Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee (PPCC) chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring (File Photo)Punjab Congress president Amrinder Singh Raja Warring Tuesday dared Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann to dissolve the Assembly and hold fresh elections if he was son keen on proving confidence.
“If you are really so keen to prove confidence, why not dissolve Assembly and hold fresh elections? Why enact ‘vote of confidence’ drama in the House? Go to people if you are so confident,” Warring said in a tweet.
He was reacting to Mann tabling the confidence motion in the Vidhan Sabha. The ruling AAP has 92 MLAs in the 117-member Assembly.
Terming as “mere drama” the ruling AAP’s clam that the BJP, under “Operation Lotus” was trying to topple the six-month old government,
Warring asked, “Why would BJP destabilise or dethrone your government: Isn’t AAP the BJP’s B team?”
“Instead”, he added, “the BJP has been destabilizing only the Congress governments”.
The PCC president said that Congress was opposing AAP’s “Operation Lotus drama because we know that the BJP will never disturb or destabilize you as you.”
“You helped and facilitated BJP’s victory in Uttarakhand and now you are trying to repeat it in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh as well. You are already exposed and you can’t fool all the people all the time,” he added.
Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition Partap Singh Bajwa termed the ousting of Congress legislators by the marshalls from the Vidhan Sabha as “absolute murder of democracy.”
“There was no immediate need or emergency for summoning the session. The opposition parties never sought the no-confidence motion against the Punjab government. So what was the need to prove the majority on the floor of the House, which was not needed and is completely unconstitutional. The Mann government does not appear to believe in the rule of the law. Just because they have a brutal strength in the House does not mean that the AAP government can subjugate or muzzle the voice of the opposition,” said Bajwa.
He claimed that AAP and BJP were playing a friendly game only to score brownie points for the Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat assembly polls where Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal so far has failed to get any traction. “But we will not allow Kejriwal and Mann to use resources of Punjab for his personal political gains,” he added.
Bajwa said he written to Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan and “promised to extend all possible support and cooperation for the smooth conduct of the House because the opposition wanted to discuss many burning issues pertaining to Punjab; however instead of working on the same, the Speaker arbitrarily threw the Congress MLAs out of the Assembly.”