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Amidst murmurs of discontentment among some of his Cabinet Ministers over recent reallocation of portfolios, Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh has set a deadline fasking his cabinet colleagues to assume charge of their new ministries.
Besides Navjot Singh Sidhu, who has been divested of charge of Local Government and Tourism and allotted Power Department, some of the ministers have expressed their dissatisfaction with the change in their portfolios — but only in whispers.
With Sidhu already raising enough dust of controversy within the government, Capt Amarinder, it seems, has sensed that more trouble may brew in the coming days. And it was mainly because of this that he has now asked his ministers to assume the charge of their new Ministries by Monday.
In a rebellion mode, Sidhu has gone incommunicado ever since the portfolios were reallocated among the Ministers. The reallocation came on the same day when Sidhu skipped the Cabinet meeting and decided to address a simultaneous press conference about 100 metres away instead.
As Sidhu, who has been camping in New Delhi, was scheduled to meet the party president Rahul Gandhi on Sunday afternoon, there was no confirmation from anywhere, till the filing of this report, whether the former cricketer has met the Gandhi scion.
It has been learnt that Sidhu wanted to raise the issue of taking away the Local Bodies Department, which he has all along been defending while presenting facts and figures to project that the urban areas performed better than the rural ones but he was being “singled out” for no reason.
Other than Sidhu, three other ministers — Tript Rajinder Singh Bajwa (Urban Development Department), OP Soni (School Education), and Gurpreet Singh Kangar (Power) — also lost their portfolios as they did not have a good working equation with their departmental secretaries.
On Sunday, Soni indirectly questioned the move of stripping him from School Education Department, while claiming that bureaucracy is overpowering the Ministers. At the same time, he maintained that he was and never would be afraid of any officer, “even if it is the Chief Principal Secretary Suresh Kumar”.