Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Saturday dismissed as ridiculous and baseless Sukhbir Singh Badal’s allegation that he was trying to pass the buck on farm loan waiver, lashing out at the SAD president for trying to mislead the farmers with his brazenly false and unfounded statement.Reacting strongly to Sukhbir’s allegation, the Chief Minister said had the SAD-BJP government done anything for the state’s farmers during their 10-year rule; the farming community would not be under such acute distress today.While his government, said the Chief Minister, was doing everything in its powers to bring succour to the beleaguered farmers, the financial mess left by the Badals and their government prevented it from give immediate total relief to them, necessitating the central government’s intervention.While he had been seeking the Centre’s intervention and support in the form of one-time debt waiver for the farmers, at no point in time had his government slowed down its own efforts to save the farmers from their debt burdens, which the Badals had allowed to pile out of control, said Captain Amarinder, making it clear that the government’s debt waiver scheme remained on track and his own commitment to waive of the farm debts was sacrosanct.
In fact, a total of Rs. 999.98 crores worth of cooperative bank loans of 2,02,186 farmers had already been waived off, and the waiver of the remaining debt of farmers in this category would be waived off by November this year, notwithstanding the financial mess inherited by his government from the erstwhile government, said the Chief Minister.In any case, asked the Chief Minister, does the Centre not have any responsibility towards the farmers? How can the central government wash its hands off this responsibility, considering that the agrarian problem has assumed the proportions of a national crisis? he further asked.Neither the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) nor the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had ever shown an iota of concern for the farmers’ plight, the Chief Minister pointed out, adding that Sukhbir’s latest statement had once again exposed the total disdain with which they looked at the woes of the farming community.Instead of asking the BJP-led central government, in which the SAD was a part and his own wife was a minister, to come out in support of the Punjab government’s programmes to alleviate the sufferings of the farmers, Sukhbir was leaving no opportunity to undermine the state government’s efforts on this count, said Captain Amarinder Singh.
The people of Punjab, particularly the distressed farmers, had expected Sukhbir and his wife Harsimrat Kaur to put pressure on the central government to come to the rescue of the farming community. But far from doing so, the Badals were simply indulging in petty politicking on such a sensitive issue, which was a matter of life or death for the farmers, said the Chief Minister.The insensitivity being showed by Sukhbir towards the plight of the farmers, many of whom continued to resort to extreme steps to escape from their debt burdens, was characteristic of the Badals, who had never shown any interest in the welfare of the people of Punjab, Captain Amarinder said. Evidently, they had failed to learn any lessons even from the series of ignominious defeats they have faced in elections since total rout in the Assembly polls, he added.“While my government will continue to find ways and means of waiving off the debts of the farmers, as promised, the farming community will not forget or forgive the treatment meted out to them by the Akalis, led by the Badals,” said the Chief Minister.