Amritsar ( 17 October, 2011 ): Taking a dig at Congress and Akali Dal (Badal) for ruining the Punjab financially, the Dal Khalsa said everyone right from Parkash Singh Badal to Manpreet Singh Badal, wants to ride on Anna’s anti-corruption wave only to get political mileage out of it.
Party’s secretary for political affairs Kanwar Pal Singh said, people of Punjab knew in their guts that neither Congress nor Akali Dal has any concrete agenda to wipe out corruption from the state. He said both the parties for putting up a false display of fight to root out corruption from the state.
On Manpreet’s claim that his third front (PPP-Left) would emerge as non-corrupt alternative, he said, Manpreet, who had remained in the kitchen cabinet of the corrupt government led of Badals for long was still expecting that people of Punjab should believe that “he had clean hands” ( free from all wrong doings). The people were not naïve, he said and added Manpreet would have to go a long way as Punjab has witnessed bipolar polity and the role of third front has been negligible so far”.
Referring to Anna Hazare’s announcement for observing indefinite maun varat (vow of silence), he said after hitting the headlines of all national dailies, now Anna was dramatizing his anti-graft campaign by one or the other way.
Condemning the premeditated and brutal assault on Prashant Bhushan, Supreme Court lawyer by so-called Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena, the Dal Khalsa leader blamed dirty tricks department of the Home Ministry for attack on Bhushan junior. He said the members of this outfit including its president (a Sikh face) Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga were RSS men remote-controlled by intelligence agencies.
“Bagga and his goons created a lot of disturbance at Delhi seminar held on Oct 21 last year in which Nagas, Kashmiri’s and Sikh representatives besides Arundhati Roy participated”, said Kanwar Pal Singh who himself was present in the function.
He said “the agencies have killed two birds with one stone : they had attempted to create wedge between Anna Hazare team members as they had divergent viewpoint on J&K plebiscite issue and at the same time muzzling the voices that are in favour of right to self-determination for Kashmir”. To drive his point home, he said Prashant’s views on Kashmir were not new as he along with many known intellectuals and thinkers from the Indian civil society had been advocating these views since long. Then why all of a sudden an attack on him and that too when anti-graft campaign was at its peak, he said smelling a hidden design behind it.
He pointed out that the forces behind the attack have succeeded to some extent in creating rift between team Anna as was evident from the statements of Anna and Keejriwal snubbing Prashant.