Akali veterans remember party patriarch as a man with golden heart
CHANDIGARH: The leaders of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Wednesday remembered party patriarch and five-time Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal as a man of commitment, kind-hearted, humble and one who managed to hold the party and its leaders intact and contented.
Badal senior passed away on Tuesday after a brief illness and will be cremated at Badal village in Muktsar district on Thursday.
“I can narrate stories about Badal Saab for hours and days as he treated me like his younger brother or maybe as his son,” said the party’s senior leader in the present times, Balwinder Singh Bhunder. According to him, Badal made him agriculture minister in 1977, when he was elected MLA for the second time. The move came as a big surprise to Bhunder.
“It was a surprise for me when he offered me to choose from the list. I left the decision to him, and Badal Saab offered me the portfolio, which he told me was close to his heart,” Bhunder said, who is also known as Badal’s righthand man.
Former Rajya Sabha member Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, who separated ways with the Badals after the party’s debacle in the 2017 state elections, fondly remembered Badal senior as a believer in consensus politics.
“We had a long association since 1977 and have dealt with many difficult situations together,” remembered Dhindsa. He recalled that in 1996, ahead of the 1997 state polls, Badal held a meeting with all the senior leaders of the party to discuss a possibility of an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had then formed government in the Centre. “When everyone agreed, Badal offered support to BJP, and it was a start of a fruitful alliance,” said Dhindsa.
Former president of Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) Bibi Jagir Kaur said she owes her career to him. Then a school teacher and head of a religious dera in Begowal, Bibi Jagir Kaur, said she was in the USA in 1996 when he got a call from Badal senior to contest the SGPC election. Bibi remembered him as a decisive leader. “I never knew he (Badal) wanted me to head the SGPC, replacing (Gurcharan Singh) Tohra Saab in 1999. All this happened so suddenly, and I realised much later that he had planned my career much in advance,” said Bibi Jagir Kaur, adding that she was just 45-year-old when she was made the first woman president of the gurdwara body and given the responsibility of leading the tercentenary celebration of the Khalsa panth the same year. According to former president of Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) Paramjit Singh Sarna, the former CM had political finesse with which he could disarm his opponents. “He had differences with us, but after being released from the jail in 1977 for opposing emergency, Badal Saab came straight to our home in Delhi and asked Sikhs in Delhi to contribute funds to support the party’s election campaign.”
“We wholeheartedly contributed, and Akali Dal won the state elections, leading to the formation of a government. He invited us and asked us what we want from him. That was a great gesture which is rare among the leaders now,” said Sarna.