Shah holds closed door meeting with Akali Dal leadership

With an eye on 2019 Lok Sabha elections and in an exercise to reach out to meet the NDA allies, BJP national president Amit Shah on Thursday held a closed-door meeting with the top Shiromani Akali Dal leadership, including the Badals, at Chandigarh.

Shah met Akali Dal patron and Punjab’s five-time Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his son and party president Sukhbir Badal, besides two-dozen leaders of the SAD-BJP combine from the state.

The meeting was held as a part of Shah’s initiative to connect with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJPs) allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). A day before, Shah had met NDA ally and Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackerey in Mumbai as part of his ‘Sampark for Samarthan’ (Contact for Support) programme.

Shah is also expected to meet Bihar Chief Minister and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir, and partners in Jharkhand and the northeast.

The main agenda of Shah’s meeting with the SAD was to chalk out the alliance partners’ strategy for the 2019 general elections considering the possibility of all opposition parties coming together.

After the meeting, Sukhbir Badal rubbished the rumours of conflict between the two allies. “Shiromani Akali Dal is a permanent ally of BJP. There is no conflict between us. I would like to appeal to all our allies that this is the time to fight, the battle is in six months. We should get together and cast away all our differences,” he said.

The alliance of the two parties did not do too well in the Punjab Assembly elections early last year, and pushed to the third spot with nascent Aam Aadmi Party emerging as the principal opposition party in the state assembly.

SAD-BJP combine has five out of 13 Lok Sabha seats in Punjab, with BJP having just one seat; while the Congress and AAP has four seats each in their kitty.

Describing the meeting as “most positive, result-oriented and fruitful”, Sukhbir said that the two sides discussed a wide range of issues in an atmosphere of complete cordiality, trust and mutual respect.

Saying that the Akali-BJP alliance is the oldest and the “most durable” in the country, Sukhbir said that the coming together of these parties represented the social consensus in Punjab. “It is much more than a political alliance and symbolizes the sacred sentiment of peace and communal harmony in the state,” he said.

He said that the two sides also discussed several other political, economic and religious issues, including the farmers’ problems, and also resolved to continue to work together for peace and communal harmony.