By Ashok Nilakantan Ayers
The SAD-BJP thaw is more interesting than a routine parliamentary numbers game. The immediate trigger is delimitation and women’s reservation, but the larger question is whether two estranged political partners are quietly testing the waters for a reunion before the 2027 Punjab Assembly election. The tension of the renewed alliance rests on: principle or political survival?
The Shiromani Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party have not yet announced that they are getting back together. But politics in Punjab has already begun to sound like a marriage counsellor’s waiting room.
Six years after the Shiromani Akali Dal walked out of the BJP-led NDA over the farm laws, SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal last week met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi. Within a day came the political signal: the Akali’s, once sharply opposed to the Centre’s proposed delimitation formula, now support the government’s plan to implement women’s reservation without delay and increase Lok Sabha seats by roughly 50 per cent.
Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju promptly welcomed the change of heart. That may look like a parliamentary footnote. It isn’t. It could be the first visible sign of a political rapprochement between two parties whose alliance once seemed almost permanent.
The SAD-BJP relationship had been one of India’s longest-running political partnerships. It survived ideological differences because each party brought something the other lacked: the Akalis possessed a deep rural and Sikh organisational network in Punjab, while the BJP supplied an urban Hindu constituency and a powerful national partner. The alliance lasted for roughly 24 years until the farm-law rupture in 2020.
The divorce was not over ideology. It was over Punjab. When the Narendra Modi government pushed through the three farm laws in 2020, Punjab’s farmers became the epicentre of the resistance. For the Akali’s, this was existential. Their political constituency was overwhelmingly tied to agriculture, the mandi system and the rural economy.
Harsimrat Kaur Badal, then the lone SAD minister in the Union Cabinet, resigned in September 2020 in protest. Sukhbir Singh Badal declared that the legislation would hurt Punjab’s agricultural interests. The SAD subsequently broke with the NDA. The calculation was straightforward: remaining with Modi while Punjab’s farmers were on the streets could destroy the Akali Dal’s remaining credibility.
The calculation, however, did not save the party. The 2022 Punjab Assembly election was devastating. The Aam Aadmi Party swept 92 of the 117 seats with about 42 per cent of the vote. The SAD, despite polling 18.38 per cent, won only three seats. The BJP won two.
The message was brutal: the Akali’s had retained a substantial vote but lost their ability to convert that vote into political power. Then came the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Contesting independently for the first time since 1996, SAD won only Bathinda, where Harsimrat Kaur Badal retained the seat. The party finished third or fourth in most constituencies. That is the backdrop to the Badal-Modi meeting.
Why is SAD changing its tune now? The immediate explanation is delimitation. The Modi government wants to operationalise the 33 per cent women’s reservation law before the 2029 Lok Sabha election. Its proposal would increase the Lok Sabha from 543 to 816 seats, with 273 reserved for women. The government has argued that expanding the House allows existing political parties to accommodate women’s reservation without forcing sitting MPs to surrender their constituencies.
The government has also sought to reassure the South that delimitation will not punish states that successfully controlled population growth. Its own figures show, for example, Tamil Nadu rising from 39 to 59 seats, Karnataka from 28 to 42, Kerala from 20 to 30, Andhra Pradesh from 25 to 38 and Telangana from 17 to 26.
Yet this is precisely where the political controversy lies. Southern parties fear that a population-based redistribution will eventually give the populous northern states much greater political weight. That is why the delimitation question is considerably bigger than the women’s quota.
And this is where SAD’s new position becomes useful to the BJP. The government needs a broad political consensus for a constitutional amendment. Its earlier attempt to amend the law was defeated in the Lok Sabha, with 298 members voting for it and 230 against; 352 votes were required for the constitutionally mandated two-thirds majority among those voting.
So, the Akali Dal’s one Lok Sabha member is not going to magically deliver the bill. Nor can SAD’s support by itself solve the Rajya Sabha arithmetic. But political symbolism matters. An old NDA ally moving towards the government’s position makes it easier for Modi to claim that the delimitation formula is not simply a BJP project. It also gives the government another regional party with which to negotiate.
For SAD, meanwhile, supporting women’s reservation is politically difficult to oppose. No party wants to be portrayed as blocking greater representation for women. The ingenious part is that SAD has attached its support to a uniform increase in seats for every state. That allows it to say: we are not surrendering Punjab’s interests; we are supporting a fairer expansion of representation.
But there is a second, less constitutional and far more electoral explanation. Punjab 2027. The ghost of 2020 is no longer alone. The farm laws are gone. The farmers’ agitation has receded from the centre of national politics. The political battlefield in Punjab has changed. The SAD now faces an AAP government, a resurgent Congress and an increasingly ambitious BJP. The BJP, freed from its old alliance with the Akali’s, has built a larger independent political base. Its vote share in the 2024 Lok Sabha election rose sharply compared with its 2022 Assembly performance, giving it a new confidence in Punjab.
For the BJP, an alliance with SAD could provide what it still lacks: deeper rural penetration and a traditional Sikh political network. For SAD, the attraction is obvious: access to the BJP’s national machinery, resources and urban vote.
It is therefore difficult to believe that the Badal-Modi meeting has nothing to do with 2027. The timing is simply too convenient. Yet an alliance would carry enormous risks. Badal remains the major problem. The biggest obstacle to an Akali revival may not be Narendra Modi or Bhagwant Mann. It may be Sukhbir Singh Badal himself. The Badal family remains inseparably associated with the SAD. But that association has become both an asset and a liability.
During the 2007-17 SAD-BJP governments, Punjab’s drug crisis became one of the defining political controversies of the decade. The issue was powerful enough to enter popular culture. Udta Punjab, starring Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh, turned Punjab’s drug problem into a national cinematic controversy. The film explicitly dealt with drug addiction among Punjab’s youth and the social consequences of the crisis.
Dakuaan Da Munda, based on journalist Mintu Gurusaria’s autobiography, went even deeper into the human story: a promising kabaddi player falling into drug addiction and crime before fighting his way back. Its sequel, Dakuaan Da Munda 2, continued the theme. Cinema did not create Punjab’s drug crisis. But it helped cement the public image of a state in which drugs had become intertwined with politics, policing, crime and youth unemployment.
And the Akali’s have never completely escaped that shadow. The most politically damaging case involved Bikram Singh Majithia, Sukhbir Badal’s brother-in-law and a powerful Akali leader. A Punjab Police STF report in 2018 alleged that Majithia had played a role in facilitating the supply of pseudoephedrine to Canadian NRIs in connection with the 2013 drug racket. Majithia denied the allegations. In December 2021, the Punjab Bureau of Investigation registered an NDPS case against him.
It is important not to convert allegations and cases into established guilt. But politically, the damage was already done. The drug issue became shorthand for the failure of successive governments to tackle a crisis that had destroyed families and futures.
There was another blow to the Badal image: the religious controversies and the Akal Takht’s action against Sukhbir Singh Badal. In 2024, he was declared tankhaiya, or guilty of religious misconduct, and later resigned as SAD president. For a party whose political legitimacy is deeply intertwined with Sikh religious identity, this was devastating.
The real test in 2027 is: Has SAD become resurgent in the rural areas and the sikh network that it can challenge the AAP. Will the alliance bring down BJP again in the assembly elections in 2027 as the ghost of 2020 could haunt the people against SADs misdemeanours. The renewal of the alliance seems like a double-edged sword.
The Akali Dal still has something most smaller parties would envy: a recognisable political brand, a historic Sikh constituency, organisational roots and a family name known in virtually every village. Its 18.38 per cent vote share in the 2022 Assembly election shows that it is not dead. It is simply extraordinarily inefficient at converting votes into seats.
The problem is that AAP has occupied the space the Akalis once controlled: the anti-Congress, anti-establishment, Punjabi regional vote. AAP won 92 seats in 2022. Even if its popularity has subsequently weakened, it remains the governing party and has had five years to build its own rural networks. Congress remains another formidable competitor. And now there is the BJP.
That creates a peculiar possibility: SAD and BJP may discover that their interests are once again complementary. The BJP wants Sikh and rural reach. SAD wants urban Hindu votes and a national ally. But a reunion is not guaranteed. Recent reports indicate that the BJP is preparing to contest the 2027 Punjab election independently, even as speculation about an SAD reunion continues.
That may be the smartest position for the BJP: keep the Akalis close enough to negotiate, but not so close that it becomes dependent on them. For SAD, the stakes are much higher. The party has already demonstrated that it can survive outside the NDA. What it has not demonstrated is that it can win without it.
Is it therefore a Marriage of Convenience or an Unholy Alliance that could destroy both, particularly the BJP though in the short-term support from a regional party to delimitation and women’s reservations boosts BJP broadband image. The Badal-Modi meeting should therefore be read less as a completed alliance than as a political audition.
SAD’s support for women’s reservation and a larger Lok Sabha is the respectable constitutional face of the rapprochement. Punjab 2027 is its political subtext. Neither party can openly say that yet.
The BJP would not want to appear desperate for the Akali’s. SAD cannot afford to appear to have forgotten why it walked out of the NDA in the first place. But politics is often about remembering yesterday only until tomorrow arrives.
Six years ago, the Akalis left the BJP because standing with Modi had become politically toxic in Punjab. Today, the Akalis may be discovering that standing apart from Modi has become politically expensive. And the BJP may be discovering the converse: that winning Punjab without the Akalis is possible but winning it with them may be easier.
The real question, therefore, is not whether SAD supports the delimitation bill. It is whether Sukhbir Singh Badal and Narendra Modi have begun negotiating the terms of a second marriage. If they have, Punjab’s voters will be the ultimate marriage counsellors. And they have already shown that they are not sentimental about political divorces. (IPA Service)
