Sidhu says Cong needs to reinvent itself, backs ‘honest’ Mann

Chandigarh: Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu said the party lost the Punjab elections because of the “mafia raj” that prevailed in the state and it now needed to reinvent itself, while praising Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann as a “younger brother” and an “honest man.”
Without taking names, he blamed Amarinder Singh and Charanjit Singh Channi –the two Congress chief ministers who ran the state in the past five years – for failing to crack down on the “mafia”.
He said he will support Mann, whose Aam Aadmi Party trounced the Congress in the recent assembly polls, if he fights the mafia. “He is an honest man,” Sidhu told reporters at the sidelines of an event where Amrinder Singh Raja Warring took charge as the state Congress president. Sidhu had resigned from the same post after the party's defeat in the Punjab elections.
“I did not speak earlier but everybody has a right to speak and I say today that the Congress lost because of the five-year rule of the mafia raj,” he added. Sidhu said he has always fought against the mafia. Though he did not elaborate, he has in the past criticised his own Congress government in the state over alleged mafias in sand-mining, transport and cable TV sectors.
“My fight was not against any individual. It was against the system and against some persons who were eating into the state like termites,” he said.