Chandigarh: Standing on a stage in Haryana’s Ambala, a town barely an hour’s drive from the Punjab border, Union Home Minister Amit Shah spoke about Punjab’s farmers Thursday. He then asked the people of the state to vote for a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government.
Shah said he had been touring Punjab these days and found farmers carrying banners that demanded a guarantee on the minimum support price (MSP). He said Congress leader Rahul Gandhi had handed them a “ghunghuna”, a toy rattle, by promising to fulfil their MSP demand.
He then turned to Haryana. Shah said the state government led by Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini was procuring 24 crops at MSP. He asked the people of Punjab to bring the BJP to power in the coming Assembly elections. Then, almost in the same breath, he corrected the line and said they should vote the NDA to power.
That quick correction is what political circles in Punjab are discussing. The BJP has no ally in the state at present. The only party that was ever part of the NDA in Punjab is the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD).
When contacted by The Print, the BJP’s state media head, Vineet Joshi, said the party was preparing to contest all 117 seats on the lotus symbol. A senior BJP leader, who did not want to be named, was less categorical. “Nothing can be ruled out in politics,” he said.
This is not the first time Shah has used the word NDA for Punjab. Earlier, in Delhi, he had said Punjab was set to have an NDA government this time. SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal responded the next day that the party had kept its alliance options open.
When the BJP and SAD broke apart
The BJP and the Akali Dal had been partners for nearly 25 years. The alliance, built in the mid-1990s, was based on a simple division of ground. The SAD held the Sikh peasantry of the countryside, and the BJP held the Hindu traders and voters of the towns. In that arrangement, the BJP was the junior partner and contested a fraction of the seats—the party contested 23 out of 117 in 2017, the last assembly election the two parties fought together.
The break came in September 2020. The SAD walked out of the NDA over the central government’s three farm laws, which were later repealed after a year-long protest by farmers. Since then, the two parties have fought elections separately.
The numbers since then tell two different stories. In the 2022 assembly elections, the SAD, fighting with the Bahujan Samaj Party, won only three of the 117 seats. The BJP won two. The Akali vote share, which stood at over 25 per cent in 2017, fell to about 18 per cent.
The Lok Sabha elections of 2024 were different. The BJP failed to win a single seat in Punjab, but its vote share rose sharply, from about 9.6 per cent in 2019 to about 18.5 per cent. The SAD managed to win only one seat, Bathinda, and its vote share fell to about 13 per cent from around 27.5 per cent.
Each party can read these numbers in its own way. The BJP has shown it can draw votes on its own, but it has not converted them into seats. The SAD has lost ground, but it remains the main political face of the Jat Sikh farmers, who dominate Punjab’s countryside and decide the outcome in a large number of rural seats.
That is why MSP figured so prominently in Shah’s speech. Farmers in Punjab have been demanding a legal guarantee on MSP, and the BJP has to answer them if it wants to enter the Malwa and Majha belts. An Akali partner could help it with that.
For now, neither side has spoken of a pact. But the shift from “BJP” to “NDA” in a speech at Ambala was not missed in Punjab.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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