ਸੁਖਬੀਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਾਦਲਸੁਖਬੀਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਾਦਲ

Early life, Badal village and an American MBA

Sukhbir Singh Badal was born on 9 July 1962 at Badal village, his family's ancestral home, which then lay in Faridkot district and is now in Sri Muktsar Sahib district in Punjab's Malwa region. Some profiles give his birthplace simply as Faridkot, the district of the time. He is the son of Parkash Singh Badal, who became chief minister of Punjab five times and dominated Akali politics for half a century, and he grew up inside the world of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the party his family came to lead. He was educated at The Lawrence School, Sanawar, took an MA in economics from Panjab University in Chandigarh, and completed an MBA at California State University, Los Angeles. Before his own full time political career he was involved in the family's business interests, which news reports have long described as spanning transport, Punjabi television and hospitality. In 1991 he married Harsimrat Kaur Badal, who went on to represent Bathinda in the Lok Sabha from 2009 and to serve as a Union minister. The couple have three children.

Parliament first: Faridkot MP, Union minister and the Rajya Sabha

Sukhbir Badal entered national politics before he entered the Punjab assembly. He was first elected to the Lok Sabha from Faridkot in 1996 and re-elected in 1998, and in the second Vajpayee government he served as Union minister of state for industry from March 1998 to October 1999. He then sat in the Rajya Sabha from 2001 to 2004, and returned to the Lok Sabha from Faridkot in 2004 for a third term as an MP. The pattern of those years matters: while his father ran Punjab, the son built a parallel career in Delhi, learning the alliance politics of the BJP led National Democratic Alliance, to which the Akali Dal then belonged. It was preparation for the handover that came at the end of the decade.

Party president and deputy chief minister

On 31 January 2008 Sukhbir Badal became president of the Shiromani Akali Dal, succeeding his father. A year later, in January 2009, he was sworn in as deputy chief minister of Punjab, but because he was not a member of the assembly he had to resign in July 2009 when his six months to win a seat ran out. He promptly won the Jalalabad by-election and returned as deputy chief minister in August 2009, this time for the long haul, holding portfolios that at various points included home, excise and taxation, housing, investment promotion and sports. The high point came in 2012, when the Akali Dal and BJP alliance won a second straight term, something no incumbent government had managed in Punjab before, and Sukhbir Badal, re-elected from Jalalabad by 50,246 votes, was widely credited as the campaign's organiser. In 2017 he held Jalalabad again, defeating the Aam Aadmi Party's Bhagwant Mann, but the party around him collapsed to 15 seats and the Congress took the state. In 2019 he returned to Parliament as MP for Firozpur, polling over 600,000 votes against Sher Singh Ghubaya of the Congress.

What went wrong for the Akali Dal after 2015?

The turn came in 2015, midway through the second Akali term. In October that year, torn pages of the Guru Granth Sahib were found at Bargari in Faridkot district, and police firing on Sikh protesters at Behbal Kalan killed two men. The same period saw the Akal Takht pardon the Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim in a blasphemy case, a pardon withdrawn within weeks after an outcry. Coming together, the sacrilege incidents, the firing and the pardon badly damaged the Akali Dal's standing with its own Sikh base, and the party has never fully recovered its vote since. The family's transport business also drew public anger that April, when a teenage girl died after being molested and thrown from a moving bus near Moga run by Orbit Aviation, a company in which the Badal family held a stake. Sukhbir Badal's later public life has been shaped by these events: in December 2023 he appeared before the Akal Takht and apologised for the sacrilege cases that had happened during his party's rule, and in August 2024 the Akal Takht declared him tankhaiya, guilty of religious misconduct, over the mistakes of the Akali Dal and its government between 2007 and 2017, including the failure to punish those responsible for the 2015 sacrilege incidents and the Dera pardon.

Farm laws, a break with the BJP and electoral collapse

In September 2020 the Akali Dal broke with the BJP over the three farm laws passed by Parliament: Harsimrat Kaur Badal resigned from the Union cabinet and the party quit the National Democratic Alliance it had belonged to since the 1990s. The break did not save it. In the 2022 assembly election Sukhbir Badal lost his own Jalalabad seat to Jagdeep Kamboj of the Aam Aadmi Party, and the Akali Dal won only 3 of 117 seats, its worst result ever. He did not contest the 2024 general election. The party won a single Lok Sabha seat, Bathinda, held by his wife, and its vote share fell from 27.45 percent in 2019 to 13.42 percent, below the BJP's share in Punjab for the first time. His father, Parkash Singh Badal, had died in April 2023, and the son now carried the party's history and its decline at the same time.

Penance, a shooting, and a return: is Sukhbir Singh Badal still president of the Akali Dal?

Yes, but the road back ran through the Akal Takht. Sukhbir Badal resigned as party president on 16 November 2024, after the tankhaiya declaration. On 2 December 2024 the Akal Takht pronounced his religious punishment, and he began serving it at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. On 4 December, while he was performing seva at the temple entrance, a former militant, Narain Singh Chaura, opened fire at him; the shot was foiled and he was unharmed. His resignation was accepted in January 2025. Three months later, on 12 April 2025, the party's delegates unanimously re-elected him president at Teja Singh Samundri Hall in the Darbar Sahib complex in Amritsar. In December 2025 he announced that he will contest the 2027 Punjab assembly election from Gidderbaha, a Malwa seat his father once held, rather than from Jalalabad. The attacks have continued: on 13 August 2026, news agency ANI reported, he was attacked with a dagger at a gurdwara in Nanded district, Maharashtra, suffering a wound to his right forearm; he was treated in hospital and reported stable, and the accused was taken into custody. In October 2026 he was still leading the party's campaign build up, telling reporters the Akali Dal would not ally with the Congress or the AAP, and leading a delegation to the Punjab governor that sought the dismissal of the Bhagwant Mann government. Whether the oldest party in Punjab can climb back from 3 seats is the question his second presidency will be judged on.