BJP leader Rana Gurmeet Singh Sodhi has said that the time for an alliance between his party and the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) has passed.He asserted that the BJP was now strong enough to contest the Punjab Assembly elections on its own.In an exclusive interview with The Tribune, the former minister, who switched to the BJP from the Congress in November 2021, said the BJP’s vote share in the state had almost touched 19 per cent in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and it needed only another 11-12 percentage points to cross the majority mark. Further, he said the BJP and the SAD now pursued separate agendas.Sodhi said forming an alliance at this stage would send a wrong signal to voters. “We cannot afford to enter an alliance at the moment because people have faith in us. We do not want to create confusion,” he said. He acknowledged that senior leader Capt Amarinder Singh remained a strong advocate of an alliance with the Akalis, but said he held a different view. “Captain Sahib has his own ideas and I respect whatever he speaks,” Sodhi said while maintaining that the two parties’ divergent priorities left little room for a tie-up “at the moment”.Turning to the Congress, Sodhi blamed the party’s decline squarely on indecisiveness at the top, holding Rahul Gandhi responsible for a series of missteps in Punjab.He said Gandhi had failed to grasp the core issues facing the state. “When you don’t understand the subject, you become a confused man, and when you become a confused man, you make wrong decisions,” Sodhi said. Sodhi also accused state’s ruling AAP of failing to deliver on its poll promises. “It is like you show somebody a 24-carat gold bangle and then give him something like brass. It is a fake, a total fake,” he said.