Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
Chandigarh, June 20: People’s Party of Punjab chief Manpreet Singh Badal today said not only the BJP leadership once again had ditched the state at Anandpur Sahib yesterday, the issue of drug menace rightly raised by Union Home Minister Rajnath singh amounted to indictment of the Parkash Singh Badal government. The legitimacy of Akali Dal-BJP alliance was now getting eroded.
“Rajnath Singh touched raw nerve of Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal who has deliberately been rejecting the existence of this problem despite the fact that the Akali Dal in its manifesto for the last election to the general house of the Shiromani Akali Dal had promised to launch a sustain campaign against drug menace. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, on the other hand, has been blaming smuggling from across the border for the alarming situation. Now the Union Home Minister has put the state government leadership in an embarrassing situation. The BJP, for the last several months, has been talking of combating this problem. It is the Akali leadership that has been nailed”, he said.
He referred to the outright indifference of both BJP chief Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh to the issue of injustice raised by Sukhbir along with that of continued discrimination under the Modi government by other Akali leaders including Mr Ranjit Singh Brahmpura. The BJP top leadership did not even acknowledge the charge of continuing discrimination around which total politics of the Akali Dal used to revolve during the Congress regime at the centre. Now senior Akali leaders were levelling the same charge against the Modi government.
He recalled that earlier during his maiden visit to the state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had totally ignored not only the long pending but even the current issues concerning Punjab.
He said the situation would have been different in case Sukhbir had not referred to 1984 killing of the Sikhs and other issues from the stage as then these leaders could have safely taken the refuge in the argument that the function was apolitical. However, once the demands were raised repeatedly, it was expected of the BJP leadership to react and extend some sort of assurance.
He felt Chief Minister should have got some assurance at least on the fiscal front to which Punjab was entitled. He said the state was losing at every level under the present dispensation, both at the centre and in the state.
