Bajwa: Brother, not wife, from Qadian

Ravi Dhaliwal

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Tribune News Service

Qadian, July 13

The bitter feud raging in the Bajwa family since long seems to have finally ended with a consensus on the name of Fatehjung Singh Bajwa, younger brother of Congress Rajya Sabha MP Partap Singh Bajwa, as the family’s choice for the Assembly ticket from its pocket borough of Qadian.

Fatehjung had once again laid claim to the ticket despite the fact that Partap’s wife Charanjit Kaur Bajwa is the sitting MLA.

Fatehjung has unsuccessfully contested three Assembly polls. The last time he was in the fray was in 2009 when he lost the Kahnuwan byelection to SAD’s Sewa Singh Sekhwan.

A similar dispute was witnessed just ahead of the 2012 elections when Partap, then a Lok Sabha MP from Gurdaspur, decided to make his wife contest despite “promising his brother” the ticket.

In today’s Jan Sampark rally, a longtime loyalist of the family, Manohar Lal Sharma, took the mike in the presence of CLP leader Charanjit Singh Channi, and announced that “the family has unanimously decided that in the 2017 elections, Fatehjung will be the candidate and not Charanjit Bajwa”.

A senior leader confided that ever since PPCC president Capt Amarinder Singh had a dinner meeting with Fatehjung last month, the senior Bajwa was not feeling comfortable. “Just to ensure that his brother did not land in the Amarinder camp, Partap decided to forgo the claim of his wife,” he said.

Bajwa’s political opponents, meanwhile, were not impressed by today’s announcement. “The Bajwas have no locus standi to announce tickets. This is the prerogative of the PPCC president. All Partap can do is to recommend Fateh’s name,” said a sitting Congress MLA.

Meanwhile, Channi asserted that the Congress, after coming to power, would withdraw the sanction for Khalsa University as public land “could not be allowed to be encroached upon by the ruling family”.