NO EVACUATION IN RAJASTHAN, GUJARAT MEANS CLEARING OF PUNJAB BORDER IS JUST TO DELAY POLLS, SAYS JAKHAR

KHEM KARAN (TARN TARAN): Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh on Tuesday asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to clear whether India was at war with Pakistan even as he criticised the eviction of villagers from the border areas of Punjab.

Addressing meetings in Khem Karan and Tarn Taran along the International Border, the former CM said surgical strikes were carried out across the Line of Control (LoC) even during the Congress regime, but nobody tried to take political mileage out of it.

Expressing solidarity with border villagers, he assured his party’s support to them in this hour of crisis. The former CM said he would take a house on rent in the border village of Rajatal, 500 metres from the International Border, to stay with the villagers. He also asked the border villagers to stay put in their homes and carry on with their harvesting.

“I am concerned for the people of the border belt who are being asked to move out of their homes leaving their properties, crops and livestock behind,” the state Congress chief said.

He also promised to take up the problems being faced by the border villagers in Parliament’s next session. “If need be, we will stage a dharna in the Lok Sabha,” he added. ‘WHERE’S SUKHBIR IF THERE’S WAR THREAT’ CHANDIGARH: Punjab Congress chief spokesperson Sunil Jakhar has questioned the absence of deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal from the state for four days when its border belt was evacuated over war threat.

“If there was war threat, he should have been in the state… or the evacuation was just a ploy to delay the 2017 assembly elections that the ruling Akali-BJP combine is sure to lose,” he told the media on Tuesday in Chandigarh, seeking Sukhbir’s whereabouts.

Jakhar said there was no evacuation in the border belt of Rajasthan and Gujarat. “So there’s no war threat in these states. The BJP-led government at the Centre has built up a war-like situation for advantage in the ensuing polls in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab,” he said. “The Punjab government has lost credibility and the imposed-evacuation tactic is taking the central government the same way.”

Demanding President’s rule in Punjab, Jakhar said the situation with Pakistan forced people to believe the government. “But if farmers are also evacuated, who will harvest the paddy crop that’s ready?” He said that previous Congress government at the Centre had carried out four surgical strikes in Occupied Kashmir but never disclosed it.