Sidhu declines to address Priyanka's rally in Sangrur

SANGRUR/KOTKAPURA: Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief Navjot Singh Sidhu declined to address party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra's rally in

Dhuri

assembly constituency of Sangrur district on Sunday. Sidhu has been keeping a low profile after the party chose Charanjit Singh Channi as its CM face.

When Sidhu's name was being called from the stage to speak before Channi, the Amritsar East MLA gestured from his seat to let the CM speak and that he would listen. On stage, Channi was seated in the middle, with Sidhu to his left and Priyanka Gandhi to his right.

Priyanka, too, did not mention Sidhu at all in her three addresses in Kotkapura, Dhuri and in Derabassi, where she took out a 'Jansampark Abhiyan' to meet voters. Haryana Congress leader and RS MP Deepender Singh Hooda was present during the roadshow. The slogans raised during the Derabassi roadshow did not have a mention of Sidhu.

In first statement by the Gandhi family on the ouster of Captain Amarinder Singh as the chief minister last year in September, Priyanka told her audience in Faridkot district's Kotkapura town and later at Dhuri in Sangrur district, that the Congress government in the state had started taking directions from Delhi.

Without naming Captain Amarinder, a close friend of the family and a loyalist, Priyanka said: "We've had the Congress government in Punjab for the last five years. It is true that there were some drawbacks in our government. The government got misled because it stopped being operated from Punjab, instead it was being operated from New Delhi, not by the Congress, but by the BJP. Now that hidden alliance has come out in the open."

"It's the reason behind bringing Channi as the CM," she added.

"The government was not talking about Punjabiyat. We felt that something was not going the right way. If our government was being run by someone else, outside Punjab, by the BJP government, or in hidden understanding (santh-ganth) then it was important to change," she said in Dhuri.


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