Loss in Dhruvi Assembly bypoll brought to the fore the rivalry between Punjab Congress' two top leaders, Amarinder Singh and Partap Singh Bajwa, as both blamed each other for the drubbing and launched a vicious attack on each other today.
Punjab Congress chief Bajwa came down heavily on the former chief minister saying he deliberately "sabotaged" the party in the Dhuri election, giving impression through his actions and statements that the party was vertically divided.
"This was part of his perverse thinking as his politics had always been guided by his vested political interests and not that of the Congress," Bajwa said.
Earlier, Amarinder Singh, in a statement here, questioned Bajwa's locus standi on taking disciplinary actions against party leaders saying,"this is viciously wishful thinking of someone who knows his countdown has begun to divert the public attention from his own repeated failures."
"This was Bajwa's desperate bid to bully down all those MLAs and leaders who were publicly seeking his removal," Amarinder, who claimed support of 33 MLAs, said.
However, Bajwa in a separate statement questioned Amarinder's "style" of functioning, saying, "this amounts to admission of his disruptive activities to harm the party repeatedly".
"His problem is that he is hallucinating during the day," Bajwa said adding that Amarinder's negativity had further reinforced the perception about him that he was only power hungry.
He alleged that Amarinder was suffering from selective amnesia forgetting that the Congress had lost every election under his leadership since 2007.
Bajwa reminded him that in the last Lok Sabha election, his wife Preneet Kaur lost from the home turf of Patiala and that too to a greenhorn like Dharamvira Gandhi of Aam Aadmi Party.
"He miserably failed to get his son elected from Samana in the last Assembly election, the constituency which was also considered to be the home turf of his family," he said.
