Punjab assembly polls: Who will gain as BJP vows to contest alone in all seats?

Of the four states that will go to polls early next year, three are ruled by the BJP. The party hopes to make a comeback in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Goa. It is in Punjab that the BJP faces a tough test of whether to go to the polls alone or form an alliance with the Akali Dal.

The party has so far maintained that it will contest the polls alone on all 117 seats. The first assertion to this effect came from Home Minister Amit Shah, and the latest from party general secretary (organisation) B.L. Santosh, who is on a two-day visit to Punjab. Santosh said his party will contest all 117 seats and asked the party to strengthen its grassroots network right up to the booth level.

On the other hand, there have been indications that the BJP and Akali Dal could enter into an alliance. This was fuelled by a recent meeting between Akali Dal chief Sukhbir Singh Badal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi. A day later, the party lent its support to the delimitation bill, even though it had just one member in the Lok Sabha, Harsimrat Kaur Badal. Later, Harsimrat too hinted at talks for a possible alliance.

These assertions have left party members and leaders on both sides confused, even as months remain before the polls. State observers argue that both need each other to form a stable government in the state. There are leaders in both parties who also argue for an alliance between the two, saying it is in the national interest.

But given the Akali Dal’s decline and the BJP’s ambitions, the latter wants a bigger share of the alliance, as a number of leaders have joined it in recent years. The party also secured close to 19 per cent of the vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, while the Akali Dal got less than 14 per cent. Clearly, BJP leaders feel there is a case for a greater share of the seats.

Earlier, from 1996 to 2020, the BJP and the Akali Dal fought Punjab elections together, but the BJP was always the junior partner, taking a much smaller share of seats than the SAD. In the 1997 Assembly election, the SAD contested most seats and won 75; the BJP won 18. In 2007, the SAD won 49 seats to the BJP’s 19. In 2012, the SAD won 56 seats to the BJP’s 12. In the 2017 election, the BJP contested 23 of the 117 seats, leaving the rest to the SAD. In 2022, both contested independently after their alliance broke following the farmers’ agitation over the three farm laws.

For the SAD, agreeing to an alliance on the BJP’s terms would mean accepting a status far below what it once had. This would not just translate into the Akali Dal getting fewer seats but could also affect its standing among Sikhs, its core constituency. That is a tricky area both sides would have to negotiate, so that the charge against the Akali Dal of underselling itself would be difficult to wash away.

The BJP, on the other hand, has spent the last two years trying to build its own support base across the state, not just in its old Hindu urban pockets. The outreach runs on several tracks, including Dalits and Jat Sikhs, the community that has traditionally dominated Punjab’s rural politics. The party recently installed Kewal Singh Dhillon, a Jat Sikh, as state president, and elevated Manpreet Singh Badal, nephew of the late Parkash Singh Badal, to national vice-president.

Punjab has the highest Dalit population share of any Indian state, at around a third of the electorate, concentrated in the Doaba belt around Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur. The BJP has courted this vote through outreach to Dalit-dominated deras such as Dera Sachkhand Ballan and by securing national recognition for religious leaders from that community. There is a fourth track aimed at OBCs and non-Jat communities, including Sainis, Kambojs, Ramgarhias and others, courted partly through visits by Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini, who shares a caste background with several of these groups.

As there are still a few months left, if the BJP holds this line of going alone, Punjab would head into 2027 as a genuinely multi-cornered fight, with Congress, AAP, BJP, SAD and a fractured panthic bloc that includes Amritpal Singh’s Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De) and the SAD (Punar Surjeet) faction.

For Congress and AAP, more contestants splitting the anti-incumbency and Sikh votes is, on balance, good news, since it lowers the bar for either of them to finish first. For the SAD, it means fighting a shrinking base on its own. But the BJP on its own may be able to increase its tally, thus building its confidence for a bigger role in the future.