In a setback to the Akali Dal, Rajdeep Kaur, the sister of slain gangster Jaswinder Singh Rocky, and his mother Harmander Kaur Tuesday quit the party and joined the Congress.
Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh welcomed Rajdeep into the Congress fold, a little over a year after she had joined the Shiromani Akali Dal.
Rajdeep had contested the 2017 assembly polls as an independent from Fazilka constituency which comes under the Ferozepur Lok Sabha seat from where SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badal is contesting.
She had polled over 38,000 votes.
With more and more leaders and workers from other parties deciding to put their weight behind the Congress, the party was clearly dominating the Lok Sabha poll scene, Amarinder Singh said.
I am happy to have Rajdeep join the Punjab Congress' efforts to clean the state of the destructive and divisive Akali forces, he added.
If such was the extent of disillusionment in SAD chief Sukhbir Badal's own constituency, one could gauge which way the wind was blowing across the state, the chief minister said, adding that the SAD president would be ignominiously voted out by the people of Ferozepur.
Rajdeep thanked the chief minister for giving her the opportunity to serve the people of Punjab.
She blamed Sukhbir Badal's "autocratic and highhanded" style of functioning for Akali Dal's "downfall" and said there were many who, like her, were feeling disenchanted and suffocated in the SAD and wanted to join the Congress, which stands for democracy and inclusive progress.
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