Former Chief Minister of Punjab Captain Amarinder Singh on Friday, 11 March, slammed the Congress for putting the blame of its "humiliating defeat" in the 2022 Punjab Assembly elections on him.
The Congress was voted out of power in Punjab after the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won the state polls on Thursday with a landslide mandate, gaining about three-fourths of the seats in the state.
Following the declaration of the election results in Punjab on Thursday, Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala claimed that the anti-incumbency, which was created in the state under the regime of Captain Amarinder Singh prevented the Congress from winning the polls.
"In Punjab, Congress presented a new leadership through Charanjit Singh Channi who is son of the soil, but the entire anti-incumbency of 4.5 years under Captain Amarinder Singh could not be overcome and hence people voted for AAP for change," Surjewala said, as per news agency ANI.
Reacting to this allegation, Amarinder Singh, said, "The @INCIndia leadership will never learn!"
"Who is responsible for the humiliating defeat of Congress in UP? What about Manipur, Goa, Uttrakhand? The answer is written in BOLD LETTERS on the wall but as always I presume they will avoid reading it (sic)," he wrote in a tweet.
Singh's message also came as a dig to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who on Thursday tweeted saying that the party humbly accepts the people’s verdict, adding that the party would "learn from this". This came after a disappointing performance by the party in all states.
Singh, who now heads the newly formed Punjab Lok Congress (PLC) has lost his home seat of Patiala by a sizeable margin of 19,873 votes against Aam Aadmi Party's Ajit Pal Singh Kohli. PLC went into an alliance with the BJP for the polls, but it couldn't win a single seat. The BJP, meanwhile, won just two out of the total 117 seats in the Assembly. With the AAP winning 92 seats, the Congress, with 18 seats, was pushed to the second position.
Singh had stepped down as the chief minister of Punjab and resigned from the Congress party in September 2021, five months before the Assembly elections.
(With inputs from ANI.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)