Punjab Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu was divested of the Local Government portfolio by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Thursday, June 6. Sidhu has now been allocated the Power and Energy Sources ministry. In the continuing back and forth between the two Congress leaders, Sidhu skipped a state Cabinet meeting today and instead met the press in a Facebook live. The two leaders have been having a go at each other ever since the Lok Sabha 2019 election results came in and the Congress won 8 of the 13 Lok Sabha constituencies in Punjab.
Sidhu had like Thursday’s meeting failed to attend another meeting called by Amarinder to assess the party’s performance in the Lok Sabha elections. The Punjab CM had blamed Sidhu for the party’s inability to win all seats in Punjab due to the poor handling of urban areas in the state since he handled the Local Government ministry. The cricketer-politician had said he was being singled out for the party’s collective failure. Sidhu had joined the Congress ahead of the Punjab polls in 2017 after quitting the BJP. He was said to be a likely deputy CM but Amarinder chose to retain him as a minister. Since then, the cricketer and the captain have been criticising each other.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Sidhu had charged the Punjab CM from doing everything to thwart his wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu’s wish to contest as a Congress candidate from Amritsar.
Sidhu had famously hugged Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Bajwa at the swearing-in ceremony of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan in August 2018, which had been boycotted by nearly every Indian dignitary including other veteran cricketers.
