Amarinder Singh, former Punjab chief minister from the Congress and now a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, recently advocated an alliance between the BJP and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) to boost the winnability of both parties in the state. While other BJP leaders have attributed the views as Singh’s personal opinion and said that the central leadership of the party will take a call on any such move, it is worth examining what such an alliance would entail as
- Both the SAD and the BJP have suffered since parting ways in PunjabThe BJP and the SAD entered into an alliance in Punjab for the first time in the 1996 elections. This ended after the SAD withdrew from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2020 in protest against the (now-withdrawn) three farm laws, which triggered a large farmers’ protest in Punjab. The rupture cost a lot for both the SAD and the BJP. While the BJP-SAD alliance won the highest number of assembly constituencies (AC) or parliamentary constituencies (PC) in six of the 12 elections held between 1996 and 2019, the two parties put together won just 4.3% and 7.7% of the ACs and PCs in 2022 assembly and 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the worst performance for both these parties in a long time. To be sure, things had started going downhill for the SAD-BJP alliance even before they parted ways in 2020. The 2020 breakup also came in the backdrop of two back-to-back electoral losses: 2017 assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha elections. See Chart 1: Party-wise seat-share in assembly-Lok Sabha elections in Punjab
- Punjab’s political churn goes beyond the rupture between the BJP and the SADPunjab, today, is India’s only major state with a polity that is decidedly not bipolar. The median Effective Number of Participants (ENOP) for Punjab in the latest assembly elections is 3.23, the highest among all states and union territories with at least seven PCs or more. ENOP is the reciprocal of the sum of squares of the vote share of each candidate in a constituency and decreases with decreasing fragmentation. For example, if three parties poll 40%, 35%, and 25% votes, the ENOP in the AC is 2.9. If this distribution changes to 80%, 15%, and 5%, the ENOP is 1.5. Punjab’s median ENOP was just 2.4 in 2007. The rise in political fragmentation in Punjab is primarily a result of the Aam Admi Party’s (AAP) entry in the state’s politics in 2014, and increased further when the BJP and the SAD parted ways. See Chart 2: Median ENOP in latest assembly election of major states and UTs
- At this level of political fragmentation, the Congress can gain disproportionately from anti-incumbency against the AAP in 2027The Congress won seven out of the 13 PCs in Punjab in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections with a vote share of just 26%. Not only was Congress’s seat share to vote share ratio the highest for major political parties in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, it was also the highest for any of the four major political parties in the state in all Lok Sabha elections since 2014. If one were to add BJP and SAD votes at the PC level in 2024, the picture would change drastically and the hypothetical alliance would end up with a vote share and seat share of 32% and 48.7% when results are disaggregated at the AC level. See Chart 3A: Seat share vote share ratio of Congress, AAP, SAD and BJP in 2024 See Chart 3B: Hypothetical SAD-BJP alliance performance at AC level
- Compelling as the mathematical case is for the resurrection of the alliance between the BJP and the SAD is, politics is not always driven by arithmetic. There was a lot of bad blood between the two parties during the farmers’ agitation and there is good reason to believe that some of that animosity among farmers vis-à-vis the BJP still persists in the state. However, politics is always the art of the possible and if the alliance were to indeed happen political contest in Punjab could take a new turn.
Nishant Ranjan has been working as a data journalist with Hindustan Times since 2023. In this short period, he has established a niche for creating original datasets and utilising them to produce journalistic work that pushes the boundaries of journalism. The list of datasets and stories done by him include the following: a dataset of all 717 chief ministers India has had since 1952, a dataset of all 3,350 members of India’s council of ministers, a dataset of all 190 deputy chief ministers in India and a dataset of all 279 Supreme Court judges in India (1950-2025). He has also profiled each elected Muslim MLA/MP since 1952. He is a mining engineer by training who decided to pursue a Master's in Development Studies from TISS after working in a coal mine for 10 months. He also worked as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, researching local governance in India. He also has a keen interest in analyzing electoral politics and political executives in India.
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. He heads the newsroom's data journalism team, which produces Number Theory, a daily data-driven feature for the print edition and the HT app. Number Theory uses data analysis and story-telling based on it to add value to the newsroom’s daily coverage by putting stories in a larger context on a range of issues, including politics, macroeconomy, markets, global affairs and climate. Under his leadership HT’s data journalism work has established itself as a niche product in Indian journalism and pushed the boundaries of marrying academic rigour with news sense and speed. Along with writing and editing data stories, he has also been writing a weekly political economy column called Terms of Trade for HT Premium. A trained economist with an MPhil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kishore has also been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Along with his journalistic work, his writings have also appeared in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and working papers for CASI and UNESCAP.