3 terms as MLA, never an MP: Will Sukhpal Singh Khaira’s tryst with Lok Sabha polls give him a second chance

Even recently, unlike other Congress leaders, Khaira spoke against Arvind Kejriwal when he was arrested by the ED in Delhi liquor policy scam.

Son of Akali stalwart Sukhjinder Singh Khiara, who also served as education minister of Punjab, Khaira chose to deviate from the SAD and decided his own political path by starting as a panchayat member from his native village Ramgarh in Kapurthala when he was 29.

While his father was Akali Dal’s Bholath MLA in 1977, 1980 and 1985, Khaira, a graduate from Bishop Cotton school in Shimla, became the Punjab Youth Congress vice-president in 1997 after joining the party the same year.

Khaira himself is a three-time MLA from Bholath constituency in Kapurthala district.

His first victory came as a Congress MLA in 2007 when Congress was in opposition in Punjab after two failures in 1997 and in 2002. However, he lost to SAD’s Bibi Jagir Kaur in 2012.

He was also the party’s spokesperson during the 2012 Assembly elections but he resigned from the post after Congress’ defeat that year. In 2015, he joined the AAP and was elected as AAP MLA from Bholath in 2017.

He was also appointed as the leader of opposition (LoP). However, in July 2018, he was removed as LoP by AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal with just an announcement through a social media post. An apparently upset Khaira then started speaking in the open against Kejriwal and days after that, he was suspended from the party.

He resigned as AAP’s Bholath MLA in March 2019. In his first tryst with Lok Sabha elections, Khaira formed his own party — Punjab Democratic Alliance — in 2019 and contested general elections from Bathinda against SAD’s Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Congress’s Amrinder Singh Raja Warring and AAP’s Baljinder Kaur.

While his party couldn’t even clinch a single seat, he himself finished fourth by securing only 38,199 votes. Reeling under defeat, he did a ghar wapsi of sorts and rejoined the Congress in June 2021. The next year, he again won the Bholath Assembly seat on Congress ticket despite a huge AAP wave in the area.

For Khaira, this will be his second chance at contesting a Lok Sabha elections but this time from a different seat.

He has been pitted against AAP candidate and state cabinet minister Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer, sitting MP and SAD (Amritsar) president Simranjit Singh Mann and SAD’s candidate and former Dhuri MLA Iqbal Singh Jhundan. BJP is yet to make an announcement on the seat.
While Sangrur became the centrestage after its MP Bhagwant Mann became the CM in 2022, the seat has over the years has seen different parties at its helm.

AAP first won Sangrur in 2014 when Mann defeated SAD’s Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa by a margin of over 2 lakh votes. In 2019, Mann won the seat again but this time, the margin reduced by half. A bypoll was necessitated in 2022 after Mann resigned as MP after being elected as Dhuri MLA and eventually became the CM. However, in June 2022, Sangrur surprised the ruling AAP, which had won 92 seats in the state assembly in March 2022, by giving it away to Simranjit Mann of SAD (Amritsar). AAP’s embarrassing defeat was attributed to singer Sidhu Moosewala’s murder a month before the bypoll, inaccebility of its elected representatives as major factors.

However, keeping his Lok Sabha fate in the past, Khaira, who is considered as an outsider for Sangrur, has already started his campaign.
He posted a video of Ranike village of the CM’s Dhuri constituency of a dilapidated government dispensary where a pharmacist works for “just Rs 11,000 per month”.

When asked, Khaira said that he deviated from the SAD and joined the Congress on his father’s advise. “My father always had ideological differences with Parkash Singh Badal. He asked me to choose my own path and focus on my growth as by then he had realised that Akali Dal will just remain a family party,” he said, adding that “over the years, the Congress hasn’t disappointed him ever”.

When asked about his campaign plans, Khaira said that he will visit the constituency in the next few days.

“My real contest is with sitting MP Simranjit Singh Mann and AAP stands no chance in the seat,” said Khaira, who is also the chairman of All India Kisan Congress (the party’s farmer cell).