Punjab Congress on Monday strongly condemned the arrest of party’s kisan wing chairman Inderjeet Singh Zira and several other activists who were protesting in Badal village against the harassment of farmers in mandis all over the State.
The party demanded that the arrested kisan wing leaders should be released without any delay and their their demands should be immediately addressed.
“Such issues are not political but concerned the State’s economy and the plight of the people,” said State Congress president Partap Singh Bajwa. He said that it was people’s democratic right to give vent to their concerns by staging demonstrations in the village of Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal.
“There is no reason why the right to demonstrate in front of the residence of Chief Minister should be curbed like this,” he said. “Rather than attending to the problems being faced by the people in general and the farmers in particular, this Government has unleashed terror reminiscent of the days of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. The Badal Government era too would go down into history as a repressive regime,” he added.
Bajwa asserted that the farmers had always suffered in the mandis during the Badal regime despite the so-called claim of the Chief Minister to be their champion. “The marketing of food grain is marked by rampant corruption in Punjab and the ultimate victim happened to be the farmer who was otherwise feeding the nation,” he said.
He also referred to the pitiable plight of cotton cultivators whose problems had compounded, earlier due to late rains and now in the absence of adequate price mechanism. Similar was the situation of the paddy farmers in general and the basmati cultivators in particular.
Calling upon Badal to stop shedding crocodile tears for the farmers, he asked him to rather focus on the removal of their problems immediately rather than suppressing the protests.