Taking serious notice of the threat issued by former Chief Minister and Amritsar MP Capt Amarinder Singh to the officers working day and night for the development of Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Sunday said that it seems that he has not learnt any lesson from his past mistakes.
“The officers of the State Government are directly working under a constitutionally elected Government and he has no business to threaten the bureaucracy which is working as per the wishes of democratically elected Government. If he has any point to make, he should dare to point it out to the government,” said the party secretary and spokesman and Punjab Education Minister Daljit Singh Cheema.
He said that it was strange that septuagenarian leader has failed to understand the pulse of the people of Punjab. “This is not the first time when he has tried to terrorise the officers from performing their bonafide duties. Prior to 2012 Punjab Vidhan Sabha elections, in the same fashion, he had urged banks against issuing loans to the State for development works in the State,” he said.
Cheema said that apart from this, he had gone a step further in asking the then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who was heading a Congress-led UPA government at the Centre, to stop grants worth crores of rupees to the state as he had apprehended that the development would cause big political loss to him in the elections.
SAD leader said that fear factor of the erstwhile ‘Maharaja’ had proved right as the people voted for the development initiatives of the SAD-BJP combine in 2012 elections. “History is going to repeat this time too and the same fear factor has gripped the former Chief Minister who has already read the writing on the wall,” he added.
Cheema said that as the Congress-led UPA government has been ousted by the people of the country and he is not in a position to influence the NDA government, so he had chosen another novel way of issuing threats to the senior officers of the state to stall the process of development.
The Minister said that the threat issued by the Congress leader to the officers of the state has once again exposed his anti-Punjab face and his ulterior motive to work against development the state. This is the basic principle of the Congress party, he added.