Punjab saw another bandh this week. Roads blocked, slogans raised, the same old demand repeated once again: Release the Sikh prisoners, or Bandi Singhs. Markets stayed shut, buses stayed off the road, but the day passed off peacefully, with no untoward incident reported anywhere in the state. This has been going on for more than a decade now. Every few months, some party or the other picks up this issue, makes a big statement, holds a rally, writes a letter to Delhi. Then things go quiet again, until the next round. The truth is simple, even if nobody wants to say it out loud - every major party in Punjab has used this issue. Not one of them has actually closed the file when it had the power to do so.
When this campaign started in 2013, the list of Sikh prisoners being demanded free ran to 119 names. More than a decade of releases, deaths and legal action later, that number has come down to around 21. The list has shrunk mostly on its own, case by case, not because any single government sat down and resolved it.
The Akali Dal: A Decade in Power, No Result
The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) ruled Punjab for 10 years, from 2007 to 2017, and was allied with the BJP at the Centre for most of that time. If any party had the means to push this through, it was the SAD. Though Punjab's former chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal wrote to several governments in 2014 seeking the release of 13 prisoners, formed a high-level committee in 2015, and Punjab also moved the Supreme Court. Waryam Singh's release was subsequently cleared. The issue only returned to SAD's speeches after it lost badly in the 2022 election. When the SAD had the chair, the file gathered dust. When it lost the chair, the file reopened as a slogan.
The BJP: A Notification, Half-Delivered
In 2019, the Centre government issued a formal notification, reportedly, for the release of eight Sikh prisoners, timed with Guru Nanak Dev Ji's 550th birth anniversary. Three of the eight were reportedly already out; three others were subsequently released, while Bhullar and Gurdeep Singh Khera remained unresolved. That is six years of a decision sitting half-done. The BJP points out, fairly, that most of these convictions happened under Congress rule but that does not explain why its own notification has still not been fully carried out.
Congress: Loud in Opposition, Quiet in Government
The Indian National Congress ruled Punjab from 2017 to 2022 and did little concrete on this at the state level. Out of power now, leaders like Gurkirat Singh Kotli and Charanjit Singh Channi back the release at rallies. The twist: Kotli is Beant Singh's own grandson, while another Congress MP and Beant Singh grandson, Ravneet Singh Bittu, has publicly opposed releasing the men who killed his grandfather. Congress does not even speak with one voice inside its own family.
AAP: From Silence to a Sudden Push
The AAP has governed Punjab since 2022 and stayed largely non-committal for three years. That changed this August, when Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann personally sought parole for Jagtar Singh Hawara from the Punjab Governor Gulab Chand Kataria. With the 2027 election approaching and the Panthic vote up for grabs, a government finding sudden urgency now is hard to read as anything but timing, even the BJP's own Punjab unit has called it out as such.
Panthic Parties: Consistent, But Not Free of Politics Either
The hardline Panthic groups that never held power have their own story. Simranjit Singh Mann's SAD (Amritsar) has raised this demand for decades and backed this week's bandh; Simranjit Singh Mann was detained during the Independence Day march. But a party that has never won power in Punjab can never be tested on whether it would actually deliver, forty years of demanding from the sidelines is not the same as holding the file.
Akali Dal (Punar Surjit), the newest entrant, broke away only last year under Giani Harpreet Singh, a former Akal Takht Jathedar now in full-time politics. Backing this bandh was one of his first moves as party chief, a fast way for a brand-new outfit to earn trust in a crowded field.
The starkest case is that of Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De), around jailed MP Amritpal Singh. It has widened the definition itself, folding Amritpal's own 2023 arrest under the National Security Act in with 1980s-90s insurgency convictions but his NSA detention is legally different from the cases of prisoners serving sentences after conviction.
Of the 21, Who Actually Moves Votes and Where
Not all 21 names carry equal weight, and their pull is not spread evenly across Punjab either.
Balwant Singh Rajoana carries the heaviest symbolic charge. Sentenced to death in 2007 for the Beant Singh killing, his hanging has never been carried out. He belongs to Rajoana Kalan village in Ludhiana district, and the 2012 bandh over his proposed execution had an impact across Punjab, including Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Tarn Taran, Bathinda, Ropar and Patiala-not simply a Ludhiana-Moga-Muktsar phenomenon.. For a hardline Panthic audience, his name still carries the most weight, especially in this region.
Jagtar Singh Hawara is the face of the present round, simply because he is the one Mann personally pursued this August. The movement's operational centre right now sits at the Qaumi Insaaf Morcha's permanent protest camp on the Chandigarh-Mohali border, which has become the physical headquarters of the whole campaign.
Devinderpal Singh Bhullar is the case most known outside Punjab, since his conviction was for the 1993 Delhi bomb blast, giving it national reach for years. Delhi's Sentence Review Board considered his case in December 2025 and the rejection was formally communicated in February 2026. The clearest proof of how far this sympathy travels came from the 2024 Lok Sabha election, and it too has a geography.
Amritpal Singh, contested from jail, won Khadoor Sahib- a Majha-belt seat around Tarn Taran and Amritsar - by nearly 1.97 lakh votes, the biggest margin in Punjab that year. Sarabjit Singh Khalsa won Faridkot, in the Malwa region, by about 70,000. Both victories demonstrated the continuing electoral space for Panthic, anti-establishment politics outside Punjab's traditional parties. But it would be wrong to attribute those victories solely to the Bandi Singhs issue. Amritpal's campaign, for instance, also involved drugs, Sikh identity and opposition to the political establishment.
But the same election showed the limit of this sentiment: Simranjit Singh Mann himself lost his own Sangrur in 2024, also in Malwa, that year. Sympathy for the Bandi Singhs clearly moves votes in specific pockets - Majha's Khadoor Sahib belt and Malwa's Ludhiana-Moga-Muktsar-Faridkot stretch above all - but it rewards particular names and moments, not whichever party shouts loudest.
A Pattern That Repeats Itself
The pattern is difficult to ignore. In opposition, parties demand action; in government, legal complications, jurisdiction and political caution slow them down. Then, as elections approach, the issue returns with fresh urgency. That does not make every intervention cynical or every concern insincere. But after more than a decade, Punjab still lacks a transparent, case-by-case process capable of bringing the matter to a conclusion. For the families, this is not an election issue; it is a decades-long wait. In 2027, voters may ask a simpler question: not who is making the promise now, but what they did when they had the power.
Ravinder Singh Robin is a broadcast journalist with over two decades of experience in covering Punjab, Sikh affairs, border issues, India-Pakistan relations and international developments.
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.
