Opinion Express View: Remembering Parkash Badal Singh, a leader and healer

Parkash Singh Badal towered over politics in Punjab for decades weathering many storms. His political career started at the time of Indian independence — he was elected a sarpanch at the age 20 in 1947. Over seven decades, he witnessed the battle for a Punjabi suba, the Green Revolution and agrarian prosperity, the Anandpur Sahib Declaration, the rise of Sikh militancy, healing and reconciliation within a divided society, peasant distress, migration of youth, flow of drugs and so on. In these years, he won numerous elections and was chief minister five times. His successes and failures influenced the course of political and social life in Punjab; the choices he made shaped the state. Yet, he was no mere regional politician. The Shiromani Akali Dal he helmed and helped transform from a Panthic party to a party of Punjabiyat was a regional force, but Badal, like the late DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi, transcended the limits of regionalism to articulate a politics that subsumed ethno-nationalist impulses under the rubric of a federal India. In that sense, Badal was more of a national leader than a provincial politician.

Like most successful politicians, Badal was a pragmatist. He could read the popular mood and would course correct. He was game for building coalitions even with ideological opposites; he would enter into an election alliance with the Jana Sangh even in the heyday of the Anandpur Sahib resolution, which the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had described as a secessionist document. Secular and liberal in his views, he steered the Akali Dal away from Sikh exclusionism and started to field members of the Hindu minority in elections. In the traumatic years of militancy, Badal was careful that the Akali Dal, the main voice of the Sikh peasantry, did not fall for the extremist line. His sober leadership helped to slowly heal the wounds of the violent 1980s and 90s, marked by the anti-Sikh massacre in the wake of Indira Gandhi assassination, targeted killings in the name of faith, bomb blasts, encounter killings, custodial tortures and so on. On the national plane, he continued to play a pivotal role in building a strong Opposition to the Congress. The Akali Dal stood with the forces that opposed the Emergency and Badal was jailed. It joined the Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance in 1998 and remained in the alliance until 2020, when it became untenable for the party to ally with the BJP due to the groundswell in Punjab against the contentious farm laws.

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In fact, the farmer stir helped to highlight all that had gone wrong in Punjab. This mobilisation that forced the Modi government to backtrack on farm laws also exposed the hollowing out of the Akali Dal as a mass party. The Akali Dal in government had been blind to the agrarian crisis that was brewing in Punjab for years. Populist but lazy policy decisions cloaked as farmer welfare helped to postpone the onset of unemployment and its resultant consequences. Even as mafias and vested interests feasted on a political economy in a shambles, the political mainstream refused to course correct. The Akali Dal, now headed by Sukhbir Badal, finished with just three seats in the assembly elections last year. Now its light gone, Badal’s party stares at an uncertain future. It needs to work hard, think hard to renew and refresh his enduring legacy.