With fourth consecutive win, Harsimrat Kaur Badal is Shiromani Akali Dal’s lone saviour

Brief biography: Harsimrat won her first Lok Sabha election in 2009 by defeating the Congress’s Raninder Singh by a margin of over 1.2 lakh votes. Raninder is son of former chief minister Amarinder Singh. In 2014, she defeated her brother-in-law Manpreet Singh Badal by 19,395 votes. Manpreet contested the election on a Congress ticket at that time.

In 2019, she defeated the Congress’s Amrinder Singh Raja Warring by a margin of 21,772 votes. This time she is far ahead of the AAP’s Gurmeet Singh Khudian. She is set to be the lone Akali Dal MP in the Lok Sabha as all other candidates of her party have lost the elections.

Harsimrat was Union minister of food processing from June 2014 to September 2020 under the BJP-led NDA government. She resigned as the minister in protest against the three farm laws that the government later had to repeal under pressure from farmers. The SAD then left the NDA.

Harsimrat campaigned seeking votes as a tribute to Parkash Singh Badal, who passed away in April last year. Posters were put up all over the constituency saying that it is not just a vote but a tribute to “Bapu Badal”.

By the way: In February, during the virtual inauguration of AIIMS by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Bathinda, Harsimrat started talking about farmers protesting at the Punjab-Haryana borders with demands including legal guarantees for minimum support prices. However, she was interrupted by the organisers.

After Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann recited Kikli 2.0 (a spoof) targeting the Badals during the poll campaign, she dared the AAP leader to visit any village without his security detail and see the public response.