Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Sunday said that Punjab Congress had fallen back on holding a sham in-house hunger strike after the people resolutely rejected Congress president Partap Singh Bajwa’s decision to take support of a dreaded drug lord to attack the SAD-BJP Government.
Terming the hunger strike as a “photo opportunity” to keep himself in the news, SAD spokesman Dr Daljit Singh Cheema and general secretary and Cabinet Minister Sharanjit Singh Dhillon said that it was ironic that Bajwa, who had launched an agitation programme with much fanfare recently, had fallen back on an in-house hunger strike in the comfort of the party office here in the union territory. “Bajwa has seen the fate of the chakka jam programme held recently which saw uninterrupted movement of traffic across the state even as few henchmen of the PCC chief went in for symbolic protests to please their boss,” the SAD leaders said, adding that this was the main reason why Bajwa had diluted his agitation programme and decided to release well calibrated photographs for dispatch to the party high command to show that an agitation was in progress when nothing existed on the ground.They said that the ‘hunger strike’ was also aimed at shifting focus away from the on-going factional fight in Punjab Congress. “Rather than holding sham protests which has no meaning, the PCC chief should come clean on his past misdeeds which had been revealed in detail in a letter written by former Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh to the high command as well as an investigation done by a reputed news magazine,” they added.