Abul Khurana, a village in what is today the Sri Muktsar Sahib district of Punjab, was the birthplace of Parkash Singh Badal, born there on 8 December 1927 in what was then the Punjab Province of British India. The village lies in the flat cotton and wheat country of the Malwa region, close to the neighbouring village of Badal from which his family took its name. He never moved his political base away from this corner of the state, and the constituency he represented for term after term lay within a short drive of the fields where he grew up.

A farming household and an education in Lahore

The family were Jat Sikh farmers, part of the landowning peasant community that has shaped Punjab's rural politics for more than a century. Agriculture was not a background he left behind; it remained the subject he returned to most often in public life, and farming families remained the core of his support for seven decades.

For his higher education he went to Forman Christian College in Lahore, then one of the most respected institutions in undivided Punjab, drawing students from across the province. His college years therefore belong to the last phase of British India, before the partition of 1947 divided the province and placed Lahore in Pakistan. That experience of a Punjab before partition marked the generation of leaders to which he belonged.

From sarpanch to the state assembly

His public career began at the smallest unit of Indian democracy. He was elected sarpanch, the head of the village panchayat, and then became chairman of the block samiti, the tier of local government above it. This grounding in panchayat work is central to how his career is remembered: he entered politics through village administration rather than through law, journalism or a metropolitan movement, and he retained the manner and speech of the countryside throughout his life.

In 1957 he was elected for the first time to the Punjab legislative assembly. He would go on to sit in that house across an extraordinary span of decades, for many terms representing the Lambi constituency in the Muktsar country of his birth. His association with Lambi became one of the most durable constituency relationships in Indian electoral history.

The first terms and national office

In 1970, at the age of forty-two, he became Chief Minister of Punjab for the first time, then the youngest person to hold the post. In 1977 he served briefly in the union government as Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation in the cabinet led by Morarji Desai, before returning to the state to become Chief Minister again, holding the office from 1977 to 1980.

These years were interrupted by imprisonment. He was jailed during the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, when large numbers of opposition politicians across India were detained, and he also spent time in prison in connection with the Akali agitations of the period. Long spells in custody were a recurring feature of his early and middle career, and they helped establish his standing within the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Sikh political party with which his name became inseparable.

Party leadership and the long later terms

He became president of the Shiromani Akali Dal in 1995 and led the party for many years, shaping its long-running alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, a partnership that gave the Akali Dal a route to power at the state level and a presence in national coalitions. Under that alliance he returned as Chief Minister from 1997 to 2002.

His final and longest period in office ran from 2007 to 2012 and then from 2012 to 2017. Completing the first of these terms made him the first Chief Minister of Punjab to serve a full five years in the office, and winning the second made him the first to be returned for a consecutive term. Taken together with his earlier spells, this made him a five-time Chief Minister of the state and, in his last years in office, the oldest serving chief minister in India.

His career therefore covered the most turbulent decades of Punjab's modern history, from the reorganisation of the state and the transformation of its agriculture through the years of militancy and their long aftermath. He was a participant in many of the contested episodes of that period, which continue to be debated.

Later years and legacy

In 2015 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour of the Republic of India. In December 2020 he formally returned the award, stating that he was doing so in protest against the central farm laws then under discussion and in solidarity with protesting farmers. The return was widely reported at the time and is part of the public record of his last years.

His son, Sukhbir Singh Badal, followed him into the leadership of the Shiromani Akali Dal and served as deputy chief minister of Punjab, continuing the family's presence in the state's politics. Parkash Singh Badal died on 25 April 2023 at Mohali, near Chandigarh, at the age of ninety-five.

For the village of Abul Khurana and the surrounding Malwa countryside, his career is a remarkable arc: from the panchayat of a small farming settlement to the chief ministership of a border state, sustained across sixty-six years of elected public life. Whatever position one takes on the politics of the period, the sheer duration of that career, beginning under British rule and ending in the twenty-first century, is close to unmatched in India.