Farmers Movement Archive

Beyond the News: Akali Dal turning 100 in lead-up to toughest fight

On December 14, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) will join the country’s select club of centenarian political parties, after the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, and the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) which, inspired by the 1917 Russian revolution, took shape in Tashkent a couple of months ahead of the SAD in 1920.If the Congress was the product of the freedom struggle, the Akali Dal rose from a parallel movement for the liberation of gurdwaras which, till then, were controlled individually by priests (mahants). The Sikh Gurdwara Act, 1925, the British were forced to bring defined the Sikh identity, placing their shrines under the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC).Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested during the Jaito Gurdwara Morcha near Faridkot. Mahatma Gandhi hailed the handing over of the keys to the Golden Temple to the movement’s leader, Baba Kharag Singh, as India’s first victory in the country’s struggle for freedom from the British.A prominent Delhi road is now named after Kharag Singh. He simultaneously served as president of the Akali Dal and leader of the Punjab Congress. In fact, the Congress-SAD dual membership was common practice till the 1942 Quit India Movement, when Kharag Singh’s successor, Master Tara Singh, whose was the last word in Sikh politics from 1930-65, defied the Congress to support recruitment of Sikhs in the British army in World War II.Among the many Akali leaders Tara Singh groomed for national roles represented the Congress-SAD overlap. They included India’s first defence minister, Baldev Singh, former external affairs minister Sardar Swaran Singh, and Sardar Hukam Singh, the third Speaker of the Lok Sabha. As former Rajya Sabha MP Tarlochan Singh told the House in a debate some years ago: “The whole of Punjab would’ve gone to Pakistan had Tara Singh not spurned Jinnah’s quid pro quo of a Sikh state in Pakistan at the time of the partition.” History’s witness also that the first non-Congress government after Independence was of the SAD’s Gian Singh Rarewala, who administered (as designated prime minister) the erstwhile PEPSU (Patiala and East Punjab States Union) from 1948-51, much before the rise of the then CPI leader EMS Namboodiripad as chief minister of Kerala in 1957.Like Namboodiripad, the government of Rarewala too was dismissed by the Centre. That marked the beginning of the SAD-Congress rivalry that continues till date, accentuated along the way by the events of 1980s and the earlier Punjabi Suba movement that led to the linguistic reorganisation (of the Indian east Punjab) into Punjab and Haryana. The CPI’s 1964 split, in the aftermath of the 1962 India-China war and the divisions in the global communist movement, saw Namboodiripad becoming the face of the breakaway CPI (Marxist).By some quirk of fate, these parties with a glorious past seem confronted today by an unexceptional future. There’d be a lot to introspect when the battle bruised Akali leadership assembles for a show of strength at Moga, near Ludhiana, on its founding day.For decades the foremost regional party of Punjab, the SAD is facing a crisis akin to what’s dogging the Congress. If the latter fell short of numbers in two successive general elections to be recognised as the official opposition in the Lok Sabha, the Akali Dal was a poor third in the 2017 assembly polls, trailing the victorious Congress and the fledgling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which became the principal opposition. The SAD’s downfall came after a decade of uninterrupted rule, a la the Congress in Delhi.Like the Congress where the Gandhi family exercises unbridled control, the Akalis were done in by charges of nepotism and perpetration of family rule by Parkash Singh Badal, the state’s tallest leader since the 1970s whom Prime Minister Narendra Modi once called the Nelson Mandela of Punjab. As five-time chief minister and the party numero uno, he favoured his son Sukhbir Badal, who now is the SAD chief, to the annoyance of many old-timers locally called the Taksalis. A few among them like former union minister S S Dhindsa and R S Brahmpura, a former MP, have since formed their own breakaway Akali Dal (Samyukta). Together with Amarinder Singh, the chief minister-turned-Congress rebel, they’re slated to enter the poll fray in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to set up a four-cornered contest in the 2022 assembly elections.To be fair, Sukhbir Badal has worked hard to regain the core Akali constituency on parting company with the BJP over the three farm laws since withdrawn by the Modi regime. To expand his party’s appeal, he has a pre-poll alliance with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, whose precursor, DS-4 (Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangarsh Samiti) had its origins in Punjab on Kanshi Ram’s watch in 1971. While the upcoming polls are for the AAP an opportunity, they’re an acid test for Sukhbir Badal and the Congress, now led by the state’s first Dalit chief minister, Charanjit Singh Channi. Much will depend on how the BJP-led formation that’s in-the-making with an eye on the Hindu vote, fares in its first outing.

Hindustan Times

12-12-2021

India