Barely 4 hours after the Union Price range 2026 presentation in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s aircraft landed on the Adampur airport in Punjab’s Jalandhar, for 2 key occasions that already look to the long run. The subsequent yr, to be exact. There was a touch of this concentrate on 2027 in Nirmala Sitharaman’s speech too — within the very first sentence.
First, why the PM headed to Ballan village in Punjab.
Punjab goes to polls early 2027, and the BJP is searching for to court docket Dalit voters, particularly Ravidassias, with PM Modi paying a go to to Dera Sachkhand at Ballan village close to Jalandhar.
And he additionally renamed the airport the place he landed, after Guru Ravidass, the Fifteenth-century mystic-philosopher-poet who’s the patron saint of the Ravidassia neighborhood concentrated within the Doaba area of Punjab.
February 1 occurs to be Guru Ravidass’s start anniversary.
Nirmala Sitharaman famous this proper at the beginning of her price range speech. On the sacred event of Magh Purnima and the start anniversary of Guru Ravidass, I current the price range for the yr 2026-2027,” she mentioned.
PM Modi in his speech at Ballan mentioned, “The concept of ‘Viksit Bharat’ is impressed by the teachings of Guru Ravidass,” linking his slogan of “a developed India by 2047” with the dera’s patron saint.
Why PM is visiting Dera Sachkhand in Ballan
PM Modi’s caste-coded politico-religious strikes come lower than two weeks after Dera Sachkhand chief Sant Niranjan Dass was chosen on Republic Day eve for the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honour.
Safety was notably tight in Ballan and wider Jalandhar as some faculties within the metropolis had acquired risk emails a day earlier than; although these turned out to be hoax.
Modi’s go to will definitely be a fillip to the employees of the Bharatiya Janata Get together (BJP), which is hoping to grow to be greater than only a junior ex-partner of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in Punjab. Its Ravidassia neighborhood outreach is concentrated on Dalits at giant.
Numbers that matter: Punjab’s Dalits and BJP
Dalits represent practically one-third of the inhabitants of Punjab, which is the best amongst all states. In Doaba, certainly one of Punjab’s three foremost areas with the others being Malwa and Majha, this proportion of Dalits within the complete inhabitants goes as much as practically 45%.
Electorally, it means this: Of the 117 meeting seats in Punjab, the Doaba area accounts for 23, with the dera at Ballan believed to affect voters in no less than 19 of those.
The Dalit inhabitants just isn’t a monolith, although. A few third of the Dalit inhabitants — 10-12% of Punjab — is Ravidassia, Ramdassia or Advert-Dharmi/Chamar as per Census classes, all belonging to the Scheduled Castes however with various spiritual and cultural practices.
Why it issues to Ravidassias
The Ravidassias, or no less than a big part of the Dalits, extracted themselves from mainstream Sikhism after 2009, the yr of assassination of Ballan dera deputy chief Sant Ramanand in Vienna. That killing triggered clashes between radical Sikh teams and Dalits in the neighborhood.
This led to the Ravidassia neighborhood declaring a separate faith in 2010, and changing the Guru Granth Sahib, which carries some verses from Guru Ravidass amongst others, with their very own holy guide referred to as ‘Amrit Bani: Satguru Ravidass Granth’, which is concentrated extra squarely on Ravidass’s works.
For the neighborhood, subsequently, the PM’s go to additionally serves as a nod to the separate identification.
Modi was invited to the dera by the sect’s chief by visiting him at his residence in Delhi on December 5.
When the PM unveils the title ‘Sri Guru Ravidas Ji Airport, Adampur’, it fulfills a long-standing demand and honours the social reformer who emerged from a Dalit household to grow to be an icon of equality and human dignity.
BJP’s technique of Modi plus Shah
For the BJP, this concentrate on the Dalit demographic is vital to its standing by itself in Punjab.
Since its alliance with Sukhbir Singh Badal’s Sikh-centric SAD resulted in 2020 over the later-repealed farm legal guidelines, the Hindutva-centric BJP has labored to construct an impartial footprint within the Sikh-majority state. The Saffron Get together has pockets of affect in some city areas amongst Hindus principally, reminiscent of Jalandhar-Hoshiarpur in Doaba, Abohar-Fazilka in Malwa, and Pathankot-Batala in Majha.
When it comes to vote share, the celebration has gained some even after the breakup with the Badals’ Akali Dal.
The BJP vote share was simply 6.6% within the 2022 Vidhan Sabha elections, by which it contested by itself, to 18.56 % within the 2024 parliamentary elections.
By courting the Ravidassias, the BJP goals to chop additional into conventional bases of the primary Opposition Congress and the state’s ruling Aam Aadmi Get together (AAP).
However that may take a mixture of strikes.
Professor Paramjit Singh Choose, an knowledgeable in Dalit points, has instructed HT that whereas the Ballan dera may influence voting traits at a micro degree, there’s typically an “phantasm that that it influences the Doaba area’s politics” on a macro scale.
Punjab BJP president Sunil Jakhar, who switched to the BJP round 4 years in the past after a long time with the Congress, has mentioned the PM’s go to displays respect for a neighborhood which, he claimed, was sidelined or misunderstood by the Congress.
Past the Dalit outreach, simply three weeks after Modi’s go to, Union residence minister Amit Shah can also be slated to go to Punjab. That is a extra direct ballot outreach, with a farmers’ rally in Moga on February 22.
At this rally, the BJP is aiming to mobilise practically 1 lakh farmers, basically gathering the agrarian neighborhood dominated by Jat Sikhs who spearheaded the 2020-21 agitation towards farm legal guidelines that Modi needed to repeal.
“Again-to-back visits by the Prime Minister and the house minister in a month clearly replicate that the celebration has determined to concentrate on Punjab,” mentioned a former BJP minister, who was at prep conferences for these occasions.
This obtained a response from the ruling AAP. The state authorities introduced that it has procured 10 acres close to the dera at Ballan to determine ‘Sri Guru Ravidass Bani Adhyayan Centre’, a analysis facility. Finance minister Harpal Singh Cheema has mentioned the federal government will launch a year-long collection of state-level programmes from February 1 to commemorate the 650th start anniversary of Guru Ravidass that is subsequent yr.
(with inputs by Navrajdeep Singh)
