Punjab Congress on Friday demanded “public apology” from the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh insulting farmers in the country by attributing their suicides to “drugs, love affairs and impotency” in a written reply to a question.
“It is shocking that Radha Mohan Singh today denied in his written reply that more than 1,400 of the suicides by the farmers in the country were not due to financial distress because of staggering debt or crop loss due to adverse weather but due to drugs and impotency etc,” said the state Congress president Partap Singh Bajwa.
He said that the Union Minister has insulted the farming community in the entire country as the studies, one after the other, have pinpointed the cause of increasing suicides to crisis in the farm sector.
Bajwa expressed surprise that the Minister had referred to debt as only one of the reasons for these suicides along with family problems, illness, dowry, love affairs and impotency.
“This is not only clumsy but shameful, appalling and reprehensible cover up for a national tragedy with which those who feed the nation were confronted with,” he said.
The State Congress chief said that the awfully disgusting statement made by the Union Agriculture Minister had exposed disdain the farmers were being subjected to by this Government as to also the thinking behind the Bill to amend the land acquisition legislation which was an effort to wipe out the farmers themselves.
The investigation done by the three universities in Punjab on farmers suicides had referred to debt burden as the main reason, he pointed.
Bajwa said the Modi Government should hang its head in shame and the PM must apologise himself “for this crime against farmers committed by his Agriculture Minister”.