Chandigarh: From MPs to MLAs, councillors to common workers, the entire Congress landed up at the venue of Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi son’s wedding except party chief Navjot Singh Sidhu, who instead of heading back home from Lakhimpur Kheri, suddenly decided to land up in faraway Vaishno Devi shrine.
Channi’s son Navjit Singh got married at Sacha Dham gurdwara in Mohali on Sunday. With senior cabinet minister, Manpreet Badal by his side, others who were in attendance included Harish Rawat, the AICC general secretary in- charge of Punjab affairs.
“Darshan of the primordial mother during Navratras is synergising… Washes away all the dirt from the soul!! Blessed to be at the lotus feet of Mata Vaishno Devi," Sidhu said in a tweet. Sidhu’s absence from the ceremony has only added to speculations of continued difference between him and Channi.
Meanwhile, the Shiromani Akali Dal alleged that Sidhu harboured ambition of becoming a chief minister and was jealous that a member of Scheduled Caste community had become the CM, the attack from the Opposition coming in the wake of a purported video of the Congress leader going viral on social media. In the video, Sidhu can be heard attacking Chief Minister Charanjit Channi, saying, “This man (Channi) will sink the Congress in 2022 (assembly election). They should have made me CM".
Reacting to it, SAD vice president Daljit Singh Cheema alleged that the Scheduled Caste card played by the Congress to divert attention from its failures in Punjab had boomeranged on the party “with Navjot Sidhu asserting that the chief minister could not deliver the goods for the party".
In a statement here, Cheema alleged that “Sidhu had also shown how much respect he has for the SC community and CM Charanjit Singh Channi by refusing to wait for even two minutes for the latter to arrive on the occasion of start of the party’s protest on the Lakhimpur Kheri incident issue".
A Sidhu-led Congress delegation had assembled in Mohali last week before heading for Lakhimpur Kheri in UP to meet the families of the farmers killed in the violence there.
