Congress candidate from Amritsar lok Sabha seat and former chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh apparently lacked the “vision”, his SAD-BJP rival candidate Arun Jaitley has displayed in his ‘document’ of proposed plans for the holy city.
While the BJP stalwart has addressed local issues such as providing basic amenities like water connectivity, sewage and proper streets, besides setting up textile cluster and improving cross-border trade in its “vision document”, Capt Amarinder, on the face of it, was not seeing beyond Operation Bluestar and 1984 riots during his campaigning.
The senior Congress leader has all along been targeting Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal accusing him for playing the “most negative role” during negotiation period with militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.In comparison to his rival Jaitley, Capt Amarinder has not listed out his priorities for the constituency. Instead, he is busy in targeting the Badal family, and assailing Jaitley on his each and every statement.
Jaitley had long before unveiled his vision document for Amritsar, maintaining that the “historically and religiously important city” needed a strong and improved infrastructure that had been missing till now.He stressed on the need to preserve historical sites and augmenting gardens, including several old buildings such as Khalsa College which need to be projected at the national level as a symbol of high quality education.
Visualising to develop Amritsar as ‘tourism hub’, he talked about connecting it on all sides by large highways, improved internal infrastructure and basic amenities to every section.Responding, Capt Amarinder dubbed Jaitley’s document “having no vision for development of Amritsar”, and claimed that he prepared vision document for Amritsar way back in 2006.