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2nd appeal in a month: Sukhbir again urges dissident Akali leaders to rejoin party
Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Sunday again appealed to breakaway Akali factions to come back to the party fold and put up a united face to take on the national parties in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections
BATHINDA : Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Sunday again appealed to breakaway Akali factions to come back to the party fold and put up a united face to take on the national parties in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
Addressing the party’s annual ‘Maghi conference’ in the historic town of Muktsar, Sukhbir said the Delhi-centric parties are conspiring against the SAD, which, he said, is the only custodian of Punjabis and ‘Panthic’ institutions.
This is the second time within a month that the SAD chief has urged Akali dissident factions to come together under one umbrella. Addressing a gathering on the 103rd foundation day of the SAD in Amritsar on December 14 last year, Sukhbir apologised to the Sikh community for the 2015 sacrilege cases and called upon dissident Akali leaders to unite, saying only a powerful army can defeat the enemies.
But so far, his call has received a lukewarm response with only SAD Delhi’s Manjit Singh GK rejoining the party, while Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, who leads the breakaway faction the Shiromani Akali Dal (Sanyukt) Dhindsa, is yet to take a final call.
On Sunday, Sukhbir urged the splinter groups to consolidate political power as the “Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is taking Punjab towards economic distress”.
Sukhbir gave a call for a united face as political efforts are being made to gain control of the gurdwara management committees in various states.
He also sought “wholehearted” support for the party’s “Punjab Bachao Yatra” scheduled to start on February 1. He called the party sympathisers to defeat the Congress-Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) alliance in the general elections to give power to SAD again which, he said, is only ‘quom di awaz’.
Sukhbir said he was bemused by the repeated electoral preference of Punjabis for the Congress under whose regime a military operation was conducted on the Golden Temple premises in 1984 and SAD, the ‘maa-party‘ of Punjab, was not voted well in the last over a decade.
“Several states have a tradition of preferring regional parties. Electors in Gujarat continue to vote for the works done by Narendra Modi when he was the CM there. Bapu Badal (referring to the former Akali patriarch and his late father Parkash Singh Badal) was the epitome of overall development in Punjab and the party followed in his footsteps. But Punjab’s only regional outfit was left behind in the elections,” he said, making a case for the SAD which is going through the toughest electoral phase.
Unlike the Maghi conference of 2023, no one from the SAD’s political ally, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), was present at the event on Sunday. Last year, flags of the SAD-BSP were visible at the rally and BSP’s senior leadership was there.
