Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s Jalandhar rally on Wednesday focused heavily on drugs, the AAP government and the BJP’s plans for Punjab, but one major political question remained unanswered: where does the BJP stand on a possible alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) for the 2027 Assembly elections?
Shah did not mention the SAD or any possible alliance with the former BJP partner during his address, instead, he appealed to Punjab voters to give the BJP a chance and said the party would make Punjab free of the chitta trade by December 31, 2029. He also attacked the Congress and AAP and asked voters to give the BJP five years to govern the state.
The absence of any reference to the SAD is significant because the question of a possible BJP-SAD reunion has remained open in Punjab politics for weeks.
In March, Shah had taken a clear position against an alliance. At the BJP’s ‘Badlaav Rally’ in Moga on March 14, he ruled out an alliance with the SAD and said the BJP would contest all 117 Assembly seats on its own.
Since then, however, the political situation has changed.
On August 7, SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament. Neither the BJP nor SAD officially announced that the meeting was about an alliance, but the meeting revived speculation about a possible reunion between the two former allies ahead of the 2027 polls. Although the agenda of the meeting was not disclosed, but several reports linked it to renewed alliance discussions.
The two parties have not formally announced any new alliance. At the same time, BJP leaders have continued preparing for an independent contest. BJP general secretary BL Santosh had told party workers to forget the Akalis and prepare to contest all seats. The report also noted that Shah had made no public comment on the alliance question since the contradictory signals emerged.
That makes Shah’s silence in Jalandhar notable, but it does not by itself establish that an alliance is being planned.
For now, there are two publicly documented positions from the BJP. The first is Shah’s earlier statement that the BJP would contest all 117 seats without an alliance. The second is the absence of any fresh statement from Shah ruling out the possibility after the Modi-Sukhbir meeting revived alliance speculation.
Shah’s Jalandhar speech instead concentrated on the BJP’s anti-drug campaign. The party’s 13-day ‘Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatra’ covered all 117 Assembly constituencies and nearly 4,000 km before concluding with the Jalandhar rally. Shah said the BJP’s campaign was about making Punjab free of the chitta trade by the end of 2029 and asked voters to give the party an opportunity to govern the state.
The BJP has also been using the drug issue as a central theme ahead of the 2027 elections. The campaign was launched on September 18 through four separate yatras, which travelled across Punjab before converging in Jalandhar.
The SAD-BJP relationship has a long political history. The two parties were alliance partners for more than two decades and jointly governed Punjab from 1997 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2017. They parted ways in 2020 after the SAD withdrew from the NDA over the then three farm laws.
The recent Modi-Sukhbir meeting brought the possibility of a reunion back into political discussion. However, there has been no official announcement confirming that the BJP and SAD will contest the 2027 elections together.
Wednesday’s rally therefore leaves the alliance question unresolved. Shah did not repeat his earlier explicit rejection of an alliance, but he also did not announce or signal a formal tie-up with the SAD in his speech.
For the moment, the documented position is that the BJP continues its preparations for a statewide contest, while speculation about a possible reunion with the SAD remains alive following the Modi-Sukhbir meeting and Shah’s decision not to address the issue publicly in Jalandhar.