Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address the grievances of the farming community by holding direct talks with farmer organisations as well as all the other stakeholders to come out with a solution which is acceptable to all.
The SAD chief said, “Farmers’ organisations have rightly rejected the secretary-level talks offered by the Agriculture ministry as a bureaucrat cannot offer anything on the table and had called the farm leaders only to explain the centre’s point of view.”
He said, “The Prime Minister must understand that a lot of water has flown under the bridge. Farmers in Punjab and Haryana besides other places have taken to the path of agitation at grave personal risk to themselves during the pandemic because they are convinced the 3 recently enacted Agri laws will destroy their future generations. In such a situation, leaving aside any middlemen, the Prime Minister should intervene and hold direct talks with farmers as well as other stakeholders, including all political parties.”
He also announced that the SAD would initiate the formation of a national pro-farmer front by coordinating with other like-minded regional parties to take this demand to its logical conclusion. Badal said he would personally take up the cause of the farmers in Delhi by meeting representatives of likeminded regional parties soon.
On the other hand, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh said that Sukhbir should refrain from commenting on the farm laws till he gives satisfactory answers to three vital questions, the answers to which every single farmer of Punjab wanted to know.
He asked, “Why did Harsimrat Kaur Badal not oppose the Farm Ordinances when they were first approved by the Union Cabinet, of which she was then a member? Why did Sukhbir not support the state government at the all-party meeting he (Captain Amarinder) had convened to evolve a consensus against the farm legislations? Why did the Akalis boycott the Vidhan Sabha session in which the other parties (barring BJP) had voted in favour of the resolution on the agricultural laws?”
Captain Amarinder said he had been asking these questions of Sukhbir and Harsimrat for the past several weeks but the Akali leaders had been persistently ignoring them. It was clear the duo had no justification for their actions, which had brought the situation to such a pass, where the very survival of the farmers was at stake, he added.
Reacting to Sukhbir’s request to the Prime Minister to talk to farmer organisations and to listen to the voice of the people, the Chief Minister said why he did not remind the PM of his responsibility towards farmers all those years he was with the BJP. “And what about your responsibility? Or are you admitting that you never had any sense of duty towards the people of Punjab, especially the farmers,” Captain Amarinder asked Sukhbir.
On Sukhbir’s talk about forming a national pro-farmer front with “like-minded parties”, the Chief Minister quipped that the SAD had ostensibly already quit the coalition of ‘like-minded parties’, whose only common interest was to ruin agriculture and appease the corporates who were controlling them. Had he any interest in the welfare of the farmers, he would have supported the Punjab government’s battle against the agricultural laws of the Union Government.
