Parties face ups and downs, SAD will continue to fight for Punjab’s interests: Parkash Badal after poll debacle

Chandigarh, March 14

After his party’s worst-ever performance in an assembly poll in Punjab, SAD patriarch Parkash Singh Badal on Monday said sometimes parties do face ups and downs but asserted that the Shiromani Akali Dal will continue to fight for the interests of the state.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) romped home by winning 92 seats in the 117-member Punjab assembly, decimating the Congress and the SAD-BSP alliance.

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) could win just three seats.

Among several political stalwarts, the five-time chief minister, Parkash Singh Badal, and his son SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badal faced defeat from their respective seats Lambi and Jalalabad in the state assembly elections, results for which were declared on March 10.

The 100-year-old SAD on Monday called a meeting of its core committee to analyse reasons behind the loss in the elections.

Reacting to the poll results, 94-year-old Parkash Badal said, “Sometimes parties face ups and downs.”

“It happens in politics,” he added and pointed out that after the Emergency in 1975, his party won all seats.

“During the Emergency, the wave was in our favour and nobody else could win,” said Badal while talking to reporters before the meeting.

“People will see this experience (AAP government) too but we will continue to fight for the interests of Punjab and the country,” he said.

“It is not only the Akali Dal which lost (in the polls). It was a wave. When there is a wave, people do not see candidates or anything else. All these things, the party will discuss in the meeting,” said Badal.

Asked how a political stalwart like him could lose in the assembly polls, Badal said, “I cannot say anything. But we bow down before the people’s mandate.”