The fall of the patriarch: Badal Sr, five-time CM, bows out, loses stronghold Lambi

PM Narendra Modi had once famously called him the Nelson Mandela of Indian politics for his 17 years in prison at various times of his political career, first during the freedom struggle and later during Emergency.

Canvassing in Lambi after a bout with Covid, he had said, “I am a soldier of the party, the party wanted me to contest, for it believes it will win if I join the poll battle.” Unfortunately, Shiromani Akali Dal, which celebrated its 100 years in December 2020, was almost wiped off the poll field, with a mere three seats.

Badal Senior’s fall coincides with the fall of a party that he once presided over, and which was once known for its robust cadre of workers who stood out with their blue turbans and dupattas, omnipresent at morchas on issues that ranged from Punjabi Suba and federal structure for Punjab to remunerative prices for crops.

The biggest charge against him is that he succumbed to “putramoh” when he anointed his son Sukhbir Singh Badal as the party president in 2006, a first for the cadre-based party. But it did not stop at this. When the Akali Dal returned to power for the second successive time in 2012, the Cabinet was one big family with his son Sukhbir as the deputy CM, his son-in-law Adesh Partap Kairon as a minister and his daughter-in-law Harsimrat Badal’s brother Bikram S Majithia as a minister. Harsimrat also contested the LS polls and was elected an MP who went on to become a Union minister.

Badal has always remained defensive on this issue, saying that all the decisions were taken with the “sarv sehmati” of party workers. But slowly, the loyal cadre that kept the party afloat for decades aged and drifted away to be replaced by more questioning and less loyal youngsters. A wily politician, Badal also wielded control over the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, the cash-rich body that manages gurdwaras, and the Akal Takht. But what once came in handy in the politics of the state became a liability when he was blamed for not doing enough to stop the incidents of sacrilege that wracked the state in 2015.

But while it’s easy to blame Badal for self-combusting, history will also remember him as a leader who practised moderate politics. Political observers call him the great reconciler. When Punjab was gripped by militancy in the 1980s, Badal carved a space for moderate politics, and never took an anti-Hindi or anti-India stance. Soon after the end of militancy in the early 1990s, he brokered a pre-poll alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party in 1997, widely seen as a guarantor of communal amity. Earlier, he had forged four post-poll coalitions with the Jana Sangh.

Elected to the Vidhan Sabha 10 times, Badal transformed the panthic party into a Punjabi party that fielded 11 Hindus in the 2012 polls. Even in these polls, Sukhbir took great pride in announcing that the party had fielded the maximum number of Hindu candidates. Hindus, who form 47% of Punjab’s population, saw him as the biggest guarantor of peace.

Bureaucrats remember him as a hands-on CM who would wake up at 5 to read the newspapers and then call up deputy commissioners with a to-do list. He also institutionalised the practice of sangat darshan wherein he would meet people at various places along with officers to solve their problems. Even recently, he confessed that it was the best part of his innings.

Badal, who kept the Akali Dal’s core base of peasantry happy with a slew of subsidies, including free power, faltered badly when it came to the farm bills, going so far as to praise them in a video in August 2021 that did much harm to his image on the ground. He also used freebies such as atta-dal scheme to woo the Dalits, who form 32 per cent of the state’s population.

But his poll mathematics that kept him in power from 2007 to 2017 laid the ground for the entry of the Aam Aadmi Party as Punjab declined under Badal, who failed to address the agrarian crisis and the rising unemployment. From 2008 to 2015, the Badal government witnessed a record 25,000 protests, the highest in India, according to the Bureau of Police Research & Development.

It’s an irony that the patriarch who never distanced himself from people, failed to sense the molten anger against his party.