In War-ring zone Gidderbaha, a Badal spices up fight
Archit Watts & Rajmeet Singh
The battle for Gidderbaha is turning into Punjab’s hottest contest, with former friends-turned-arch-rivals, turncoats and political enemies staring balefully at each other as the Assembly segment goes to the polls on November 13.
In the forefront are BJP candidate Manpreet Badal, a former Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) Finance Minister and five-time MLA, Congress candidate Amrita Warring, wife of Ludhiana MP and state party chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, as well as AAP candidate Hardeep Singh Dimpy Dhillon.
But it is the open animosity between the Badal and Warring camps that is drawing eyeballs across the state. In 2012, a young and upstart Raja Warring won Gidderbaha from under the nose of Manpreet Badal, then in the People’s Party of Punjab — a firm favourite and nephew of Parkash Singh Badal, Manpreet had been Finance Minister when Badal Senior was the Chief Minister; a falling out in the family ensured his expulsion from the SAD in 2010; so he floated the PPP, fought Gidderbaha, and lost.
Manpreet then shifted base to Bathinda Urban in 2017, fighting on the Congress ticket — and won. Five years later, in 2022, the former Congressman not just lost to AAP’s Jagroop Gill, he lost his security deposit as well. His return to Gidderbaha after 12 years, this time as a BJP candidate, is interesting, not only because he has hopped from one party to another in the five terms that he has been MLA, including four terms from Gidderbaha on the SAD ticket, but because the town’s voters remain hugely curious about the relationship between the first cousins, SAD president Sukhbir Badal and Manpreet.
The town is certainly enjoying the attention. Raja Warring broke into song on Tuesday evening along with a constituent in a shop in Gidderbaha — of course, the video has gone viral.
“Gori hai kalaaiya, tu la de mujhe hari hari chudiya, apna bana le mujhe baalmaa (put green bangles on my fair wrists and make me yours),” Raja Warring and the constituent sang, as the rest of the store watched.
He later had lunch with a farmer’s family at the grain market.
All candidates are certainly leaving no stone unturned to woo the voters — touching the feet of elderly voters, shaking hands with men, lifting babies and young children and kissing and hugging them.
Satire videos by the social media teams of the candidates are the flavour of the day.
In an effort to support Manpreet, BJP’s Punjab affairs in-charge and former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani toured Gidderbaha today.
Amrita Warring has been holding small meetings across the constituency. Typically, she starts by asking people, “Who is coming to power in 2027?” When her audience responds by saying, “Congress,” she replies, “let’s start with Gidderbaha.”
For the longest time in recent months, Amrita Warring refused to come clean on her political ambitions.
Political observers say one reason why her Ludhiana MP-husband is pulling out all the stops in Gidderbaha is because in 2019, when he fought the Bathinda Lok Sabha election against SAD’s Harsimrat Badal, wife to Sukhbir Badal, he lost by nearly 20,000 votes.
At the time, Raja Warring had accused the Badals, both Sukhbir and Manpreet, of being hand in glove with each other.
It didn’t help when Warring was made state Congress president in 2023 — Manpreet, it was said, felt sidelined. Soon enough, he had joined the BJP.
But some worried Congressmen today point to the “tacit understanding” between the two, asking why SAD has still not fielded a candidate for Gidderbaha.
