Badal, towering leader of Punjab politics, cremated with state honours

PUNJAB: Cutting across party lines, the tallest leader of state politics and the Akali patriarch Parkash Singh Badal, who always valued and practised secular credentials, was cremated with full state honours at his native village of Badal in Muktsar district in southwest Punjab.

His death at the age of 95 on Tuesday evening marked the end of an era of 70 years in Punjab’s politics.

In political circles, Badal, the country’s oldest politician — next only to BJP veteran L.K. Advani — was known as the ‘Baba Bohr’ (banyan tree) of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD).

He is survived by son and former deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal and daughter Parneet Kaur and grandchildren. He lost his life-partner, Surinder Kaur, in 2011.

His son lit the pyre. As the bugle sounded, a pall of silence descended at the cremation ground before police personnel fired shots into the air as a mark of respect to the departed leader.

The elderly Badal entered politics at the age of 20 when he got elected as the sarpanch of Badal in 1947, the village that remained his native place despite being election as the Chief Minister five times. And for the villagers the veteran leader was their sarpanch till he breathed his last.

The cremation was held at the family’s kinnow farm where a raised platform was erected for performing the last rites. The farm was raised by the elderly Badal himself.

Scores of dignitaries from all political spectrum and supporters flooded his native place early in the morning where former Chief Minister’s body was kept to catch a last glimpse of the late leader.

Amid ‘Shabad Kirtan’, his body, kept in a flower-decked tractor-trailer, was taken in a procession to the nearby agricultural field for a state funeral.

A stoic Sukhbir Singh Badal, often consoled by his ‘estranged’ cousin Manpreet Badal, along with his wife Harsimrat Kaur and his three children acknowledged the tributes of hundreds of people, some tearful, who came to pay respect to the elderly Badal, whose mortal remains were brought from Chandigarh on late Wednesday evening at their residence.

Under the helm of senior Badal, SAD made history in 1997 by becoming the first non-Congress party to complete its first full term in office since Independence.

It repeated its feat in 2007 and 2012 in alliance with the BJP. BJP national President J.P. Nadda, Union Ministers Hardeep Puri and Som Parkash, Punjab Governor Banwarilal Purohit, Chief Ministers Bhagwant Mann and Ashok Gehlot, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Hooda, National Congress leader Omar Abdullah, Haryana Deputy Chief Minister Dushyant Chautala, former union minister Praful Patel, among others, attended the cremation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday reached Chandigarh to pay his last respects to the patriarch where his body was kept for public to pay their respects. (IANS)

Also Read:Uddhav Thackeray warns of taking ‘revenge’ for Shinde’s backstabbing

Also Watch: