Coming down heavily on the Congress’ recent “ploy” to allure the farmers with their loan waiver scheme, the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal on Monday said that this will be another fraud by the Congress party with the innocent farmers of the State.
“Before misleading farmers for a new loan waiver scheme during his ‘Kisan Yatra’, Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh must go barefooted to the farmers of the State to apologise for denial of benefit of the much-proclaimed `70,000 crore loan waiver scheme announced by the Congress-led UPA Government in 2008 just before the Parliament elections of 2009…Not even one per cent of the Punjab farmers benefitted from the scheme,” said SAD secretary and spokesman Daljit Singh Cheema.
Cheema asked the State Congress chief that he owes an explanation to the farmers of the State that being the highest contributor to the national food pool, why were the Punjab farmers were treated so mercilessly by the Congress-led UPA Government.
Exposing the previous loan waiver scheme, Cheema said that the scheme which was announced to be `70,000 crore worth of value actually came down to `52,000 crore.
Cheema said that the same Congress party which betrayed and looted the farmers in 2008 has again started alluring the farmers with a new scheme and even collecting forms from the farmer through their paid workers only to commit another fraud with the innocent farmers.
lashing out at Capt Amarinder, Cheema said that the person who could not tolerate the free power facility to more than 14 lakh tubewells of the farmers by SAD-BJP combine Government and withdrew it as soon as he came to power putting a burden of `30,000 crore on the poor farmers of the Punjab in a span of five years is now trying to befool the same community with another “lollipop”.
Dubbing the ‘Congress Kisan Yatra’ as yet another poll eve stunt, senior Akali leader Mahesh Inder Singh Grewal alleged that the Congress president “is exploiting the widows of suicide victims and flaunting them as trophies to garner political support”.
Grewal, in a hard-hitting statement, said that there was little use of Capt Amarinder indulging in rhetoric that he would “wipe every tear from their face” and “take all possible measures to alleviate their sufferings”.
Instead, he should list the initiatives he had taken to curb the menace of farmers’ suicide and steps taken to ameliorate the conditions of suicide victims during his tenure, that is 2002-2007.