 "Navjot Singh Sidhu")
Filing nomination from the Amritsar East seat, Punjab Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu on Saturday dared his bte noir Amarinder Singh to leave Patiala and take on him.
He also challenged Shiromani Akali Dal's Bikram Singh Majithia to fight only from the Amritsar East seat and leave the Majitha assembly constituency.
Apart from the Majitha seat, Majithia, a former Punjab minister, has also entered the fray from Amritsar East from where Sidhu is seeking re-election.
"If you have so much guts and have faith in people then leave Majitha and fight from one seat here. Do you have the guts?" Sidhu dared while interacting with reporters after filing his nomination.
About former chief minister Amarinder Singh's comment that he would not let Sidhu win, the Punjab Congress president dared him to leave Patiala and contest from Amritsar East.
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"Come to Amritsar," Sidhu said.
Amarinder Singh, who was made to resign as chief minister and later exited the Congress, has floated the Punjab Lok Congress and entered into an electoral tie-up with the BJP. He will fight from the Patiala Urban seat.
Over Majithia entering the fray from two seats, including Amritsar East, Sidhu said, "They (SAD) have come only to play spoilsport. But in this 'Dharam Yudh', they will not succeed. Yato Dharmastato Jayah (Where there is 'Dharma', there will be victory)."
Targeting the Akalis, he alleged that they are the people who "looted" Punjab.
Sidhu also hit out at his political opponents for bringing up the reference of his mother, who died over 30 years ago, and accused them of playing dirty politics over it.
"They stooped so low that they brought my mother into it to play politics. I ask them to prove the allegation. You want to bring my mother, who died 35 years ago, for her testimony."
A day ago, Suman Toor, who claimed to be Sidhu's elder sister, levelled various allegations against the Punjab Congress chief, including that he had "deserted" their mother after the death of their father in 1986.
However, the Congress leader's wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu had come forward to issue a clarification. She claimed that Navjot Kaur Sidhu's father had married the woman who had two daughters from her previous marriage.
"These two girls (Toor and her sister) along with their mother left the house after taking divorce when Navjot Singh Sidhu was seven-year-old," she had said.
Meanwhile, Navjot Singh Sidhu said that after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi announced the party would go to the polls with chief ministerial faces, they were in a shock, he said.
Seeking to target his political rivals, Sithu said, "These days even in their dreams they are seeing me and getting scared. A pack of jackals want to hunt a lion."
He hit out at the Akalis saying how could they think of undertaking developmental works when they "always harassed" people by registering false cases. "Has Sidhu ever got any case registered against anyone in Punjab in the last 17 years," Sidhu posed.
He also spoke about his cricketing career and stint on television as he attacked the Akalis accusing him of amassing "ill-gotten" wealth. "Sidhu today does not earn even 5 per cent of what he was earning earlier," he said.
Accusing the SAD of diverting the attention of people from the pressing issues of the state, the Punjab Congress chief alleged that they "mortgaged" the state and it under a burden of Rs 3 lakh crore of outstanding debt.
He also said the public support for the Akalis in Amritsar could be gauged "from the fact that despite their assurance of a huge win for BJP leader Arun Jaitley from Amritsar in the 2014 general elections he still suffered defeat".
Sidhu, who switched over to the Congress from BJP ahead of the 2017 assembly polls, said he was asked to fight the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Kurukshetra, but he had refused as he did not want to shift from Amritsar.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
