Describing her nearest rival during recently-concluded lok Sabha polls at Bathinda, the second-time Akali MP, Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Tuesday called Manpreet Badal as “chameleon”, and said that true to his style, he was now blaming the Congress, which gave him more than four lakh out of his 4.94 lakh vote share.
“Acting like the true chameleon, he is now finding fault with the Congress on whose symbol he contested the elections and which is responsible for
most of the 4.94 lakh votes polled in his favour,” said Harsimrat, in an official statement.
She said that it was ironical that instead of thanking Congress for its support, Manpreet’s kith and kin were finding fault with Congress leaders now.
“Manpreet’s bid to claim the 4.94 lakh votes as his alone by finding faults
with the Congress legislators and halqa in-charges is in
keeping with his character.
He is disowning a party which contributed a bare minimum of four lakh votes to his
kitty,” she said while grounding her assertions on the fact that Congress had got four lakh votes at its lowest
ebb in 2009 when its party candidate Raninder Singh lost the election by more than 1.20 lakh votes.
“If you take into account the 20,000 plus votes polled by the CPI in 2009 you will realize that Manpreet’s PPP as well as SAD (longowal) were able to stitch together only
70,000 odd votes by themselves in the current election,” she added.
Asking Manpreet to “introspect on his own actions”, Bathinda MP said that he was fond of boasting of his four consecutive
victories as an MlA from Gidderabaha.
“You must remember that these victories occurred as long as you had the blessings of Parkash Singh Badal. You lost abysmally from both Gidderbaha and Maur in 2012 as soon as you set out on your own,” she added.
“Even in the recently concluded parliamentary election, you would have lost your security deposit if you had contested on the PPP ticket. That is why you
decided to stitch together a grand coalition of the PPP, Congress, CPI and SAD (longowal) which had together got more than 6.10 lakh votes in 2012 assembly elections from Bathinda. However, under your leadership even the vote share of the coalition went down by 1.15 lakh which is a true barometer of your popularity,” MP added.