Formally announcing his decision to join the team farmers to bat for them against the Centre’s recently-enacted three farm bills, the former cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Singh Sidhu on Tuesday called for taking the movement to the masses.
Sharing a video on his YouTube channel ‘Jittega Punjab’, the Congress leader Navjot Sidhu has asked all the political parties, farm unions, and every Punjabi, right from old to the young ones, to be on the same page for opposing these “black laws” till the end.
Sidhu, who has decided to come out of his year-long political exile for the farmers’ cause, on Tuesday announced that he would be holding protests against the controversial farm bills from his Amritsar East constituency on Wednesday. His announcement came a day after the party legislators in Punjab, in response to the Congress high command’s call, held state wide protests against the Bills.
Batting for formulating a common minimum programme to strategically fight against the Centre’s move, Sidhu maintained that challenging the Bills in the Supreme Court appears
to be the best way to counter the Central Government’s decision.
“The BJP has got the Bills passed in both the House, and there are negligible chances for the President to counter the Centre’s move…I have also done the politics of solution and not just discussed the problem,” he said.
He also claimed that the Bills could not only lead to “unprecedented” food inflation, he said that it would also legitimize hoarding, and the hoarders would sell that produce at much higher prices, leading to food inflation.
The former Minister alleged that the Government at the Centre always “went out of the way to help capitalists by waiving Rs 4 to 5 lakh crore taxes and giving subsidies and rebates in taxes…But when the time comes for giving MSP to farmers, there is so much hue and cry,” he said, adding that the GST killed traders. These black laws are ruining farmers. Around 28,000 arthiyas and four to five lakh mandi labourers will also be hit”.
Sidhu said that these farm bills would affect the state’s revenue from mandis. He alleged that the Centre was replacing the “successful mandi model” with the “free market model” that had failed in the USA and Europe.