Parkash Singh Badal, five-time Punjab Chief Minister, passed away at the age of 95 in a hospital on Tuesday. His party the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) was among the oldest allies of the NDA until 2020 when it quit the alliance in protest against the controversial farm laws, which witnessed farmers from across India, including Punjab, hitting the streets and highways demanding the laws be revoked.
Although no longer an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached Chandigarh on Wednesday to pay his last tributes to the veteran politician and Akali Dal patriarch.
The relationship between PM Modi and the SAD patriarch has always been cordial. The PM always made it a point to touch his feet at public rallies. In another instance, when Badal was admitted to a hospital with chest congestion in 2016, PM Modi took everyone by surprise landing at the PGIMER, Chandigarh, and spent half an hour with the ailing politician. Doctors said that Badal perked up upon seeing Modi, reported The Indian Express.
In 2015, Modi referred to Badal as the “Nelson Mandela of India”, referring to close to 17 years he spent in prison during his long political stint, for several movements he was part of. The same year, Badal received the country’s second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan.
However, in 2020, expressing solidarity with farmers who sat on protest in Delhi’s border in November against the new agricultural laws, the former Punjab CM wrote to President Ram Nath Kovind to return his Padma Vibhushan award.
In a three-page letter to Kovind Badal had said, “I write this to return the Padma Vibhushan award in protest against the shocking indifference and contempt with which the government is treating the ongoing peaceful and democratic agitation against the farm Acts. Today… the farmer because of who I am has lost his honour. I see no point in holding onto the Padma Vibhushan honour.”
Clarifying, why he supported the planned changes in the farm laws at first, the ailing Badal had wrote, “When the Government of India had brought in ordinances, assurances were given to us that the farmers’ apprehensions would be addressed… when these were converted into Bills and Acts. Accordingly, I even appealed to the farmers to trust the Government’s word. But I was shocked when the Government simply went back on its word… That was the most painful and embarrassing moment in my long political career… I have truly begun to wonder why the Government has become so heartless, cynical, and so ungrateful to the farmers.”
In 2020, when the farm laws were introduced, Badal had tried to allay the fears of the farmers, stating that the Centre would never stop giving the minimum support price (MSP) for wheat and paddy.
Lamenting “the conspiracies unleashed to paint this peaceful struggle as anti-national”, Badal said, “I am deeply pained by the communal insinuations… I can assure you that they (the farmers) have secular ethos running in their blood… It is amazing and unjust that lakhs of crores of corporate loans are waived off… but no one has even thought of subsidising farm debts or introducing schemes like one-time settlement. Instead the country chose to let the annadata die.”
“Today I feel so poor that, at this stage of my life, I do not have much else to sacrifice to express solidarity with the farmers’ cause as one who has spent something close to a century amidst the people and especially the farmers… I would request you to use your good offices to get the government to listen to farmers with love, compassion, understanding and above all the respect that they fully deserve,” he wrote in conclusion.
Notably, even though ties were snapped between the PM Modi-led BJP and SAD, the PM continued to wish the aged politician on his birthdays.
Badal was born on December 8, 1927 in Abul Khurana near Malout. He started his political innings as a village sarpanch in 1952, and became the youngest Chief Minister at the age of 43 in 1970. He also held the record of being the oldest Chief Minister in 2012.
Badal was also the only Punjab CM who won back-to-back Assembly elections in 2007 and 2012, and lost the last election of his life in the 2022 Punjab Assembly elections to AAP leader Gurmeet Singh Khuddian.
He was also conferred the Panth Rattan Faqr-e-Qaum (Jewel of the Panth Pride of the Community) in 2011, reported The Tribune.