Maharaja Ranjit Singh still looms large over Punjab. His portrait hangs in the chief minister’s office in Chandigarh. Across the state, maps of the undivided kingdom he once ruled can still be found painted on tractors and trucks. Even in Parliament, there is a 32-foot statue of the Sikh ruler on horseback. The idea of Khalsa Raj, epitomised by his rule, has an emotional appeal, even if it rarely moves beyond rhetoric.
And now the BJP, eyeing larger ground in the border state, is invoking it. On June 27, the 187th anniversary of the maharaja’s death, it organised chabeels (kiosks serving sweet water; a Punjab summer ritual) across all 117 assembly seats. A week earlier, BJP national president Nitin Nabin, on his first visit to the state, promised a Punjab like the one under the maharaja’s rule. The party’s first Jat Sikh state president, Kewal Singh Dhillon, put up a portrait of the maharaja in the BJP’s Chandigarh office.
“We have started a drive based on Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s vision,” said Pritpal Singh Baliawal, BJP spokesperson. “It is the same as Modi ji’s ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’. Ranjit Singh donated gold not only for the Golden Temple but also for the Mahakal temple in Ujjain. So we are talking about Khalsa Raj in Punjab because we’ve seen three or four governments—the Akali Dal, the Congress and the AAP—and we want to offer a form of governance where everyone is respected.”
Punjab is the only major border state not in the BJP’s grasp. Apart from having power in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, it is part of Conrad Sangma’s coalition in Meghalaya. The lieutenant governor controls security in Jammu and Kashmir. And in Himachal Pradesh, the BJP alternates in and out of power with the Congress. So, the ambitions in Punjab are linked to national security—zero tolerance on cross-border narcotics and arms smuggling, terror financing and watchfulness over demographic change. After 15 years of patient organisational work delivered in West Bengal, the party believes the same can work in Punjab, too.
Offering a window of hope is the churn in Sikh politics. The Sikh apex body, the Akal Takht, has been on a collision course with Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s regime.
The BJP’s engagement with Panthic symbolism sharpened on June 6, when Maharashtra minister Girish Mahajan addressed a gathering on the anniversary of Operation Bluestar. This was the first time a minister from a BJP government had done so. With a portrait of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as the backdrop, he called those killed in 1984 martyrs and the army action an invasion. The party later termed it Mahajan’s “personal opinion”.
The BJP calls these moves engaging with “different verticals”. Along with its Panthic engagement, its outreach to deras, including the Dera Sachkhand Ballan, often called the “Mecca of dalits”, is crucial. Punjab has a dalit population of around 34 per cent, concentrated in Doaba’s Ravidassia community, a bloc the Congress once owned, and one the AAP never fully consolidated. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February visit to the dera for Guru Ravidas Jayanti was followed within weeks by a Padma Shri for its chief, Sant Niranjan Das.
Dhillon’s appointment as state president in late May illustrates both intent and limits. At 75, a businessman who built his political career in the Congress before crossing over in 2022, he is not the grassroots organiser many in the BJP wanted. But, symbolically, he is a Jat Sikh face from the Malwa belt, which has 69 seats. Baliawal said Dhillon had taken on organisational responsibilities and toured the state as vice-president, and that he was the workers’ choice.
Congress president Raja Warring said the BJP was being “forced to outsource Punjab leadership”, and termed the invocation of Khalsa Raj bogus.
Analysts see the outreach to Sikhs, particularly the politically influential Jats, as the party’s attempt to soften its standing with the Sikh peasantry, alienated after the three farm laws of 2020. Prof Ashutosh Kumar, who teaches political science at the Panjab University, Chandigarh, pointed out that 96 per cent of agricultural land is owned by Jats. “British-era land settlements classified Jats an agricultural caste while excluding Banias, Khatris and Aroras from farm ownership regardless of wealth, a structure that persists today as urbanisation and land sales to developers slowly erode it,” he said.
There is also a more conventional caste calculation. Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini—Punjabi-speaking and from an OBC background—is now the party’s most visible face in the state, turning up regularly in a turban at rallies over the past year. He carries particular weight in 18 to 22 constituencies bordering Haryana, and among OBC and Saini communities in Doaba and lower Malwa, including the Anandpur Sahib and Ropar belts.
The party also made Taranjit Singh Sandhu—the Amritsar-born former ambassador to the US, who contested and lost the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat in 2024—the lieutenant governor of Delhi, a perch from which he stays visible nationally. It secured another “vertical” when seven of the AAP’s 10 Rajya Sabha MPs joined it. They represent the urban vote bank, including trading communities.
At the micro-level, the BJP has gone to the villages. Across the state, its workers have helped residents with Central schemes, pension cards and PM Kisan KYC registration—taking beneficiaries from roughly two lakh to eleven lakh.
During the recent local body polls, the BJP claims it saw its flags reach rural areas for the first time, covering “70 per cent” of the state. Baliawal puts the party’s rural vote share at over 18 to 18.5 per cent—blocks where it earlier got six or seven votes now give it 300 or more. The party claims to have covered 80 per cent of the state’s 24,000 booths. During Nabin’s visit, it held a convention of 11,000 heads who look after three to five booths each.
With less than six months to polls, the BJP has taken up broad themes: Drug-free and gangster-free in two years, a return to “Rangla Punjab” (a prosperous, thriving state), job creation, border-area development, relief from the state’s debt burden and MSP on 24 crops from the state government, modelled on Haryana (rather than relying on Central procurement). It has also raised religious conversions among dalit Sikhs, citing the growth of Pentecostal churches.
Given the party has hardly existed beyond urban limits, observers note its aggression but remain sceptical. But the BJP says it will contest all 117 seats, ruling out a return to the Akali Dal, which has been in decline since losing power in 2017. A senior party functionary said they will take a final call on an alliance closer to the polls.
Kumar does not think the BJP expects Sikh votes en masse. He argued that an Akali alliance remains the party’s most realistic path to recovery, though he doubts it will happen given resistance in local leadership. More likely, in his reading, is a strategy of attrition, with factions from the Akali Dal and ticket aspirants shunned by the AAP joining the ranks. In fact, a breakaway faction of the Akali Dal, now called Akali Dal (Punar Surjit), has said the BJP may not be a pariah if it clarifies its stance on Panthic issues. But any alliance talks would hit the same sticking point: neither side wants to play second fiddle.
The prominence of Panthic issues could instead open a door for jailed MP Amritpal Singh’s Waris Punjab De. In 2024, in the same general election in which the BJP had nearly doubled its vote share to 18.5 per cent contesting alone, he had also won.
For now, the contest appears to be between the ruling AAP and the Congress. The AAP won more than 50 per cent of the seats in recent local body polls, with the Congress coming second. But both face challenges: the AAP is on the warpath with the Akal Takht, while Congress leaders fight among themselves.
