Chandigarh, (Samajweekly) Hitting out at the AAP for its “brazen lies”, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Sunday said the “non-evidence” shared by the party to support their baseless allegations against him had “shown the extent of their desperation and exposed the shocking levels of deceit to which they had stooped to”.
“From sharing a selectively edited video of his statements to the release of a list of the final committee members, the AAP spokesperson had made yet another desperate attempt to sell his party’s pack of lies to the people of Punjab,” he said in a statement here.
Amarinder Singh said these actions showed that Arvind Kejriwal’s party had hit rock bottom in its desperation to promote its political agenda in the state, where they had been unceremoniously rejected by voters in 2017 Assembly polls and in every election thereafter.
“If they think that by sharing a doctored video, they can befool the people of Punjab then AAP leaders are even more ignorant about this state then I had believed them to be,” he said.
The fact that they needed to resort to such cheap tactics to find a footing in Punjab goes to show that they have no concrete agenda for the state, he added.
Amarinder Singh questioned the AAP spokesperson on what he was seeking to prove by sharing a copy of the final list of the high-powered committee members, dated August 7, 2019, when the original committee (minus Punjab) was actually set up on June 15, 2019.
These dates are clearly mentioned on the documents shared by their spokesperson himself, he said.
“Don’t you understand the difference between Punjab not originally being included in the committee and being named a member after I personally wrote to the Centre on the issue? How does flaunting the final list, in which Punjab was included after my intervention prove me wrong?” asked the Chief Minister, adding that he had never once claimed that Punjab was not in the reconstituted committee.
“Had AAP bothered to share the complete videos of my statements, the truth of what I have been saying would have been endorsed, which is obviously why they have carefully doctored my recorded statements,” he said.
He added that when the first meeting of the committee was held, Punjab was not part of it. And after Punjab’s inclusion at his behest, one meeting had discussed financial issues, with Finance Minister Manpreet Badal in attendance, while the last had only Agriculture Secretary as the invited participant.
“All this is a matter of record, which AAP clearly does not believe in checking out,” he said, adding that their spokesperson, in his enthusiasm to prove himself as the newly appointed in-charge of the party’s Punjab affairs, had obviously failed to do his homework.
“Or perhaps, he was simply following in the footsteps of his mentor, Kejriwal, who was a shameless master of deceit,” he said.
