The ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Wednesday accused the Congress party of derailing the national development agenda by giving a political colour to unfortunate incidents, including the murder of a Dalit, to prevent discussion of the National Herald and other corruption cases of the party.
“It is unfortunate that the Congress is disrupting the Parliament in a case in which its party president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi had received court summons for usurping National Herald property worth thousands of crores by spending a trifling `50 lakh,” said the Union Food Processing Industry Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal.
She said that such tactics, however, would not succeed for long. “You will have to account for your thefts and are liable to be justly punished by the law of the land. You cannot wriggle away from your illegal acts by hiding behind the cloak of political persecution and will have to tell the people why you indulged in such illegalities,” she said.
Castigating Punjab Congress and its Abohar-based leader for showing rank hypocrisy, she said that this leader, who was holding protests to demand action against those who had murdered a Dalit, had campaigned with the very same attackers in the last municipal committee elections.
“It is unfortunate that a case of gang war between two rival gangs, in which a Jat Sikh had also been attacked, is being projected as a case of Dalit persecution,” she said.
She added, “let me remind the Congress that Punjab has the highest Dalit population in the country. Despite this, crime against dalits is the lowest in the state according to the national crime bureau statistics.”