In a matter of just 24 hours, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh suffered a double blow as two of his close aides in the government lost their jobs – one bowing down to the law of the land and the second one being forcibly sacrificed at the political altar.
The exit of senior bureaucrat Suresh Kumar, a close aide and confidant of Amarinder Singh in the 10-month-old Congress government in the state, as the Chief Principal Secretary after the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday held his appointment to a cadre post as void, being in violation of the Constitution, has definitely affected the Chief Minister and his high profile office.
Kumar, a 1983-batch IAS officer who retired as Additional Chief Secretary in Punjab in April 2016, was hand-picked by Amarinder when he became the Chief Minister in March 2016.