Parkash Singh Badal, 95, a five-time chief minister of Punjab, died on Tuesday. He was the last surviving member of a political generation that saw independence, endured the Emergency, and witnessed Punjab politics take an unexpected turn in 2022. He was the sarpanch of Badal at age 20, a legislator at age 30, and the chief minister at age 43.
He was the ultimate moderate in the turbulent landscape of a front-line Sikh majority state, a practical practitioner of religious reconciliation, a liberal and secular guy, and an acknowledged champion of and ardent defender for Punjab’s interests.Despite being extremely devout, he was not dogmatic. He believed that Hindu-Sikh amity was not just a political slogan but rather a fundamental principle, which won the hearts of the Hindus of Punjab.
Shiromani Akali Dal, one of the oldest regional parties, has a 100-year history but has never had a leader quite like Badal. With 17 years across five terms, he was the chief minister who held office the longest in the state. He also served as the Akali Dal’s president from 1995 to 2017, when he turned the reins over to his son and apparent successor Sukhbir Singh Badal.
As a prominent figure in the Akalis’ agitational politics during and after the Emergency in the middle of the 1970s and the 1980s, Badal served several terms in prison, received death threats from Sikh radicals, and was put behind bars in 2004 for corruption by his former colleague and competitor Capt Amarinder Singh. But the indomitable Akali always recovered.
The Punjab police charged him the morning of the day he passed away in the 2015 Kokatpura firing case, in which two demonstrators who were agitating against the mutilation of the Sikh holy book died at the hands of police.
Badal’s extraordinary grassroots connections were the key to his exceptionally long political career. When he was 85 years old when interacting with HT in his ancestral village, Badal revealed the formula for his outreach. His employees scrupulously recorded every fatality in Punjab, including those of common Akali workers.
Badal would later pay a visit to their homes to offer his sympathies, a straightforward but heartfelt act that people never forgot and that over time solidified his reputation as a genuine mass leader.