Punjab Congress president Amarinder Singh today rejected the Justice (retd) Zora Singh Commission report on alleged sacrilege in Faridkot district last year and subsequent police firing on protestors that led to the death of two persons.
"The commission has defeated the very purpose it was constituted for. It appears to have worked overtime to hide what actually was needed to be revealed", he said in a statement here.
He said its mandate was not to "fix the compensation" for those killed or injured, but to arrive at an "unambiguous conclusion as who was responsible for the sacrilege and who was responsible for the killing of the protestors".
"Surprisingly, Justice (retd) Zora Singh has not even touched those topics," Amarinder claimed while referring to news reports, adding, "it has only vindicated our apprehensions that the commission was merely an attempt at cover up rather than arriving at the truth".
"Not that we had expected much from the commission, but we did not expect the report to be so tame that it will not even touch the basic issues involved", the former Chief Minister said.
Awarding compensation to the victims is an administrative matter which can be handled by the government even without any recommendations, he added.
Amarinder demanded the compensation should be same for those killed and those handicapped for life.
He said, two persons who had suffered spinal injuries and have been restricted to bed for whole life, should get the same amount of compensation as those killed.
Yesterday, the judicial commission headed by Justice Singh has submitted its report to the state government.
The commission was set up by Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal in October, 2015 and was mandated to ascertain the causes and circumstances leading to the sacrilege incident and its subsequent fallout.
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Amarinder said Punjab was yet to rid itself of the baggage it inherited from the "second partition" in 1966, adding that never in history have people of a state volunteered to reduce their land instead of expanding it.
"And the very Akalis who were responsible for this shameful deed are now brazenly celebrating the occasion. No well meaning Punjabi could feel proud over what happened to Punjab 50 years ago," he charged.
The Punjab Congress chief challenged the Akalis to list out a single benefit resulting from the Punjabi Suba division.
"Recent years have witnessed a serious collapse of the state on all fronts, be it economic, agricultural, industrial or law and order," he said.
Amarinder promised to restore the state to its pristine glory if Congress was voted to power in the 2017 state Assembly elections.
"From being one of India's most prosperous states, Punjab had been reduced to being the backward one," he said.
The Congress leader added that the Akalis seemed hell-bent on destroying the state completely and irrevocably and urged the people of Punjab to rise against their nefarious designs.
