The shadow of jailed Amritpal Singh: Punjab has seen this movie before

The fledgling Waris Punjab De, formed in January 2025, has also been attracting leaders from other parties, most notably Manpreet Singh Ayali, a SAD (Badal) MLA who crossed over and joined it in May this year.

So, is Punjab witnessing the political return of Amritpal Singh, or is it yet another search for a panthic alternative that usually fades once the emotional charge dissipates?

Punjab’s history shows that such moments are not unusual. Whenever the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) appears unable to channel Sikh political aspirations, new panthic formations emerge, often gaining momentum around a particular leader or grievance, before struggling to build the organisation needed to sustain it.

Amritpal’s political relevance has survived his imprisonment largely because of the remarkable mandate he secured in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Contesting as an Independent, from inside jail, he won Khadoor Sahib by almost two lakh votes. Another winner was Sarabjit Singh Khalsa, the elder son of Beant Singh, one of the assassins of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, who emerged victorious from Faridkot.

Many interpreted these victories as an endorsement of radical Sikh politics. On the ground, the picture was more layered. A couple told this reporter that their sympathy lay with Amritpal because of the Punjab Police’s sweeping crackdown during the month-long manhunt for him in April 2023. Many youngsters were detained and the Internet was suspended for almost a week in parts of Punjab. Others admired his anti-drug campaign, while some were drawn to his repeated articulation of Sikh grievances.

That momentum, however, proved short-lived. In the November 2025 Tarn Taran Assembly bypoll, a seat within Amritpal’s Khadoor Sahib Lok Sabha constituency, the Waris Punjab De candidate finished a distant third, with 19,620 votes. The Aam Aadmi Party retained the seat, while the SAD (Badal) candidate finished second with 30,558 votes, signalling the first signs of organisational recovery for the once-dominant party.

The result underscored both the limits of Amritpal’s appeal when he was not on the ballot, and the residual strength of traditional Akali machinery in rural Majha. It also exposed Waris Punjab De’s failure to develop a village-level network, which had once made the Akalis formidable.

Rise of Amritpal

After spending several years in Dubai, a clean-shaven Amritpal, then just 29, had returned to Punjab in 2022. Almost overnight, he had reinvented himself as “Bhai Saheb”, complete with a blue turban, flowing white robes and a spear.

His dastarbandi (installation) as head of Waris Punjab De, the organisation founded by actor-activist Deep Sidhu, took place at Rode, the ancestral village of Khalistan ideologue Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, in September 2022, amid shrill sloganeering and calls for a separate Sikh nation.

For many Punjabis who had lived through the turbulence of the late 1970s and 1980s, the symbolism was unmistakable and unsettling.

His amrit sanchar (baptism) drives, called “Khalsa Vaheers”, launched in November 2022, his call to shun drugs and embrace religion, and his often exaggerated and unsubstantiated accounts of injustice against Sikhs evoked memories of another era and another man who became larger than life.

“Sikhs should learn from the Palestine struggle,” he told this reporter.

While youngsters with no memory of the militancy era were drawn to him on social media, their parents remained and still remain fearful of the consequences for Punjab. This generational divide is the most noteworthy feature of his appeal: drugs, unemployment, migration and a sense of discrimination animate the young; while the older generation remembers the cost of similar rhetoric.

The security dimension, however, cannot be ignored. Successive NSA detention orders have cited the siege of Ajnala Police Station in Amritsar in February 2023 by Amritpal and his men, the alleged creation of an “armed outfit” called Anandpur Khalsa Fauj through de-addiction centres, alleged links with Canada-based extremists and gangsters, provocative letters from jail calling for revenge over killings of pro-Khalistan figures abroad, and intelligence inputs about a hit-list targeting critics, including former associates.

After his third NSA detention ended in April this year, Amritpal was re-arrested in the Ajnala case and remains in Dibrugarh Central Jail. The Punjab government has successfully argued before the High Court that his return continues to pose a threat to public order.

Any political project built around Amritpal, therefore, will have to contend not only with the ballot box but also with the state’s security concerns.

A familiar story

It is the decline of SAD, once the unchallenged voice of Sikh politics since its birth in 1920, that has created the space Amritpal occupies.

Yet there is a historical paradox. Ever since the 1966 reorganisation of Punjab into a Sikh-majority state, Akalis have never formed a government here on their own, with the only exception being the Surjit Singh Barnala government of 1985. But it too enjoyed the tacit support of the Congress after then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi inked an accord with Akali leader Sant Harchand Singh Longowal in July 1985.

That history may explain why Manpreet Singh Ayali, the de facto face of Waris Punjab De in Amritpal’s absence, recently emphasised that the party stands not only for Sikhs but also for Hindus, Muslims and all Punjabis.

The coming Assembly elections will not simply determine the fortunes of a jailed Member of Parliament. It will test whether a generation that has grown up after militancy still seeks answers in religious assertion, or whether Punjab’s politics can produce a new vocabulary that speaks to jobs, drugs and migration without reopening old wounds.

So far, Amritpal’s personal charisma has not translated into durable organisational power. Waris Punjab De still looks less like the beginning of a new panthic consolidation and more like another challenge to an eroded Akali Dal, and one that thrives on grievance and symbolism.

Punjab has seen this movie before. The ending rarely changes.

(Manraj Grewal Sharma is National Editor, North, The Indian Express.)