The Shiromani Akali Dal was formed in December 1920 as the volunteer wing of the Gurdwara Reform Movement. It became the political party of Sikh Punjab and has governed the state repeatedly.
Its history runs through the morchas of the 1920s, the negotiations of 1947, the Punjabi Suba campaign, the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, the agitations of the early 1980s, the Rajiv-Longowal accord and the governments of the 1990s and 2000s.
It has split many times. Master Tara Singh and Sant Fateh Singh, Longowal and Talwandi, Badal and Mann, and repeatedly since. The names of the factions carry the surnames of their leaders, which is a fair description of how the party has worked.
It has always faced a structural problem. It is a party defined by a religious constituency in a state where that constituency is a bare majority, which means it can never win alone and must ally, historically with the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Its vote collapsed after 2017 and further after 2022 and 2024, and the party that ran Sikh institutional politics for a century is now a minor force in the state assembly.
The SGPC, which it has controlled for most of that century, is a separate body and the relationship between the two is the central fact of Sikh institutional politics.
Its early membership was a register of volunteers who had taken a vow of non-violence, and the black turban and the kirpan were the uniform. It was a disciplined corps before it was a party, and the corps is where its method came from.
Its structural problem is that it is a religious and a political body at once. Control of the SGPC funds the party and the party appoints to the SGPC, and every reform proposal runs into that.
It has governed Punjab repeatedly, usually in alliance, and it broke with the BJP over the farm laws in 2020. Its share of the vote in 2022 was under nineteen per cent, down from about a quarter in 2017, and it won three seats.