point of time, continuing this alliance seems to be more of a compulsion. For the Akalis, the continuing attraction in carrying on with this alliance is the of course being a part of an alliance that is in power along with a coveted union cabinet berth for Harsimrat Kaur Badal who is the wife of the party president Sukhbir Badal and daughter in law of Parkash Singh Badal.

Otherwise, the Akalis have not been able to extract much from the Narendra Modi led BJP government at the Centre. Modi failed to give any special package to Punjab ahead of the 2017 state Assembly polls that could have helped the SAD-BJP combine come up with a better performance instead of the pounding they received at the hands of the Congress and even the rookie Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Any intervention by the Centre in terms of an agriculture package or an industrial one would have boosted their chances.

In fact, the Akalis are bearing the brunt of the people for the activities of the Sangh Parivar. Apart from the heat they have been facing along with the BJP over the demonetisation carried out by Modi and the shoddy implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) that even did not spare the institution of Langar, it is the RSS meddling in the Sikh affairs that has the masses annoyed with both the Akalis as well as the BJP.

The perception among a large section of Sikhs is that the RSS has managed to infiltrate into institutions like the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) through the Akalis and is distorting Sikh history. There was a furore over the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat which is said to be a Sangh Parivar affiliate organising an event in Delhi to mark the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh and more recently over a series of books being printed in Nagpur in Hindi on Sikh history with 'blasphemous' content that are being circulated across India.

Though the Akalis have not said so in open, their leaders have been miffed at the Akali leadership being cold shouldered by Modi and his team on various occasions. They have not been seen campaigning in states where the BJP returned victorious in the last two years and neither were they on the dais during the investiture ceremonies. There was also discontent over Modi and Shah not addressing many public rallies ahead of the Assembly polls.

Coming to the BJP, the party's alliance with the Akalis has been a loss making enterprise over the last few years. The party had to pay for the anti-incumbency of the Akalis in the last state elections and its tally got reduced to a mere three seats of the 23 it contested. The slide has been massive given the fact that the party had won 19 of these 23 seats in 2007. The same is the case in case of Lok Sabha members. From three seats that it contests as an Akali ally, the party is presently representing only the Hoshiarpur seat through Vijay Sampla. It had earlier won the all important Amritsar seat which was taken away by Captain Amarinder Singh of the Congress who dealt a crushing defeat to Arun Jaitley who was fielded instead of the winning horse Navjot Singh Sidhu in 2014. The party also lost its stronghold of Gurdaspur in last year's by-poll that had resulted from the demise of Vinod Khanna. In the by-poll Sunil Jakhar of the Congress defeated Swaran Salaria of the BJP by a very huge margin of almost two lakh votes.

Although there have been murmurs of discontent from the BJP ranks to go all alone in various polls in Punjab, the party leadership has stuck to the alliance. Many BJP workers as well as leaders believe that the party will have go out alone if it wants to expand its base in Punjab. But the leadership knows very well that the party organization is limited to a few urban pockets only. The party which is perceived to cater largely to the interests of the Hindu population cannot sustain in rural Punjab without Akalis as its ally. Besides the BJP suffered a major blow ahead of the 2017 assembly polls when small traders who were its traditional support base moved towards the Congress after taking a beating from the demonetisation carried out by Modi. The party has since then been trying to woo them back, but in vain.

In addition to this is the ideological line of the RSS that claims that its alliance with the Akalis has helped promote national sentiment in this border state dominated by a religious minority. The Akalis have the distinction of being the oldest regional force in India and among the first allies of the BJP in India. There are reports that the BJP wants to swap Jalandhar parliamentary seat with Hoshiarpur in accordance with the coalition formula. It is being felt that Sampla will be more comfortable contesting from Jalandhar that has more urban voters as compared to Hoshiarpur. Secondly, Jalandhar is the home turf of Sampla.

The Akalis would obviously want the central government to come out with some major initiatives to address the concern of the farmers ahead of the Lok Sabha polls as this would help them take credit and approach their key support base in rural Punjab.

This is the first interaction between Shah and Akalis as a part of the Shah's ally outreach programme. Many more expected in the days to come as the SAD-BJP combine would be desperate to rise from the drubbing of the 2017 state Assembly polls.

“We discussed planning to be done and strategy to be worked on for the elections. I want to say that the SAD is a permanent ally of the BJP and a member of the NDA, There are no differences and conflicts between us. I want to call upon the other NDA allies that the time for the battle has come and they should forget their differences, if any, and come together,” said Sukhbir Badal after the meeting.