SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal said BSP would contest 20 of the 117 seats in the polls. The two parties are joining hands 27 years after the 1996 Lok Sabha elections.
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has entered into an alliance with the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for the 2022 Punjab Assembly elections. The party had broken ties with the BJP last year over the Centre’s contentious farm laws.
SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal said BSP would contest 20 of the 117 seats in the polls. The two parties are joining hands 27 years after the 1996 Lok Sabha elections.
The party pulled out of the NDA in September last year over three agriculture bills, which have set off a storm of protests by farmers, mostly from Punjab and Haryana. As the bills were presented in the Lok Sabha, the lone SAD minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, Harsimrat Kaur Badal, quit.
The SAD-BJP alliance came to power in 2007 before being ousted by the Congress in 2017 that won an absolute majority in the state by winning 77 seats.
