Rahul Gandhi on Monday trained guns on the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), saying that Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann was acting under pressure from party convener and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal. He said that Mann was being 'remote controlled' from Delhi.
Rahul Gandhi, who is in Punjab's Hoshiarpur for the Congress's Bharat Jodo Yatra, said: "Punjab should be run from Punjab and not from Delhi. I would like to tell Bhagwant Mann that he's the CM of Punjab and shouldn't come under pressure from Delhi and Arvind Kejriwal. He must work independently and not become someone's remote control."
Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra is now in its Punjab leg. On Sunday, he was joined by Balkaur Singh, murdered singer-turned-politician Sidhu Moose Wala’s father as it resumed from the Khalsa College Ground Jalandhar. The yatra was earlier suspended for 24 hours in view of the death of Congress MP Santokh Singh Chaudhary on Saturday. Chaudhary died after suffering a cardiac arrest during the foot march.
The Congress leader also offered prayers at Devi Talab temple in Jalandhar before the Bharat Jodo Yatra resumed.
Punjab Congress president Amrinder Singh Raja Warring, Leader of Opposition in the state assembly Partap Singh Bajwa, former chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, MLA Pargat Singh and other party leaders were among the ones who took part in the foot march.
Last week, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge invited his counterparts from 21 Opposition parties to attend the concluding day of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Srinagar on January 30. The move is being seen as a bid to bring about a united Opposition, ahead of the Assembly elections this year and the Lok Sabha polls in 2024.
He wrote to the Trinamool Congress, the Janata Dal-United, the Shiv Sena-UBT, the Telugu Desam Party, the National Conference (both Farooq and Omar Abdullah were invited), the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the DMK, the CPI, the CPI-M, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the RJD (both Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi Yadav), the RLD, the Hindustani Awam Morcha, the Peoples Democratic Party, the Nationalist Congress Party, the MDMK, the VCK, the IUML, the KSM and the RSP