By midday on 14 November 2025, Harmeet Singh Sandhu—AAP’s official nominee—won comfortably by a margin exceeding 12,000 votes in Tarn Taran, a Vidhan Sabha constituency of Punjab. The Shiromani Akali Dal’s Sukhwinder Kaur Randhawa finished second, the Waris Punjab De (WPD)–backed independent—endorsed by the Giani Harpreet Singh–led SAD (Punar Surjeet) faction—took third, the Congress was a poor fourth, and the BJP a distant fifth. For a constituency long regarded as a Panthic bellwether in Majha, many will be tempted to treat this as a tide chart for 2027. That would be a mistake. Tarn Taran’s by-poll verdict, with a poll turnout of 60.95 per cent is neither a litmus test nor a barometer; it is a sharply etched snapshot—useful when read in context, a risky guide when over-extrapolated.
Baselines that actually matter
This by-election was necessitated by the death of sitting AAP MLA Kashmir Singh Sohal on 27 June 2025, after a protracted battle with cancer. In the 2022 Assembly election, AAP won Tarn Taran with 52,935 votes, defeating SAD’s Harmeet Singh Sandhu by a margin of 12,091—a reasonable baseline for judging any “swing” narrative today. For broader context, recall that in 2024 the Khadoor Sahib Lok Sabha seat—of which Tarn Taran is a part—was swept by Amritpal Singh, the self-styled Khalistan ideologue now in his third year of detention under the NSA in Assam’s Dibrugarh jail, with a massive margin. It was an outcome many wrongly assumed would permanently reorient Panthic politics.
How AAP won here—without proving it can win everywhere
Begin with the winner. He was already a three-time MLA—albeit on the SAD ticket—which makes AAP’s five-figure edge an exercise in electoral craftsmanship rather than ideological conquest. The ruling party in the state pulled off what has become a Punjab signature: Transferring its organisational vote to a candidate with deep local roots while keeping the welfare-and-governance pitch front and centre. A victory by more than 12,000 votes in a crowded field speaks less to a tidal wave and more to disciplined booth work, the steady tending of intermediaries, and a message calibrated to village-level anxieties—law and order, drugs, employment, and service delivery. Tarn Taran confirms that AAP’s vote-transfer strategy still works, even when the nominee is a long-time rival turned recruit. But a decisive win in one Majha pocket does not automatically scale to Malwa’s multi-seat expanse, let alone to a statewide reaffirmation of incumbency in 2027.
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Sukhbir Badal’s re-election and campaign
Re-elected as President of the Shiromani Akali Dal on 12 April 2025, Sukhbir Singh Badal led from the front—and Tarn Taran’s respectable second owes much to that visible, on-ground effort. In early September, amid Punjab’s floods, he launched a hands-on relief drive, distributing cash, diesel, and equipment to affected villages and reinforcing embankments—projecting a leader rooted in rural resilience rather than rhetoric.
He paired relief with a focused political agenda: Doubling old-age pensions, pucca houses for the poor, abolition of road tax on two-wheelers, reserving government jobs for Punjabis, mandating 80 per cent local hiring in new industry, and opposing distress sales of agricultural land. His precinct-level campaign in Tarn Taran—booth meetings, pledges to upgrade hospitals and start skill colleges, and a high-visibility roadshow—re-energised the cadre. He also pressed the Election Commission over alleged police bias, prompting the suspension of the district SSP just before polling. Taken together, relief work, retail promises, organisational push, and institutional assertiveness helped SAD reclaim relevance as Punjab’s credible regional party—even if it fell short of victory.
What the runner-up actually tells us
If AAP’s margin speaks to execution, SAD’s second place speaks to recognition. After months of speculation around sacrilege, splinters, and sanctimony, the party led by Sukhbir Singh Badal has arguably settled a basic identity question: Is SAD (Badal) still the default Panthic vehicle, or have radical-adjacent formations displaced it? Tarn Taran offers a clear, if modest, answer. Voters placed SAD ahead of the WPD-backed independent and well ahead of the Congress, despite open endorsements from rebel factions. In essence, the electorate reaffirmed SAD (Badal) as the genuine Akali Dal—not by awarding it the seat, but by positioning it where it matters in a Panthic contest: Second, and unambiguously so.
That ranking has a wider implication. The fear that radical groups were poised to capture Panthic space looks overstated in the calm of counting day. The Lok Sabha 2024 surge appears increasingly episodic rather than epochal. Tarn Taran suggests that while protest-era sentiment can electrify a national poll in exceptional circumstances, by-election pragmatism—local networks, governance credibility, and trusted intermediaries—pulls voters back towards parties they believe can run the state. The people, as the cliché goes, are back to normal: Respectful of symbolism, but ultimately voting for problem-solvers over proclamations.
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The rest of the field
The Congress result is a warning light for a party that styles itself as a serious contender in early 2027. A poor fourth in a rural-majority Panthic seat indicates a district machine not yet speaking the right dialect of governance—drug abuse, farm economics, border anxieties, everyday policing—or recruiting candidates with the ballast to stitch micro-alliances across villages. Without a granular, precinct-first rebuild, Congress risks being squeezed between AAP’s incumbency delivery and SAD’s Panthic rootedness.
For the WPD-backed independent and the SAD (Punar Surjit) faction that supported him, the message is sobering. Endorsements generated headlines; they did not convert into a top-two finish. Organisation beats affect at the booth. The challenge is not mobilising at moments of high symbolism; it is institutionalising—building a durable cadre, dispute-resolution mechanisms, and an everyday service-delivery vocabulary that persuades swing voters beyond a protest core.
As for the BJP, a fifth-place finish is unsurprising yet instructive. The party remains structurally weak in border-belt rural seats where community mediators, religious institutions, and agrarian economies shape political exchange; recall it polled barely 1,176 votes here in 2022. That reopens the inevitable question: Does this nudge the BJP toward a tactical accommodation with SAD (Badal)?
The arithmetic is persuasive; the history is thorny. Trust cracked over years will not be mended by one by-poll. Still, the hierarchy in Tarn Taran—SAD clearly ahead of radical-adjacent forces and the BJP stranded—will push both sides to at least reopen the alliance file. Whether preconditions on policy, seat-sharing, and mutual penance can be squared is a slower negotiation.
Why ‘barometer’ is the wrong metaphor
Tarn Taran is a rural-heavy, border-adjacent constituency with a habit of amplifying localism. By-elections compress participation and heighten the power of informal intermediaries. In that ecology, even a five-figure margin is both commanding and context-bound—commanding because every vote is hard-won in a low-salience contest; context-bound because a handful of cross-village defections, caste-clan pivots or turnout quirks can still reshape outcomes. That is why crowning Tarn Taran as a barometer misleads: it measures midday weather in one tehsil, not the statewide climate across seasons.
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What each player should do next
- AAP: Treat this as a maintenance-plus win. Consolidate rural booths, show measurable progress on drugs and policing, and avoid complacency in Malwa.
- SAD (Badal): Bank the recognition dividend and get forensic about vote geography—where 2022 weaknesses improved, which panchayats returned, and where second place can flip with targeted alliances.
- Congress: Run a precinct-level audit—cadre discipline, candidate ballast, and a message that speaks in the granular, not the generic.
- WPD and allies: Move from moment to movement—organisation, service delivery, internal dispute resolution.
- BJP: Either commit to years of ground labour in rural Majha—co-operatives, market linkages, veterans’ networks, panchayat ladders—or pursue a principled détente with old frenemies.
Tarn Taran’s by-poll reaffirms our central hypothesis. It cannot foretell the fate of 2027, settle anti-incumbency across Malwa, or proclaim an ideological realignment of Punjab. What it does tell us is clearer and humbler: AAP’s machine not only converts but can win decisively; SAD (Badal) is recognised by voters as the authentic Akali address—rather than the Amritpal-linked experiment or the Giani Harpreet Singh–led outfit; the radical swell of 2024 looks spent rather than surging; Congress must rediscover its district sinews; and the BJP’s path in Panthic heartlands still runs through years of ground labour—or a carefully reconstructed alliance, the contours of which remain to be seen.
Treat this verdict as evidence, not augury. The barometer, if you must look for one, lies some distance down the road.
KBS Sidhu is a former IAS officer who retired as Special Chief Secretary, Punjab. He tweets @kbssidhu1961. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)