CHANDIGARH: Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh on Wednesday formally handed over his resignation, which he had earlier sent by mail on November 11, to Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan.
Amarinder met the speaker at her office in Parliament House in Delhi in the afternoon to submit his resignation as the member of the 16th Lok Sabha in the requisite proforma, and verbally conveyed to her that he had resigned over the Satlej-Yamuna-Link (SYL) canal issue.
He told the speaker that the decision was made in the wake of the Supreme Court verdict on the SYL issue, as a mark of solidarity with the people of Punjab.
Amarinder had resigned within minutes of the Supreme Court announcing the verdict in the SYL case, while party MLAs had en masse quit their Assembly seats on the issue.
Amarinder had won the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 from Amritsar by defeating senior BJP leader and now Union finance minister Arun Jaitely by a margin of over one lakh votes.
A few days back, Union minister of food processing industry Harsimrat Kaur Badal had hit at Amarinder over his `sham’ resignation as a cheap gimmick, she had said,” It is good that Amarinder has owned up to the fact that he had forwarded a sham resignation on e-mail and that he had been asked to submit the same in the correct format which he had failed to do.’’
“It did not even take you an hour after the apex court verdict on the Presidential reference to announce you were resigning as an MP. But you have failed to submit your resignation to the Lok Sabha speaker despite being in Delhi for quite some time during this period,” she said.
The day the supreme had announced the SYL verdict terminating the Punjab Termination of Agreements Act, Amarinder announced his resignation along with 42 Congress MLAs, handing over the resignations to the secretary of the Punjab Assembly in the absence of the speaker.
Meanwhile, alleging total failure of the Union government in the brutal border killing of three soldiers, one of whom was badly mutilated, Amarinder warned that the NDA Government could again try to whip up war hysteria by deliberately not doing anything to prevent such incidents.
Referring to the vicious killing of the soldiers at the Line of Control (LoC), Amarinder said that attempts were afoot to create war hysteria at the borders once again.
He demanded the immediate sacking of defence minister Manohar Parrikar over the issue, even as he pointed out that the incident had exposed BJP president Amit Shah’s lies that the country’s borders were safe under the Narendra Modi rule.
The government’s refusal to address such issues at a serious level also showed that it was again trying to escalate border tensions to trigger a fresh wave of war hysteria ahead of the Assembly elections in five states, he added.
Amarinder called upon the Central government to immediately take up the issue with Islamabad with a stern warning to back off immediately or face serious consequences. If not nipped in the bud, such incidents will continue to demoralise our soldiers, with disastrous results for the country, he added.
Reiterating that immediate diplomatic talks at bilateral and international level was the only solution to the repeated assault on India’s borders and the vicious attacks on its soldiers, Amarinder blamed the situation on the defence ministry, led by Parrikar, who he said had failed to protect the country’s borders despite his tall claims to the contrary.
There has been no diplomatic effort to resolve the border issue at all in recent months, with the NDA Government only interested in weakening the border further to expose it to such incidents in order to whip up passions and gain political mileage, he said.