On 20 October, Dussehra day, Amit Shah was in Punjab, meeting families whose sons had been lost to chitta. Two days later, at a function in Delhi on the Yamuna, he drew the political conclusion: drug trade had grown under the AAP government, and the people of Punjab had decided to bring an NDA government to power. He named no partner. Within hours, Sukhbir Singh Badal replied that the Shiromani Akali Dal was open to an alliance with any party that accepted its ideology. He named no party either.
Since then, sources on both sides have been briefing the press, each giving its own party the larger share. I propose to leave that quarrel to them. Whatever the formula, it will be called equitable; Giani Harpreet Singh’s colleagues will be accommodated, from the BJP’s quota or on a symbol of their own; and seniority will be settled not by a seat chart in October but by the number of MLAs each side has on counting day.
Talk of a remarriage has begun. Before Punjab is invited, it is entitled to look at the field, at the first marriage, and at what this one would rest on.
From Promises to Performance
The field is not the one the Akalis and the BJP left in 2020.
The Aam Aadmi Party came in on promises; it must now answer on performance. The freebies and the women’s monthly allowance have not spared it the ordinary wear of incumbency, and the CBI and Enforcement Directorate cases around its leadership cannot all be waved away as political vendetta, however loudly that is said.
Meanwhile, the Congress has a current running in its favour. It is not yet a wave, but it is there. Much of the credit goes to the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief, Pargat Singh — the former Olympian hockey captain, unassuming, matter-of-fact, a team player who brings colleagues along without rubbing anyone the wrong way, and who has shown no appetite for the microphone or the centre of the camera frame. Alongside him, Sachin Pilot brings a youthful force, and a studio clarity the party’s Punjab campaign has long lacked. In a state tired of loud men, a quiet captain and a fresh voice make a combination worth watching.
The remarriage must be read through that lens. It is not two partners combining against a dominant AAP; it is two partners re-entering a three-cornered contest in which the Congress is recovering on its own.
Why the First Marriage Ended
On 3 June 2020, the Union Cabinet approved the three farm ordinances, with Harsimrat Kaur Badal at the table. She and the Akali leadership defended them on camera as good for the Punjab farmer. Then the kisan agitation became a movement no Akali could stand in front of. She resigned on 17 September 2020; the party left the NDA nine days later. The ordinances had not changed. The mood in the villages had.
It was the Akalis who walked out of the house, and it is the Akalis who are knocking. When the laws were repealed in November 2021, the cause of the separation was gone, and they did not come back. They did not come back in 2024 either, when Sukhbir framed the contest as the Panth and Punjab against parties run from Delhi. What has changed since is the calendar.
Where It All Began: Dera Sirsa
The Akali decline did not begin with the farm laws, and a remarriage will not reverse it.
It began at Dera Sirsa. In September 2015 the Akal Takht pardoned the Dera Sacha Sauda chief — a decision the Panth widely laid at the door of the political leadership — and withdrew the pardon within weeks. Then came the sacrilege at Bargari, and on 14 October 2015, the police firing on peaceful protesters at Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan, where two men died. The party that had formed the government in 2012 fell to fifteen seats in 2017 and to three in 2022. It has not recovered from that October, now eleven years behind us.
The Dera chief has since been convicted in CBI cases. He serves his sentence in a Haryana jail, under a BJP government, and has walked out on parole and furlough more than a dozen times, to crowds and cavalcades. The sacrilege cases were handed to the CBI in 2015, and the CBI later sought to close them. The trials have still not reached a verdict.
None of this is incidental. A Haryana government does not keep opening the Dera chief’s prison gate against the wishes of its party leadership in Delhi. If the SAD remarries the BJP, it moves into the same house as the government that holds the key. How do the Akalis explain that to the families of Behbal Kalan? Why is the trial not moving? And whom does the delay suit?
The Easy Tray
Gifts are exchanged at a remarriage too. Of the twelve questions I placed before the Prime Minister on 1 October, several sit easily on the shagun tray:
The Bandi Singhs who have completed their sentences — completing a notification the Centre itself issued in 2019.
The BSF fence moved to the zero line, with flood and border works along the Ravi.
Relief for indebted farmers, and an end to arrest, kurki and nilami for their dues.
The Cash Credit Limit guarantee shifted to the Union.
A Central Act on the Indus waters, Kartarpur Sahib reopened when security allows, and a Central Sikh University.
None has a Haryana angle; none threatens either party’s base. If an announcement comes, expect it with these gifts, timed to Bandi Chhor Divas on 8 November or Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s Gurpurab on 24 November.
The Old Grievances
Then there are the matters neither family will raise at the milni.
No general election to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee has been held since 2011. The Chief Commissioner, Gurdwara Elections, functions under the Union Home Ministry; only the Union can complete the rolls and notify a schedule. It has not, and the House elected fifteen years ago still sits with the Badal camp.
In the Kotkapura firing case, a Special Investigation Team chargesheet of February 2023 names Sukhbir Singh Badal, then Deputy Chief Minister holding Home, among the accused. He denies the charge and has said he has full faith in the judiciary. With the trial now at Chandigarh, the Union could appoint an independent Special Public Prosecutor without reference to the State. It has not.
Add the rivers and Chandigarh, on which a BJP government in Haryana guarantees silence, and the list of grievances runs longer than the list of gifts.
The Opposition’s Easiest Brief
This is where a coherent opposition would write its case, and the Congress most of all. Its charge would be that two parties which have quarrelled for six years over everything else have quietly agreed on four things: the Dera chief’s paroles, the stalled sacrilege trials, an SGPC left unelected so that the shrines stay with the new mahants, and a prosecutor never appointed.
The third deserves a sentence of its own. In the fifteen years since 2011, an entire generation of Sikh youth has crossed the SGPC voting age of twenty-one without ever voting for the Panth’s own mini-parliament. A Sikh born in 1995 has voted in three Lok Sabha elections and two Assembly elections, and never once in his own gurdwara election.
The charge would be hypocrisy, and the record would carry it. Whether the Congress can make that case coherently, without the infighting that has cost it before, is its own test.
No Cakewalk
Even remarried, the arithmetic is unkind.
Giani Ji and his colleagues get a consolation prize: a handful of tickets they must win on their own goodwill, with little help from either partner’s machine.
The deras offer no shortcut. Dera Beas has never openly directed its followers’ votes, and in the Doaba, Dera Ballan and the Charanjit Singh Channi factor pull towards the Congress, not the alliance.
At the Panthic end, the hardliners who never forgave Sukhbir will say he is shaking hands with the Sangh again, and some of his remaining vote may drift to the Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) of Amritpal Singh.
At the other end, the BJP counts on the Hindu vote moving with it whole. Many urban Hindu traders, however, have long been comfortable with the Congress. They remember Capt Amarinder Singh’s two terms, rightly or wrongly, as years when businesses were protected and the extortion call of recent times was not the talk of the bazaar. For that voter, the safer refuge may not be the lotus.
Convenience, Reconciliation, or Commitment
That leaves three outcomes.
A remarriage of convenience. The vows are renewed at the Gurpurab, the easy tray is distributed, and the Dera, the SGPC and the prosecutor go unmentioned. It lasts as long as the arithmetic does.
Reconciled, not remarried. Warm words, a few gifts, separate houses — the BJP keeping Punar Surjit close and Sukhbir guessing. Intimacy without consummation. It suits the BJP better than the Akalis, who need a wedding to show their cadre.
A commitment. Before the vows, at least one old grievance is settled: an SGPC election schedule notified, an independent prosecutor appointed, or the Dera chief’s next parole application refused. None costs the alliance anything. Each would cost the Akalis something. That is precisely why it would prove the union is about more than 2027.
I do not expect the third. Politics is about time and timing. Punjab, however, remembers the first marriage — and it remembers the egregious morning of 14 October 2015 better still.