On Saturday, Shiromani Akali Dal’s (SAD’s) president Sukhbir Singh announced that his party will form an alliance with the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). This alliance is for the Punjab assembly elections, which will be held next year. Sukhbir Badal also said that the coming together of both parties indicated the arrival of a “new day in politics”.
At a joint press conference today, Sukhbir Singh Badal said, “It is a new day in Punjab politics. The Shiromani Akali Dal and the Bahujan Samaj Party will fight the 2022 Punjab state polls and future elections together.” He added, “Today is a historic day; A big turn in Punjab’s politics.”
The decision to form alliance with the BSP was taken at the SAD’s core committee meeting. In the coalition intended for Punjab election 2022, Mayawati-led BSP will contest the elections from 20 seats out of 117 total seats.
BSP will be fighting from Kartarpur, Jalandhar West, Jalandhar North, Ludhiana north, Pathankot, Amritsar central, Amritsar north and Mohali, among the high profile seats. It will also fight from Phagwara, Hoshiarpur city, Tanda, Dasuya, Chamkaur Sahib, Bassi Patahana, Mehal Kalan, Nawanshahr, Sujanpur, Bhoa, Anandpur Sahib and Payal seats.
The seven states scheduled for election next year are Punjab, Goa, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat.
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Satish Mishra, general secretary of BSP, reached Chandigarh ahead of the meeting. Last week, Sukhbir Badal had announced the Akali Dal’s willingness for a pre-poll alliance with parties other than the Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Badal had stressed that Akali dal would form alliance with any party other than BJP especially after the passage of the contentious farm-laws by the centre.
Last year (September) there was a high-voltage political split, in which SAD pulled out of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the Centre. The split was over the three contentious farm-bills, and it ended a decades-long partnership marked by unflinching loyalty. SAD’s Harsimrat Kaur Badal resigned as the Union minister of food processing industries after the split.
Akali Dal and BSP are coming into alliance 27 years after the 1996 Lok Sabha elections when they had bagged 11 out of 13 seats together in Punjab.
The SAD chief’s wife, Harsimrat Kaur Badal defined the alliance as “the rise of a new dawn of hope”
Harsimrat Kaur tweeted, “SAD_BSP_Alliance announced today symbolizes social, political and religious fraternity and solidarity of all Punjabis. It marks the beginning of the end of the era of darkness spread by 4 yrs of Cong brazen misrule, anarchy, corruption, and total economic collapse in Punjab.”
On Saturday, BSP chief Mayawati dubbed the alliance between the SAD and her party as a new political and social initiative which will usher in progress and prosperity in Punjab.
Prominent leader of SAD, Parkash Singh Badal described the formation of the SAD-BSP alliance as the beginning of a secular, federal democratic revolution in the state and the country for a total socio-economic and political revamp of polity.
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In the 2017 assembly polls, Akali Dal and BSP, which was fighting solo in the state, saw a dip in vote share compared to the 2007 polls. The alliance of Akali Dal-BJP came to power in 2007 before being ousted by the Congress in 2017. INC won an absolute majority in the state by winning 77 seats.
In the 2017 polls, AAP emerged as a major force and got 23.7 percent of the votes. BJP’s vote share went down from 8.28 percent in 2007 to 5.4 percent in 2017.
