KEWAL SINGH DHILLON: From Pepsi to Politics, The ₹212-Crore Man Who Now Leads Punjab BJP
BJP names Kewal Singh Dhillon, 75, as Punjab unit president. A Jat Sikh industrialist-politician with Congress roots and Malwa base, Dhillon replaces Sunil Jakhar ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections.
Arvind Chhabra
Chandigarh, May 28
When Punjab was burning in the 1980s and capital was fleeing the state, one man was moving in the opposite direction. Kewal Singh Dhillon, a young Congress loyalist from Barnala’s Tallewal village, was busy negotiating a deal to bring PepsiCo’s bottling operations to Punjab — at a time when, as his former Congress colleague Manish Tewari would later put it, being a Congressman in Punjab was practically an invitation to assassination.
Four decades on, that audacious business call has come to define the man. On Thursday, the BJP named the 75-year-old industrialist-politician as the new president of its Punjab unit, replacing Sunil Jakhar ahead of the crucial 2027 Assembly elections.
Kewal Singh Dhillon: The Barnala Boy
Kewal Singh Dhillon was born in 1950 in Tallewal, a village in Barnala district in the heart of Malwa. His formal education stopped early — he is a 12th pass, with BA Part-1 from SD College, Barnala in 1969-70, a degree he never completed. What he lacked in academic credentials, he more than made up for in business instinct.
Through the Dhillon Group, he built a beverages and bottling empire that expanded over the years into hospitality, real estate and other sectors. His declared assets in his 2024 election affidavit stand at over ₹212 crore — properties spread across Delhi’s Vasant Vihar, a villa in Dubai’s Sur La Mer development, two apartments in Marbella, Spain, and agricultural land across three villages near his home district.
The Congress Years
Kewal Singh Dhillon’s political home for most of his life was the Congress, where he rose as a close confidante of former Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh. He won the Barnala assembly seat in 2007 and held it through 2017, when he was swept out by AAP’s Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer — the same Hayer who is now a Member of Parliament from Sangrur.
He tried to return to the Lok Sabha from Sangrur in 2019, but lost again. When the Congress collapsed in the 2022 Punjab elections, Dhillon was among a group of senior leaders who were shown the door — expelled for anti-party activities, without even a formal notice by his account.
The BJP Chapter
Kewal Singh Dhillon joined the BJP in June 2022, part of a wave of Congress defectors that included several Amarinder loyalists. The party gave him the position of vice-president of the Punjab unit. He contested the Sangrur Lok Sabha by-election in 2022 and the Barnala assembly bypoll in November 2024 — losing both. His 2024 Barnala result was particularly telling: he came third with under 18,000 votes, behind both Congress and AAP.
Despite two consecutive losses, the BJP has now handed him the state’s top organisational post.
The Political Calculation
The appointment is not difficult to read. After its alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal collapsed, the BJP has struggled to find its footing in Punjab — a state where it has historically drawn from urban Hindu voters, a base too narrow to win on its own. By picking a Jat Sikh leader with deep Malwa roots and a long Congress career, the party is making a deliberate push toward rural Punjab’s dominant community.
There is also a pointed geographic signal. Kewal Singh Dhillon’s political base is Barnala, squarely in the Sangrur-Malwa belt that is Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann’s home turf. The BJP is essentially planting its flag in AAP’s backyard.
RSS Punjab in-charge Mantri Srinivaslu backed Kewal Singh Dhillon’s name, as did Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Saini, who has been a visible presence at BJP events in Punjab. Party national general secretary Tarun Chugh, who handles Punjab affairs at the national level, had long been pushing for a Sikh face at the helm of the state unit.
Jakhar, for his part, is not being sidelined — he is expected to remain a key figure in leading the 2027 campaign. The party appears to want both faces: Jakhar’s organisational sharpness and Kewal Singh Dhillon’s Sikh-Malwa identity.
The Road Ahead
Dhillon inherits a BJP that is still searching for an independent identity in Punjab — one that can survive without a coalition partner, win rural Sikh votes, and take on an AAP government that, despite anti-incumbency, retains a structural advantage across Malwa.
At 75, with two recent electoral losses and no mass base of his own in the current political moment, Dhillon’s appointment is more a statement of intent than a guarantee of results. But in Punjab’s fractured politics ahead of 2027, intent sometimes is the message.
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