Bharatiya Janata Party National General Secretary Tarun Chugh today led a strong protest in Batala against the Aam Aadmi Party government's blatant assault on democracy and its anti-democratic conduct in the ongoing municipal corporation elections.
The effigy of the Punjab government was burnt during the protest. Chugh levelled serious allegations against the Bhagwant Mann government for deliberately and illegally rejecting the nomination papers of BJP candidates. Tarun Chugh stated that the AAP government engineered the wholesale rejection of 21 BJP candidates across Batala, Barnala and Moga in the municipal corporation elections.
He said this is not a coincidence but a calculated conspiracy to eliminate BJP from the electoral arena. He pointed out that candidates from wards where BJP has traditionally been dominant have been specifically and selectively targeted.
Chugh highlighted that women candidates too have been subjected to grave injustice. In one particular case, the original complainant herself withdrew her complaint, yet the AAP government still rejected the nomination of the BJP's woman candidate simply because AAP had no rival candidate of its own in that ward.
He said the party that makes tall claims of women's empowerment on Women's Day is the same party that snatches women's democratic rights on election day this is AAP's true face. Tarun Chugh stated firmly that the Bhagwant Mann government is trampling upon the very soul of democracy.
Elections are a constitutional process, not AAP's personal fiefdom. BJP will also seek accountability from those election officers who allowed themselves to become instruments of this dirty politics. Chugh held the AAP government squarely accountable for every broken promise.
He said Bhagwant Mann had promised a Health Revolution 52 months later, not a single new hospital has been built, not a single new ward. He promised an Education Revolution not a single school has been constructed, children did not receive sweaters in winter, textbooks did not reach schools.
He guaranteed Rs. 1,000 per month to every woman today every woman of Punjab is owed a backlog of Rs. 52,000, and not a single rupee has reached her pocket. He announced a Rs. 10 lakh medical insurance but Chugh exposed this as a fraud, saying the box reads Rs. 10 lakh on the outside while the actual coverage inside is just Rs. 1 lakh.
He openly challenged the government to produce even one person in all of Punjab who has received the Rs. 10 lakh insurance. He also revealed that the Central Government had sent funds under the National Health Mission to upgrade X-ray machines and laboratories across all government hospitals in Punjab AAP diverted that money to print banners of its own leaders' photographs.
Chugh declared that AAP has given Punjab four curses in its four years of rule gangsterism, extortion, a loot mafia, and rampant corruption. Batala, once the engine of Punjab's progress, has been dragged backwards by gangsters. Twenty-two bomb blasts have rocked police stations, the BSF has been attacked, rockets have been fired at police headquarters, gurudwaras and temples have been targeted yet Bhagwant Mann has no answers.
Even more shameful, AAP ministers and MLAs have set up what can only be described as torture centres in their homes, where officials are summoned, intimidated, and forced to sign files under threat of blackmail. Officers who refuse are filmed in compromising situations and threatened with exposure unless they comply.
Chugh also exposed that Bhagwant Mann took two highly questionable individuals on his foreign trip one accused of assaulting Swati Maliwal and another facing a Rs. 100 crore money laundering case from Punjab. While the state treasury is empty, widow pensions and old age pensions remain unpaid, Punjab's government aircraft is being used as Kejriwal's private taxi and public money is being spent on advertisements in newspapers in Chennai, Goa and Gujarat.
He declared that BJP is legally challenging all these unlawful rejections and petitions are being filed in court today. Chugh warned that the "poles" Bhagwant Mann is planting across Punjab whether of power or of corruption will be uprooted one by one by BJP.
Ravan had a lakh sons and more, and still he could not survive. A government that rejects 21 candidates' papers to prove itself a 'Don' will meet the same fate. The people of Punjab will no longer tolerate this tyranny and AAP will be made to answer for its actions in the elections to come.