Modi can't create wedge between me and Cong high command: Amarinder

Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Saturday dismissed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks about him and Congeress as part of the BJP’s futile attempts to create a wedge between him and the party high command through frivolous and unsubstantiated statements ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

In remarks laced with sarcasm, Modi had said he had recently told Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayanasamy that the Congress leader was lucky as he will soon become a "specimen of a Congress chief minister" as his party will be in power only in his state by June after losing Karnataka, which goes to the polls in April-May.

Speaking about Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh, he claimed that the Congress hierarchy doesn't consider him as one of their own and vice versa. Going on to praise Amarinder Singh, he called him a ‘swatantra fauji’, an independent soldier.

Questioning the source of Modi’s "information", Capt Amarinder quipped, “I don’t remember complaining to him against the Congress high command. Did the high command go and complain to him against me?’ “One really fails to understand what prompted Mr. Modi’s ill-conceived and unfounded remark,” said Capt Amarinder, asserting that neither he nor the Congress high command needed the prime minister’s advice on how to manage their internal relations.

“I know my business and I know how to run my state and manage my relationship with my party high command, which is more than one can say about the BJP leaders,” the CM said, adding the Congress high command had full faith in his leadership and had given him a free hand to bring Punjab out of the mess into which the BJP, in alliance with SAD, had plunged the State.

As a loyal soldier of his party, which has a deep-rooted connect with the people across every state, Capt Amarinder said he was leading the party in Punjab in a truly democratic manner, as becoming of a party of the stature of the Indian National Congress, and as guided by the party high command.

Contrary to what Modi would like to believe, the Congress was not a fly-by-night party which he could simply wish away, he said, declaring his party’s complete readiness, under the leadership of its president Rahul Gandhi, to take on the BJP in the parliamentary elections next year. 

“And I am personally set to take this battle to the finish, Mr. Modi,” the Chief Minister declared, adding that the Prime Minister’s Rs jumlebaazi’ would not have any impact on either the Congress leadership and workers, or the citizens of the country.