Chandigarh, April 3
Punjab, Delhi and other north Indian states were on Friday rocked by spontaneous protests by Sikhs against the clean-chit given by the CBI to former union minister and Congress leader Jagdish Tytler.
No untoward incident was reported from anywhere but effigies of Congress leaders were burnt in many places. Delhi Tribune News Service reported that five members of the SGPC attempted self-immolation in front of a Gurudwara. Aggrieved people raised slogans against the Centre, Congress and the CBI.
The emotive issue has provided a handle to the NDA and Shiromani Akali Dal to push Congress on the backfoot. And Congressmen appear a worried lot as protests against grant of tickets to both Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar have spread like a wild fire. The Congress has little time before the election for firefighting with anti-Sikh riot victims of 1984 coming out on streets and garnering support of even non-political and religious organizations.
Sensing unexpected electoral dividend, both BJP and SAD have been quick to grab the issue. While they are yet to calibrate their protest, the two parties today staged separate demonstrations in Amritsar over the issue.
Anger against the Congress is building up in the region. Even senior leaders of Congress in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi are finding it hard to defend the party decision to give tickets to the tainted-two.
“It has put us in a quandary. We have to abide by the party high command on the one hand while on the other, we have to go out and persuade the people that the party had no role to play in the CBI’s clean-chit to Tytler,” said a senior Congress leader.
In private conversations they concede the possibility of the issue affecting the party’s chances in not just Punjab but also in several other constituencies dominated by Sikh population. But they are praying for the controversy to die down in the next few days, that is before
election campaign picks up in the region, where polling will mostly be held in the last two phases on May 7 and 13.
A former Deputy Speaker of Punjab Vidhan Sabha, Bir Devinder Singh, has already resigned from the party. Ironically, he, a Congress leader, was the first one to react to the nomination of Tytler and Sajjan Kumar as Congress candidates in the general election.
And even the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee chief, Mohinder Singh Kaypee, has gone on record to say that this is one issue that cannot be talked about openly. Even when senior central leaders visited Chandigarh earlier this week, no one from the Punjab unit was allowed to speak or raise the issue of Tytler and Sajjan Kumar.
