Punjab Congress on Monday stated that with Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s two successive visits to Punjab, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s “sham sympathy” for the farmers stood exposed, and now, he was trying “to find political motives behind the visits”.
The party also asked Badal to tell the people in the State as to how many families of the farmers having committed suicide he had visited since 2007.
“Badal should know that Rahul Gandhi visited the family of farmer Surjit Singh who had committed suicide without making a political show of it as he did not even talk to the media.
It manifested his concern for the increasing incidence of suicides by the farmers and that too in a State like Punjab which has been the harbinger of Green Revolution,” said Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) president Partap Singh Bajwa.
He said that Badal should explain as to why there has been this sudden jump in the number of suicides by the farmers in the State over the last few years.
lambasting Badal for cheating the State’s farmers, Bajwa said that he had failed to take a stand against the anti-farmer policies of the Narendra Modi Government in which his daughter-in-law Harsimrat Kaur Badal is a minister.
He called upon Badal to stop double crossing the people to secure the position of his daughter-in-law in the Modi cabinet.“The people has a right to know whether Harsimrat had ever formally opposed any anti-farmer decision of the Modi Government in the cabinet meetings or not,” he said.
Reminding Badal that hike in minimum support price has been highest during UPA’s 10-year rule, Bajwa said that now Modi Government had played a joke with the farmers by announcing a meager hike of just Rs50 per quintal in paddy MSP.
“Badal had been promising to the farmers that with the change in the government at the Centre, the Swaminathan Committee recommendations on the MSP would be implemented which ensure 50 per cent profit over and above the cost of production,” he said asking Badal to explain the hike of Rs50 per quintal in paddy MSP in the framework of Swaminathan Committee recommendations.PNS