Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Wednesday said no Akali leader, especially former Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal, had the moral right to speak on the crisis triggered by the Farm Laws, which they could easily have averted when they were part of the central government and party to each of its decisions.
In a hard-hitting response to Harsimrat’s claims and allegations against him with reference to his statement on the impact of the prolonged farmers’ stir in Punjab on the state’s economy, the Chief Minister said that her remarks were politically motivated which were nothing but a cover-up of her and her party’s failure to prevent the crisis that was of their own deliberate making.
Ridiculing the former union minister’s remarks that he (Captain Amarinder) was speaking the language of the BJP leadership and the Prime Minister, the Chief Minister said that left to the ruling party at the Centre and in neighbouring Haryana, the farmers would not have even reached the Delhi borders to make their voice heard.
“I never asked the farmers to go to Delhi. They were forced to leave their homes and sit at the border of the national capital, facing the elements and even losing their lives, as a result of your coalition government’s acts of commission and omission,” he said to Harsimrat.
Taking a dig at Harsimrat’s claim of being “surprised and pained” at his remarks, the Chief Minister said either the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader was deliberately lying or was totally dumb and apathetic to the plight of the state and its people. “It’s a joke coming from the leader of a party that misruled Punjab for 10 years and brought the state to the brink of complete ruination,” he said.
Meanwhile, the former Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal said here on Wednesday said that Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh’s statement made it clear that CM was dancing to the tunes of the BJP just because that party had bailed him out of is intra-party crisis by using the threat of central agencies against the Congress MLAs who had rebelled against him.
The whole world knows that Capt Amarinder Singh is a BJP’s “swatantar fauji” in the Congress and that he is doing everything to keep his “real bosses happy, ” said Harsimrat Badal in a statement here this evening.
Harsimrat Kaur Badal was commenting on what she called, “The outbursts of an embarrassed Chief Minister who had been caught betraying his own farmers just to return the favours the BJP had been doing towards him.” “I realise he owes them a lot, but his gratitude to the BJP must not come at the expense of the annadata of the country from his own state,” she added.
