The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Saturday alleged that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was following in the footsteps of the Congress party by directly interfering in the religious affairs of the Sikh community by trying to prevent the SAD from contesting the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) elections.
It also announced it would initiate criminal action against the polling agency which had entered into a conspiracy with AAP to come out with a bogus survey for the 2022 assembly elections.
Addressing a press conference here, former minister Daljit Singh Cheema said the AAP Delhi government had become desperate and joined hands with anti-panthic groups to prevent the SAD from contesting the forthcoming DSGMC elections. He said the level of frustration was such that Delhi’s Gurdwara Election minister Rajinder Pal Gautam had written to the Principal Secretary, Gurdwara Election department to demand strict compliance of certain amended rules which had been brought into being by the erstwhile Congress government. “These rules seek to prevent allocation of the ‘balti’ symbol reserved for the SAD despite the fact that this issue was settled by the Election Commission of India in 2008,” he said.
Asserting that this was done because AAP was afraid that the SAD would sweep the DSGMC elections, Cheema said the ‘sangat’ was with the party because of the ‘langar sewa’ it had done during the period of Covid, creation of a hospital for free dialysis treatment and legal help offered to Sikh youth who had been targeted for repression by both the BJP led central government and the AAP govt. “I want to tell Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal that others also tried to interfere in the religious affairs of the Sikhs but did not succeed. Nor will you”.
Questioned about a survey which projected AAP in favourable light, the SAD leader said earlier also the same company had come out with the fraudulent survey giving AAP 100 seats in the 2017 assembly election. “The survey was misused by AAP with posters of the fake survey being posted across the State. Now again a fake survey giving AAP a clear majority with 59 to 67 seats has been prepared by the same agency," he said, adding such surveys have no credibility. AAP won only 20 assembly seats in the last election against a projected hundred. This time its position is worse with the party winning only nine seats in the municipal corporation elections and failing to win a single seat in Abohar, Bathinda, Kapurthala and Mohali.
The SAD leader also asked the chief minister to take necessary steps to control Covid but also ensure the livelihood of the poor and middle class was not affected. He said an independent survey had revealed that the number of poor had doubled from six crore to thirteen crore during the period of Covid.
“We must take steps to give relief to the poor including reducing power tariff as well as VAT on petrol and diesel”, Cheema added.