No seats but BJP doubles Punjab vote share, with Akalis could have bested Congress

Their inability to forge an alliance in Punjab cost both the BJP and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) dear in the Lok Sabha elections, with the former drawing a blank and the SAD managing to win only one seat in the multi-cornered contests.

Of the state’s 13 parliamentary constituencies, the Congress finished on top winning 7 seats, while the ruling AAP got just three seats with the remaining two bagged by the Independent candidates.

This was the first time since 1998 that the BJP fought the Lok Sabha elections without its oldest ally SAD, which broke up with it in 2020 over the farmers’ movement against the now-repealed three central farm laws.

In the 2019 polls, when the BJP and the SAD contested together, they had won two seats each, with the Congress and the AAP winning eight and one respectively.

In the run-up to the current Lok Sabha polls, the SAD and the BJP had been in talks to restitch their alliance, which however could not fructify with the farmers’ continuing agitation casting a shadow over it.

The outcome of the polls prompted talks that if the estranged NDA allies had joined hands, they could have put up a better show.

Despite facing farmers’ protests in rural belts, the BJP was able to double its vote share, from 9.63% in the 2019 polls to 18.56% now. On the other hand, the SAD’s vote share, which was 27.45% in 2019, plummeted to 13.42%.

In 2019, their combined vote share was 37.08% as against the Congress’s 40.12% and the AAP’s 7.38%.

This time, the combined votes of both the BJP and the SAD stand at 31.98% of the votes polled. This is more than the individual vote share of both the Congress at 26.30% and the AAP at 26.02%.

Although the Congress and the AAP are both part of the Opposition INDIA alliance at the