Former Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Saturday, 2 October, hit back at Congress and party leader Randeep Surjewala, who had claimed that out of 79 MLAs, 78 had “written that the CM should be changed”.
Singh said, “it seems the entire party has become imbued with Navjot Singh Sidhu’s sense of comic theatrics. Next day they will claim that 117 MLAs wrote to them against me.”
Amid the fiery give-and-take between Congress leaders and Captain Amarinder Singh, Surjewala on Saturday revealed the number of MLAs against Singh and said, “When a CM loses MLAs' trust, he should step down from the post. If we wouldn't have changed the CM, it would've been termed as dictatorship”, news agency ANI reported.
'Cannot Even Coordinate Their Lies': Former Punjab CM
However, just a day earlier, Congress leader Harish Rawat had said in a press statement that 43 MLAs had written to the Congress high command.
Singh added in his letter that “this is the state of affairs in the party. They cannot even coordinate their lies properly.”
He added that the fact of the matter was that the 43-odd MLAs who had signed the letter had been forced to do so under duress.
Amarinder Singh further said that the Congress was now in a total state of panic, having been pushed into a corner over its mishandling of the Punjab crisis, which Singh said was evident in the statements of the party’s leaders.
‘Successful in Cracking Sacrilege Cases’: Amarinder Singh
Reminding the party that he was the reason for Congress to win every election in Punjab since 2017, Captain Singh added that the people of Punjab had not lost trust in him, as claimed by Surjewala, and that the whole affair had been orchestrated by a few leaders/MLAs at the behest of Navjot Singh Sidhu.
Amarinder also slammed the Congress for Harish Rawat’s statements made on the Bargari issue and subsequent firing cases, saying that, “had I been hand in glove with the Badals, as they are alleging, I would not have spent the last 13 years fighting them in courts”.
He also trashed accusations of not taking any actions in these cases and asserted that his government was successful in cracking “all the three major cases of sacrilege of Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji”.
After listing the actions taken against police officers in the Kotkapura and Behbal Kalan firing cases, he concluded that the entire bogey of no action in these cases was created by Sidhu and his aides, whose only interest was to grab power, by hook or by crook, the letter said.
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