Harsimrat Badal’s ‘tribute to Bapu Badal’ pays off

Archit Watts

Lambi (Muktsar), June 5

The emotional card of “vote for Bapu Badal as a tribute to him” played by Harsimrat Kaur Badal in Lambi Assembly segment paid off as she defeated AAP candidate Gurmeet Singh Khuddian from here.

Just before the election, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) had pasted posters of Parkash Singh Badal captioned as ‘eh sirf vote nahi, saadi shardhanjali hai Bapu Badal nu’ (This is not just a vote, but our tribute to ‘Bapu Badal’) in Lambi. During her election campaign too, Harsimrat had invoked the former CM in her speeches, saying that every vote would be a tribute to “Bapu Badal” (PS Badal).

Notably, in 2022, Khuddian had defeated former CM Parkash Singh Badal in Lambi by a margin of 11,396 votes. The SAD workers are now saying that Harsimrat has managed to kill two birds with one stone. “Biba ji (Harsimrat) has not just won the Bathinda seat by a margin of 49,656 votes, but also regained hold over Lambi by getting a lead of 23,264 votes. She has now decimated Gurmeet Singh Khuddian, who was termed as giant slayer in the 2022 state polls,” said Lakhwinder Singh, a SAD worker from Panjwa village, who had come to congratulate the Badals today.

Lambi is among the nine Assembly segments falling in Bathinda parliamentary constituency, which the former CM represented in the Vidhan Sabha for five consecutive terms from 1997 to 2022.

In 2022, then 95-year-old Badal was unwilling to contest the election but had agreed due to the repeated requests made by Harsimrat and Sukhbir. In his public speeches, he had claimed that it was the party’s decision to field him and he just abided by it. Harsimrat had at that time held the charge of the election campagn of her father-in-law and extensively campaigned in all the villages in this rural Assembly segment but failed in her attempts.