sukhbir-badal-vanishes-from-akali-posters

An interesting feature of the 2024 General Elections campaign in Punjab has been that most of the candidates belonging to the Shiromani Akali Dal-Badal have avoided putting up the pictures of their party president Sukhbir Singh Badal on their posters, banners and hoardings. 

 

Compared to that, candidates from other parties like the AAP, the BJP and the Congress are extensively using the pictures of their central leaders in posters and banners. 

 

Except in Bathinda, where the Akali supremo’s wife Harsimrat Kaur Badal is contesting, none of the other 12 candidates in rest of the constituencies, particularly in the Malwa region, have displayed the pictures of their leader, Sukhbir Badal.

Pictures of veteran Akali leader and five-time Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal have also gone missing from the visuals. At best, there are token small-size pictures, which are otherwise invisible at first glance. 

 

This is reflective of growing apprehension among the cadres and leaders of the party that using Badals’ pictures will not yield them any better dividends, but rather may cost them dearly. This is not a very good indicator of things for the Badals within their party that their workers and representatives are reluctant to use their pictures. 

 

Some leaders admit in private that there is too much aversion against the Badals and that is the reason that their photographs are being avoided by most of the candidates.

 

After the demise of the party patriarch Parkash Singh Badal, the dissenting voices against Sukhbir’s leadership have grown louder and shriller. Much will depend on the outcome of the current General Elections.

 

The Akalis, more so the Badals, will need to win the Bathinda parliamentary constituency, where they are faced with a tough challenge from the ruling Aam Aadmi Party candidate Gurmeet Singh Khudian, who defeated the senior Badal from Lambi in the 2022 assembly elections.

 

This time the Akalis are fighting it independent of the BJP. This will be an additional disadvantage for the Akali candidate. Last time in 2019, Ms Badal had won by a narrow margin of about 21,000 votes only against Amarinder Singh Raja Warring of the Congress. Warring is this time contesting from Ludhiana. 

 

For Sukhbir Badal, the current elections and their aftermath will prove to be a very challenging job to handle. His leadership has been under serious challenge for a long time. The party has lost its traditional base to different political parties including the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress. 

 

The hardliners are also posing a serious challenge with a considerable number of voters drifting towards the hardliners in the constituencies like Sangrur, Khadoor Sahib and Faridkot. If the drift continues unabated, the hardliners are likely to occupy more and more space. Those of moderate thinking who do not want to go along with Congress, have already an option in the AAP.

 

Otherwise known to be progressive and pragmatic, Sukhbir may further be pushed to adopt a more hardline stance owing to both internal as well as external pressures. He was the Deputy Chief Minister and the Home Minister when the ‘Bargadi Sacrilege’ took place. The handling of the situation that left two protestors dead is attributed directly to him.

There was considerable anger against the appointment of Sumedh Singh Saini as the Director General of Police, besides getting the Dera Sacha Sauda chief Baba Gurmit Ram Rahim Singh pardoned for sacrilege by the Akali Takhat.

 

These issues have been haunting the Akali Dal, Sukhbir in particular, since 2017. Although the anger has subsided now, it will take some time for Sukhbir to be accepted as the leader of the party that most Sikhs believe should safeguard and represent the panthic interests. The majority of them feel that Sukhbir is not doing justice to the job. 

 

He will have to find a way out and only he alone can find a way out.

 

Maybe he even knows what is the way out, but that may not be an easy decision to take.