Jalandhar, September 30, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
Suspense over a possible Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance for the 2027 Punjab Assembly elections deepened on Wednesday as Union Home Minister and senior BJP leader Amit Shah chose not to touch upon the issue during the party’s mega rally in Jalandhar.
Shah addressed the statewide rally at Paragpur to mark the culmination of the BJP’s four ‘Nasha Mukt Punjab Yatras’, which had started from different places and travelled across Punjab.
The Union Home Minister kept his focus primarily on the issue of drugs and the BJP’s promise of a drug-free Punjab. He specifically announced a deadline, saying that if the BJP is voted to power in the 2027 Assembly elections, its government would make Punjab ‘Chitta’-free by December 31, 2029.
Significantly, Shah made no mention of a possible alliance with the BJP’s former and long-time ally, the Shiromani Akali Dal.
Interestingly, he also did not reiterate the BJP’s earlier stand that the party would contest all 117 Assembly seats on its own. Shah had himself ruled out an alliance with the SAD during his Moga rally in March and said that the BJP would contest all 117 seats.
The silence assumes significance amid continuing speculation in Punjab’s political circles that the two former allies could be exploring the possibility of coming together again ahead of the 2027 polls.
The BJP, however, appears unwilling to return to the old arrangement under which it played the role of the junior partner in the alliance.
Even as several BJP leaders have repeatedly maintained that the party is preparing to contest all 117 Assembly constituencies, Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri recently gave a different nuance to the alliance question.
During a press conference in Amritsar, Puri said that the BJP had no immediate plans to enter into an alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal. At the same time, he made it clear that if the two parties were to come together in the future, the arrangement would have to be on equal terms rather than on the old junior-partner formula. He also said that the final decision on an alliance would be taken by the BJP’s central leadership.
Against this backdrop, Shah’s decision to neither speak about an alliance nor reiterate the BJP’s earlier commitment to contest all 117 seats has ensured that the suspense over the future of the SAD-BJP relationship remains intact.
FOLLOW NOW
