SAD-BJP alliance; Badal becomes CM

Who: The Shiromani Akali Dal under Parkash Singh Badal; the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee was close to Badal; and the Congress, then in power in Punjab under Rajinder Kaur Bhattal.

What: At a convention at Moga in 1996, marking the party's 75th anniversary, the Akali Dal opened its membership to Hindus for the first time and announced support for Punjabiyat. Wikipedia adds that it adopted a moderate Punjabi agenda and moved its headquarters from Amritsar to Chandigarh. A later Tribune report names the Moga resolution "Panth, Punjab and Panjabiat". The Tribune says many in Punjab began to say the party had turned into a "Punjabi Dal".

The party then dropped the Bahujan Samaj Party, with which it had fought the 1996 Lok Sabha election, and allied with the BJP. On February 7, 1997 the alliance won 93 of the 117 seats: the Akali Dal 75 and the BJP 18. The Congress, then in government, won 14. Turnout was 68.73 per cent, against about 24 per cent in 1992, when the Akali Dal boycotted the election. Badal became Chief Minister and the government ran until 2002.

Where: Punjab; Moga, where the policy was set, and Chandigarh, the seat of government.

Why it mattered: The Tribune calls the BJP "an unlikely ally" and says Badal's close ties with Vajpayee strengthened the alliance and gave Punjab a stable government after what the paper calls militancy, the years of the Kharku struggle. For the Panth the change was a turn in what the Akali Dal stood for. A party that had grown out of the Gurdwara reform movement, with membership open only to Sikhs, now sought votes across faiths and shared power with a national party.

Doubts about the partnership were voiced from inside the party. In March 2003 a senior Akali leader told The Tribune that the BJP's poor showing with urban voters had "certainly put a question mark over our alliance with the BJP", and other Akalis argued that the growth of "Hindutva" threatened Sikh identity. The alliance lasted until September 26, 2020, when the Akali Dal left it over the farm laws.