BJP president Nitin Nabin would start his three-day visit to poll-bound Punjab with an obeisance at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on June 20, party sources said on Thursday.
He will follow it up with a visit to the Durgiana Temple, also in Amritsar. This will be Nabin’s first visit to Punjab after taking charge as the party’s national president.
From Amritsar, he is scheduled to travel to Jalandhar and Ludhiana, where he will meet rank-and-file workers of the BJP and the RSS. A major event has been planned in Ludhiana on June 21, where Nabin is expected to address around 7,500 party workers and leaders.
Party leaders said the visit carried significance on more than one count. Being Nabin’s first trip to the state as national president, it is being seen as a signal of the importance the central leadership is attaching to Punjab ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections, where the BJP has decided to go it alone for the first time without the Shiromani Akali Dal.
The decision to begin the tour with visits to the Golden Temple and the Durgiana Temple is also being read as an attempt to reach out to the Sikh community and project the party’s outreach beyond its traditional urban Hindu base. The scale of the Ludhiana gathering, leaders said, is meant to project organisational strength in the Malwa belt, considered crucial to the party’s electoral arithmetic in the state.
A BJP leader said the visit was a follow-up to the poll bugle sounded by Union Home Minister Amit Shah in April, when he had announced that the BJP would bring all-round progress to Punjab and contest the 2027 Assembly elections on its own. The leader added that the final programme for Nabin’s visit would be released soon.
Sources said the party’s national organisation secretary B.L. Santosh presided over a quarterly coordination meeting with the RSS on Tuesday to discuss and finalise plans for the Punjab polls as well as preparations to make Nabin’s visit a success.
