History shows only politics could have propelled SAD to quit NDA, not “Sikh issues”

On 26 September, the Shiromani Akali Dal announced that it was breaking away from National Democratic Alliance, ending a 24-year-long partnership with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The announcement came on the heels of the central government’s decision to enact into law three controversial ordinances regarding the procurement and sale of agricultural produce. Sukhbir Singh Badal, the SAD’s president, tweeted that the reason behind the split was the centre’s “stubborn refusal to give statutory legislative guarantees to protect assured marketing of crops on #MSP and its continued insensitivity to Punjabi and #Sikh issues.” Badal’s explanation seems disingenuous and politically motivated for multiple reasons. 

Over the course of the last five decades, the Sangh Parivar has exhibited insensitivity towards Sikhs on multiple instances. Yet, the SAD continued to forge ties with its political outfits, the BJP and its predecessor the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, and yield electoral rewards. Recent years have been different—the SAD has seen lukewarm success and has been facing increasing criticism within Punjab. The party’s history with the BJP shows that its decision to sever ties with the NDA is more likely an attempt to repair the damage it caused by allying with the Hindu majoritarian party, rather than a move triggered by any commitment to Sikh issues.

Before allying with the BJP in 1996, the SAD had partnered with Jan Sangh, multiple times. In 1967, an alliance of the SAD, the Jan Sangh and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) installed the first non-Congress chief minister in Punjab. A decade later, the SAD’s Parkash Singh Badal was appointed as the chief minister, after the party again allied with the Jan Sangh. 

The next fifteen years saw widespread militancy in the state, and multiple transgressions by BJP members against Sikhs. One of the gravest of these was committed by a former BJP legislator in 1984, months ahead of Operation Blue Star, a military operation to eliminate militants from the Golden Temple in Amritsar during Indira Gandhi’s Congress government. Details of this incident were published by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which manages gurdwaras across the country, in a white paper titled, “Truth About Punjab,” in 1996. It mentioned that a group called the Rashtriya Hindu Suraksha Samiti had organised a bandh—strike—in February 1984. The paper mentioned, 

In pursuance of the Bandh call by the Samiti on February 14, 1984, mobs gathered at as many as fifty six places in Amritsar and indulged in sacrilegious activities against the Sikh Gurus, Sikh religion and their religious institutions. At the Amritsar railway station, a replica of the Darbar Sahib was broken into pieces. A picture of the fourth Sikh Guru Ram Das, on display for the past several years, was damaged beyond recognition and a lighted cigarette was struck into it. The shitting and pissing on the picture was a part of the highly sacrilegious and provocative act of the mob, led by Harbans Lal Khanna, Ex-MLA and district President of the BJP. 

Khanna was subsequently killed on 2 April. Two months later, Operation Blue Star left hundreds of innocent bystanders dead, and the Golden Temple in ruins. According to a July 2019 report in The Caravan, a few weeks before Blue Star, “the BJP leaders LK Advani and AB Vajpayee sat on a dharna in Delhi, demanding that the armed forces be sent into the Golden Temple … After Operation Blue Star, there were several reports stating that the RSS distributed laddus in celebration of the military action.” 

Indira Gandhi was killed that year, and an anti-Sikh pogrom followed. While the violence occurred under Congress leadership and supervision, a number of BJP and RSS leaders were also involved in it according to The Caravan’s July 2019 report. “At least 49 members of the BJP and Sangh are named in the 14 first information reports registered at the Delhi City police station after the massacre,” the report mentions. “A look at those FIRs shows that a number of BJP and Sangh leaders were booked on charges of murder, arson and rioting in the areas of Hari Nagar, Ashram, Bhagwan Nagar and Sunlight Colony. One of the people named in the FIRs is Ram Kumar Jain—a poll agent for Vajpayee during the 1980 Lok Sabha elections.”

Yet, the SAD turned a blind eye to these incidents and continued to align with the BJP. In 1996, the SAD forged a pre-poll alliance with the BJP for the Lok Sabha elections, after which Vajpayee formed a short-lived government. The next year, the parties came together for the Punjab assembly elections in 1997 and emerged victorious. Parkash became the chief minister again. 

Over the past few years, the SAD has appeared to prioritise siding with the BJP over sticking to its own statements. This is well demonstrated with the party’s political flip-flop on federalism and Kashmir. Between 1960 and 1990, the SAD issued resolutions and statements  supporting greater autonomy to the states at least four times. This included the 1973 Anandpur Sahib resolution that emphasised the importance of “autonomy to states” and the federal structure in India. The resolution was moved by Gurcharan Singh Tohra, the SGPC president at the time, and endorsed by the SAD. It mentioned: 

As such, the Shiromani Akali Dal emphatically urges upon the Janata Government to take cognizance of the different linguistic and cultural sections, religious minorities as also the voice of millions of people and recast the constitutional structure of the country on real and meaningful federal principles to obviate the possibility of any danger to the unity and integrity of the country and, further, to enable the states to play a useful role for the progress and prosperity of the Indian people in their respective areas by a meaningful exercise of their powers.

In May 2014, Parkash—the chief minister and the SAD president at the time—had said that “decisions on issues like Article 370 should not be taken in haste.” He expressed confidence that Narendra Modi would take a call on such issues “only after due consultation with the entire political leadership of the country.”  

The SAD appeared to have forgotten these statements last year, when the BJP-led central government stripped Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in August 2019 and brought it under the control of the centre. Sukhbir endorsed the move in Parliament and said, “I stand in support of the Bill presented by Honourable Home Minister scrapping Article 370 and 35 A.” Harsimrat Badal, who was a union cabinet minister at the time, also termed the bills as achievements. News reports had pointed out the Badals’ hypocrisy at that time as well. 

Despite its strong commitment to the BJP, the SAD seemed to have become dead weight to the ruling party. The SAD has a minuscule presence in the legislative assembly and Parliament—it won a mere 15 seats out of 117 in the 2017 Punjab assembly elections and holds five seats in Parliament. In the 2019 general elections, the BJP won 303 seats. The Congress won 41 percent of the votes from Punjab and the SAD won only 28 percent. Subsequently, the SAD and the BJP failed to zero down on an amicable seat-sharing ratio for the state elections in Haryana and Delhi, in October 2019 and February 2020, respectively. The BJP still managed to form a government in Haryana. 

As I reported in September this year, the SAD initially supported the farm ordinances and parroted the centre’s narrative. On 26 August, Narendra Singh Tomar, the minister of agriculture, wrote to Sukhbir that the ordinances were meant for “safeguarding the best interest of the farming community.” Soon after, Sukhbir reiterated Tomar’s statement in a virtual press conference, and defended the ordinances, emphasising that they were in the interest of farmers. Several experts have dismissed this view. Meanwhile, fierce protests against the bills continued, as did criticism of the SAD for not opposing the policy change. 

On 17 September, Harsimrat resigned from the union cabinet in protest over the farm bills. Madan Mohan Mittal, a BJP leader, subsequently dared the SAD to pull out of the NDA, according to a report published on 23 September in The Tribune. “The SAD cannot get a majority if they contest 94 seats and, hence, the BJP will contest 59 seats,” he said, referring to the 2022 state elections. The parties had allied for the 2017 state elections as well, with the BJP contesting 23 of the total 117 seats. 

I interviewed Sukhbir three days after he tweeted the SAD’s decision to the quit the NDA. During the conversation, he termed the SAD’s alliance with BJP in 1996 as “a symbol of peace and communal harmony.” When I referred to Khanna’s acts of sacrilege, Badal replied, “In 1984, I was too small. I am not aware of exactly what happened at that time. So, I don’t go back that far.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, Badal claimed that the SAD had opposed the farm bills. “Harsimrat gave an official note also to the prime minister while opposing it,” he said. “For the past four months, we were trying to bridge the gap between the farmers and the government.” He demurred from his stance on Article 370 as well. “We never welcomed the decision in the Parliament, we participated in the debate,” Badal claimed. He maintained that the BJP does not know “how to keep their allies together.” But when I asked whether he believed that the BJP was anti-minority or anti-Sikhs, Badal replied, “I think it is not the right time to answer that question.”