Local Compulsions Force Akali Dal To Leave The NDA Alliance
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2020-09-28 14:29:30
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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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Taken as a standalone event, the divorce between the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) and the NDA is not an earthshaking one. Even though SAD was BJP's oldest ally, dating back to the days when BJP answered by the name Jan Sangh, relations between the two parties had deteriorated over the years. Local politics in Punjab, with the rise of Aam Aadmi Party, had been forcing the SAD to carve out an identity away from the alliance. The farms bills offered it an opportunity, although misplaced, to leave the alliance by citing the anti-farmer nature of the bills. It also alleged that the NDA insulted the Punjabi language by not including it in the official language in J&K.
But taken as a whole vis-a-vis the BJP's relations with its alliance partners in the last few years, the event assumes a greater significance. Although the BJP has got a charismatic leader in Narendra Modi and the benefit of numbers now, it should remember that its rise in national politics after the abysmal low of just 2 Lok Sabha seats in 1984 was on the back of strategic alliances with like-minded parties. Hence, it recent record of broken alliances does not auger well for the party. It has broken off with the Shiv Sena and the AJSU and it has also needled parties that support it in crunch times. Although it is politically suicidal for a party to alter its policy just to accommodate an ally, the BJP could have reached out to SAD and formulated a joint policy to weather the storm in Punjab.
But SAD had other compulsions. When it saw that the farmers, egged on by the vested interests, were taking to the streets and its own workers were questioning it on the changing of the status quo in the new farm policy - one that was benefitting a large number of SAD constituents too - it feared further marginalization in local politics. As it is, it had been pushed to the third place in the last elections. For SAD, it was an existential crisis and it chose the easy way out of breaking up with the party that is now being considered as public enemy number one in the state. But it remains to be seen whether SAD benefits by this decision as the opposition is sure to say that it is shedding crocodile tears, as Punjab's chief minister Amarinder Singh has said, after having been a part of the government when the farm ordinances were first issued.
