BJP's Manpreet manoeuvre: Why a Badal was picked for Punjab

Manpreet Badal's elevation as national vice-president, months before Punjab polls, is the latest in a BJP design that has yet to produce electoral success in the stateOn January 5, 2022, then Congress leader Manpreet Singh Badal was on the Bathinda airport tarmac to receive Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Punjab chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, isolating himself after two of his staff tested positive for Covid, had sent Manpreet, the finance minister, in his place. The state chief secretary and police chief were not present either.Hours later, Manpreet was back at the airport to see off the prime minister—this time after Modi’s convoy had infamously gotten stranded on a flyover near Ferozepur for 20 minutes, causing a security scare and forcing his scheduled rally to be called off. Modi, while leaving Bathinda, had told Manpreet to thank their chief minister that he was returning alive. Manpreet was seen repeatedly apologising to him.Two election drubbings followed. In 2022, Manpreet, as the Congress candidate, lost the Bathinda Urban assembly seat to Jagroop Singh Gill of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) by over 63,000 votes. Manpreet joined the BJP in January next year, and in the 2024 Gidderbaha assembly bypoll, the BJP fielded him from the seat he had held four times. But Manpreet finished third and forfeited his deposit.Now, in a reversal of fortunes, Manpreet has been appointed a national vice-president of the BJP alongside the likes of veterans Vasundhara Raje, Ram Madhav and D. Purandeswari. Punjab is scheduled to vote early next year to elect a new government. And that context counts. But there exists a gap between what the BJP's national leadership decides and what its state unit can carry, and the past few weeks have made it all the more evident.BJP national president Nitin Nabin's team is already trying to douse cadre resentment triggered by the announcement of the list of office-bearers for the Punjab unit. Some of the corrections have made it to the list: Saudan Singh, an RSS pracharak once in charge of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, is back as national joint general secretary (organisation) after a spell as vice-president. Satish Poonia, former Rajasthan unit president and Haryana in-charge, is national general secretary and now in-charge of Punjab.Manpreet's elevation belongs to an older design: building a Jat Sikh leadership of the BJP's own after the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) left the NDA in 2020 over the central farm laws fiasco. The roster is by now substantial. Kewal Singh Dhillon was made state president. Ravneet Singh Bittu, grandson of former chief minister Beant Singh, came over from the Congress in 2024, lost the Ludhiana Lok Sabha seat that year, was made a Union minister anyway and then sent to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan.Satnam Singh Sandhu, chancellor of Chandigarh University, was nominated to the Upper House. Taranjit Singh Sandhu, former Indian ambassador to the US and grandson of Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) founding member Teja Singh Samundri, lost the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat in 2024 and was appointed lieutenant governor of Delhi this March.Manjinder Singh Sirsa sits in the BJP government’s Delhi cabinet. Harjit Singh Grewal, despite being in poor health, became chairman of the National Commission for Minorities. Tarun Chugh, who recently got a Rajya Sabha berth, is the only exception of a Hindu from Punjab getting national responsibilities in the BJP. Jat Sikhs form roughly 18 per cent of Punjab's population and dominate its politics, especially in the villages. What the BJP's chosen Jat Sikhs have in common, besides caste, is that they are drawn from the community's elite—diplomats, educationists, dynasts and ministers' relatives; and almost none of them commands a rural following.Manpreet is the type in its purest form. He has thanked Modi, home minister Amit Shah and Nabin, termed his national BJP responsibilities as “not a reward but a test” and predicted a BJP government in Punjab.Manpreet is prominent politician Gurdas Singh Badal's son, nephew of the late SAD patriarch Parkash Singh Badal and first cousin of SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal. He won the Gidderbaha assembly seat in 1995 and held it for three more terms. He broke away from the Akalis over the state of Punjab's finances, founded the People's Party of Punjab in 2011—wherein Bhagwant Mann was an early recruit—and watched it draw a blank in the 2012 polls.Manpreet contested the Bathinda Lok Sabha seat in 2014 against Sukhbir’s wife Harsimrat Kaur Badal and lost. He merged the People's Party of Punjab into the Congress and won the Bathinda Urban assembly seat in 2017, becoming finance minister for a second time, in the government of Captain Amarinder Singh.Manpreet is seen as fluent about the state's finances, unmistakable in Urdu-ised Punjabi and never much interested in the village-by-village work needed to maintain grip over an electoral seat. The persistent problem in his career has been trust.The charge that follows Manpreet into every party is about his quarrel with the Badals. While in the Congress, it came from Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, who took Gidderbaha after him and became state unit president after the 2022 election. During the campaign, Warring had urged voters in Bathinda to defeat all the Badals—a call that took in his own party's candidate Manpreet.In the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign, Jeet Mohinder Singh Sidhu, the Congress candidate for Bathinda, demanded that Manpreet clarify whether he stood with the BJP or SAD, alleging a quid pro quo with Harsimrat. Manpreet was largely absent from that campaign, those close to him citing ill-health.The BJP's own Bathinda unit made a version of the complaint from the day Manpreet joined the party in January 2023. The district core committee, under Sarup Chand Singla, targeted him. Back in 2021, Singla—then an Akali—had gone to the Vigilance Bureau over two plots in Model Town in Bathinda. In September 2023, the bureau registered an FIR against Manpreet and five others over allegations that Bathinda Development Authority records were manipulated to keep the plots out of open bidding and that Manpreet acquired them from the successful bidders.Manpreet has denied wrongdoing throughout, calling the FIR malafide and politically motivated. No charges have been framed and nothing has been proved.Single and Manpreet remain at war, and both want the Bathinda Urban ticket. After the BJP's poor showing in municipal elections this year, the two camps traded sabotage charges.The most damaging attack came from the Akali side. In August 2024, before the Gidderbaha bypoll, the SAD's constituency in-charge Hardeep Singh Dimpy Dhillon resigned over Manpreet. He said Sukhbir had told him in January that Manpreet wanted to return to the SAD; that Manpreet then became active in Gidderbaha, meeting voters without asking them to join the BJP.Sukhbir called the reports false and said that Manpreet may be his cousin, but he was in the BJP and their paths were different. Manpreet dismissed Dhillon’s allegations as frustration. Dhillon joined AAP, took the ticket and won. The SAD did not contest—Sukhbir had been declared tankhaiya by the Akal Takht.Now, there are murmurs that Sukhbir met Modi at Sansad Bhavan for 20 minutes on August 7. No statement followed and his aides called it informal. A leading daily reported that talks were underway, quoting a source who said that with anti-NDA parties consolidating after the recent youth protests, the BJP was minded to bring its old partners back. Every senior BJP figure has denied it and Nabin has committed the party to contesting all 117 assembly seats in Punjab.The arithmetic is less obliging. The SAD's vote share has fallen from 18 per cent in 2022 to 13 per cent in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and 9.71 in the recent municipal contests, and the BJP's solo run has produced no breakthrough either. As Dr Pramod Kumar, chairperson of Chandigarh's Institute for Development and Communication, puts it, the two parties would be contesting for the third and fourth places and leaving the real fight to the ruling AAP and the Congress.Against all that, the elevation Manpreet in the BJP admits two readings, and the party has settled neither. One is that a party contemplating a return to the Akalis would not promote Manpreet. The other is that a man with an open communication line with Sukhbir is exactly who you would want at the table if you are keeping the option alive.But here’s what none of all this resolves. Jat Sikh influence in Punjab runs through villages, panchayats, cooperatives, gurdwara networks and farmer bodies. A prominent Jat Sikh with a Delhi designation doesn’t command it automatically. The BJP has been collecting prominent faces in Punjab for six years. It has yet to build an organisation.Over four years after he stood on the tarmac at Bathinda airport apologising over Modi’s stranded convoy, Manpreet Badal sits in the prime minister's national leadership. Whether it produces anything the BJP can count on in Punjab will be answered in a few months.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsPublished By: Yashwardhan SinghPublished On: Aug 19, 2026 18:49 IST