Badals always put their personal interest before distressed farmers’ issues : Harpal Cheema

Chandigarh, 2nd April 2019: Leader of Opposition (LoP) in Punjab Vidhan, Harpal Singh Cheema, lambasted the former Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and Depty Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal for their recent visit to Gujarat in connection with filling of nomination papers by BJP national president Amit Shah from there, saying both had failed to apply balm to the festering wounds of thousands of Punjabi farmers fighting discrimination in Gujarat for years now. He said the government there was hell bent on uprooting the farmers.

Cheema said that the then Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri had in 1964 allotted land to some 5000 farmers from Punjab in the state under the slogan ‘Jai jawan and jai kisan’. The hardworking peasantry brought the barren land under cultivation and contributed to the economic growth of the state there. He lamented that more than 20 thousand acre land belonging to as many as 5000 farmers had been grabbed by the land mafia while the government there was exerting its full might to oust them from the state.

He said that the protection being extended by the government to the mighty mafia could be gathered from the fact that when the community moved the state High Court and got relief in the case, the government went to the Supreme Court of India, where the verdict was awaited, Cheema said.

Slamming the Badals for doing nothing for the over-stressed Punjab farmers, AAP leader said that the Badals should have intervened in the matter and persuaded the state government there against moving the apex court to securing justice for the fighting farming farmers there.

Harpal Cheema said that Badals had always kept their own petty interests before the issues and concerns howsoever significant they might be. Had they (Badals), including union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal, been a tad serious about resolving the issues of thousands of farmers in Gujarat, the government would have taken a lenient view over the issue they were wrestling with.

Cheema appealed to the people to remind Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the promise that he made to the distressed farmers of Gujarat on February 23, 2014 while addressing the ‘Fateh Rally’ at Jagroan in Punjab, wherein he had said that no farmer would be uprooted from Gujarat and give him and the Badals a befitting reply in the upcoming Lok Sbah elections.