Punjab Outlook

CHANDIGARH: Bholath MLA and Chairman All India Kisan Congress, Sukhpal Singh Khaira today accused the Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann of following in the footsteps of the BJP’s “bulldozer justice”.
“Mann is trying to be more loyal than the king”, he remarked, while suggesting that he was trying to go out of way to please the BJP and the Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Addressing a press conference at the Congress Bhawan, along with the state Kisan Congress president Kiranjit Singh Mitha, here today, Khaira condemned the use of brute force against the peaceful farmers who were only seeking what had been promised to them by the Prime Minister of the country.
The firebrand Congress leader and legislator maintained that Mann was not only copying the BJP’s “authoritarian and dictatorial” model in all ways, but was already aligned with the saffron party now. He was already following it by way of silencing his critics, political opponents and media, like the BJP does at the centre and in the states it is in power.
“Now he had taken one more leaf from the BJP book, that of running bulldozers over helpless people”, Khaira observed, while pointing out how even the houses of downtrodden people were being bulldozed on the pretext of an anti-drug campaign.
He accused the Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann of misusing police to brutally muzzle the voice of dissent in Punjab.
Condemning the brutal and barbaric use of force against the peacefully protesting farmers, Khaira said they were wrongly blamed for blocking the highway.
Setting the record straight, he said, the highway was actually blocked by the BJP government in Haryana, which had erected a concrete wall to prevent farmers from reaching Delhi. He said the Haryana government had not only blocked the farmers’ from moving to Delhi, but actually suffocated Punjab with concrete blockade.
He observed, had the Haryana government not erected concrete walls, the farmers would have moved to Ramlila Maidan in Delhi and staged protests there and there would not have been any problem to anyone.
Khaira clarified that the losses suffered by the trade and industry in Punjab were because of the Haryana government blocking the highway with concrete walls and not the farmers’ protests.