SAD attacks Rahul; questions him on Bluestar, 1984 riots

Ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today attacked Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after he visited families of two persons killed in recent police firing, saying he was playing politics over tragic deaths and questioned his failure to seek forgiveness for Bluestar Operation and 1984 riots.
Hours after Gandhi visited the families of the victims, SAD leaders, including MPs Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa and Balwinder Singh Bhundur, said it was condemnable that the Congress Vice President was "playing politics over two tragic deaths even as he failed to atone for the sins of his party and his family which was responsible for sending tanks into the Darbar Sahab and engineering the worst human genocide of the modern world in 1984 in Delhi."

The senior Akali leaders said "it was known that successive generations of the Gandhi family had never left an opportunity to denigrate Sikh institutions and their principles.
"Now another Gandhi scion has come to divide and damage Punjab and Punjabis by using the issue of unfortunate desecrations of the holy book to revive his party in Punjab. It is just another attempt at trying to unite the Congress by dividing Punjab."
Asking Gandhi why he had failed to ever visit the widows in Delhi whose husbands had been killed during the genocide in 1984, the leaders said if the Congress leader had "even a twinge of regret over the killing of more than 30,000 Sikhs in Delhi and Punjab in 1984 he would have apologised for the actions of his family."

However, "the manner in which he tried to convert a tragic incident into a political show of strength is inhuman and reprehensible", the leaders said.
They described his visit as a "knee jerk reaction in frustration due to the falling graph of the Punjab Congress as well as failure to counter the development agenda of the SAD-BJP combine.