Punjab is heading for a four-horse race as all four major parties in the state are contesting alone.
First time Punjab is witnessing a four-cornered election as Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiromani Akali Dal announced to go solo. Both the BJP and SAD contested separately in the assembly elections too, resulting in losses in seats to both parties where BJP managed victory on just one seat while SAD claimed three seats—the party’s lowest performance in the last decade.
With AAP facing anti-incumbency and Congress in confusion after several of its prominent leaders left the party, the BJP-SAD alliance could have been a tremendous force and would have increased their tally. The disagreement over the BJP-SAD alliance is due to the farmer’s protest, a prominent issue in the agrarian state.
However, the BJP seems to be at an advantage, as it has nothing to lose but everything to gain after the breakdown of the alliance. Now it has shunned the role of a younger brother to SAD and is expanding itself in the Punjabi-speaking state with a team of prominent leaders. The list of candidates by the BJP includes three incumbent MPs: Ravneet Bittu from Jalandhar, Preenet Kaur from Patiala, and Sushil Rinku from Jalandhar. Other than this, the list also includes the former ambassador to the US, Taranjit Sandhu from Amritsar, the son of Professor Bishan Singh Samundri the founding vice chancellor of Guru Nanak Dev University.
Speaking on the four-party battle, Prof. Ashutosh Kumar, Department of Political Science, Punjab University, told The Sunday Guardian, “Punjab has always witnessed bipolar contests, and this time too it is heading for the same despite four-party contests without any alliance.” Kumar added that on paper it looks like a four-cornered contest, but on the ground, Akali Dal seems in turmoil because of a leadership problem within the party, and Sukhbir Badal’s image is not much liked by the core Sikh Akali voters, while the BJP is facing heat due to the farmer’s protest, so technically it becomes a bipolar contest between the AAP and Congress.
He emphasized that Akali Dal, being a party of Sikhs, enjoyed power, but the division of Sikh votes in Congress troubled them, so they were in an alliance with the BJP, which has an urban vote bank, and they complimented each other for a long time. But after the SAD-BJP alliance’s split, both are in trouble.
Punjab is the only state where the BJP never prospered in alliance, unlike in Odisha, where they prospered while they were in alliance with BJD, because SAD gave the BJP no choice but to choose their assembly seats or were given a smaller number of seats. The BJP wanted to contest from urban constituencies, but they were not allowed, so local BJP leaders never wanted an alliance with SAD, especially after the rise of Modi in 2014. But they remained in alliance because, due to this, they were able to defeat Congress.