CHANDIGARH: The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today demanded chief minister Bhagwant Mann own moral responsibility for misusing his office to launch a politically motivated witch hunt against senior party leader Bikram Singh Majithia and resign from his post immediately.
Asserting this in a press conference here, party chief spokesperson Arshdeep Singh Kler said “the defamation campaign launched by the chief minister against Mr Bikram Majithia was unmasked in the Punjab and Haryana high court when the SIT was forced to withdraw its summons in a drug case against the senior leader. The Punjab government failed to give any proof on the basis of which it was summoning Mr Majithia for questioning in the case repeatedly”.
Stating that this made it clear that the chief minister was indulging in political vendetta against Mr Majithia, the SAD spokesman said “the vendetta exercise started after Mr Majithia took up cudgels on behalf of Mr Bhagwant Mann’s daughter who had accused her father of neglect and cruelty”.
Mr Kler said Mr Majithia had approached the high court when the government continued to summon him on one pretext or another through four SITs even though the high court had earlier granted bail to him in the NDPS case registered against him by the previous Congress government. “The high court had noted that Mr Majithia did not have any link with any drug trafficker and that no recovery had been made against him. It is also a fact that the false case against Mr Majithia was registered after changing three DGPs and Advocate Generals even though the issue had already been probed by the high court and the accused in the case had already been convicted”.
The spokesperson said earlier the High Court had taken on the responsibility of monitoring the drug case in 2013 and had formed a SIT of senior police officers. He said ten ‘challans’ had been presented in the case and that no SAD leader or worker had been named in any of the charge sheets.
Asserting that both the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government had politicized the issue of drugs to strike out at the SAD, Mr Kler said the truth was that the erstwhile SAD government had busted the drug racket in the State. He said the AAP government had done its best to defame Mr Majithia but had no answers as to why drug trafficking was at an all time high during its tenure. “Both the high court and the Punjab Governor have held the AAP government responsible for the steep rise in drug trafficking in the State. Now it is the AAP government’s responsibility to tell who is the kingpin behind this racket which is destroying lives and ruining future generations."