Rahul dismisses AAP as hype, says Akalis the real challenge
Sunday, 17/04/2016
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CHANDIGARH: Congress vicepresident Rahul Gandhi on Saturday picked the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) as the biggest challenge in next year’s high-stakes Punjab assembly polls, dismissing as mere hype the Aam Aadmi Party’s spirited campaign to grab power in the state.
“The Akalis are a formidable machine. The contest will be between us and them,” Gandhi said during an interaction with journalists before meeting Congress workers from Punjab. He also ruled out alliance with any party ahead of the polls, due in January next year.
“The AAP is only creating hype about itself in Punjab by lavishly spending out of the `600-crore publicity budget of the Delhi government,” he said.
Gandhi’s latest visit is part of the Congress’s aggressive strategy to galvanise the party rank and file in Punjab. To this end, he met frontline leaders, including state Congress chief Capt Amarinder Singh, and addressed workers at Zirakpur.
DRUGS TO BE POLL ISSUE
Calling the rampant addiction to narcotics in Punjab a “deep and debilitating” problem, Gandhi said the Congress would make it a poll issue and work according to a plan to rid the state of the menace if voted to power. “The Akalis have destroyed Punjab and they are actually a beneficiary of the drug culture,” he alleged.
Gandhi, who was flanked by Capt Amarinder Singh and party spokesman Randeep Surjewala, said that he was ridiculed by both the opposition and the media when he had first pointed out three years ago that 70% of Punjab youth had taken drugs at some point of time. “Now I have been proved right, but it has taken 10 years for the Akalis to accept this (the drug problem).”
To the Akalis’ charge that the opposition was defaming Punjab and Punjabis by exaggerating the drug issue, Gandhi said, “We are not bashing Punjab; we are rather trying to save it”.
“No,” was Gandhi’s firm and quick response when asked about the chance of the Congress stitching up a pre-poll alliance in Punjab on the lines of Bihar and West Bengal. The Congress, he said, stands for certain ideas and an ideology and would forge an alliance only in case these premises are strengthened. “That’s not happening here”.
He replied in the negative when asked if there was an overhang of tragic events of 1984 on the Congress’s poll prospects in Punjab. “We have been in power here thereafter,” he said.
Asked if he would apologise for Operation Bluestar and the anti-Sikh violence, Gandhi said both the Congress president (Sonia Gandhi) and then prime minister Manmohan Singh had already regretted what had happened in 1984.
“We have done that,” he insisted and refused to be drawn into a ‘regret’ versus ‘apology’ debate.
“Even I have been to the Golden Temple,” Rahul said, side-stepping a tricky question asked in the context of the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s statement last week that he would apologise in Parliament for the Komagata Maru episode in which the Canadian government had violently barred Indian migrants, mostly Sikhs, from anchoring their ship at Vancouver in 1914.
Gandhi declined to comment on the contentious SutlejYamuna Link (SYL) Canal issue, terming it “a sub-judice matter”.
