|
Poll season starts, so Vigilance in
action;
Amarinder,
Ch Jagjit chargesheeted
WSN Network
 Punjab’s
politics seemed to be getting into a fast lane with Punjab Congress
trying to
put up a united
image, the race for Congress tickets getting hotter and the Badal
family jumping headlong into election fray with Sukhir Badal’s wife
Harsimrat Badal emerging as a candidate. As if more spice needed to
be added, the Punjab Vigilance Bureau, now an integral player in the
political arena, chargesheeted Amarinder Singh two days after its
quizzed him last in
Patiala. The
chargesheet in the Amritsar Improve Trust (AIT) land scam case was
filed in the court of Additional District and Sessions Judge S.K.
Garg.
The judge
immediately issued summons for March 4 against Capt Amarinder,
former Local Bodies minister Chaudhary Jagjit Singh, ex-chairman of
Amritsar Improvement Trust Jugal Kishore Sharma and 13 others in
connection with the scam. It was a probe into Assembly proceedings
related to this scam that had resulted in Amarinder’s expulsion from
the Assembly in September 2008. He represented
Patiala.
|
Cong unity show demands
central forces
NEW DELHI: In a rare show of unity, Punjab Congress leaders
addressed the media in Delhi with Amarinder Singh and his bete
noire in the party Rajinder Kaur Bhattal addressing the media
jointly with Ambica Soni where they asked for deployment of
Central forces in view of alleged
ham handed ways of the Badal government. The leaders said
they will be meeting the Home Minister and Election Commission
with their demand for Central forces ahead of the general
elections. Congress has been alleging implication of party
members and supporters in false police cases and most people
believe that allegations have some ring of truth. On its part,
most political dispensations in
Punjab have been using the police and Vigilanec Bureau for narrow political
ends and fake cases. |
|
Amarinder and
his co-accused are being held responsible by the VB for alleged
irregularities in exempting about 32 acres of land acquired by the
Amritsar
Improvement Trust for private development. Amarinder’s plea is that
similar exemptions were granted by his predecessor and successor
Badal too. This was the third case registered by the Vigilance
Bureau against him after the SAD-BJP combine came to power in 2007.
Alongwide Amarinder, others chargesheeted include former chairman of
AIT Jugal Kishore Sharma, former chief town planner of PUDA K K Paul
and former secretary of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha N S Mavi. The
colonisers had demanded exemption from acquisition of their 32.1
acres from a 188-acre township scheme mooted by the improvement
trust in 2004. Their request was rejected by the then chief of the
trust, Ratna, who went ahead with the acquisition process. She was,
however, removed as the chairperson of the trust and replaced with
Sharma. When the request for exemption reached the minister, he
overruled the objections raised by the principal secretary and the
director and approved the exemption on
September 21,
2005.
The bureau
alleged that the minister got the signatures of the Chief Minister
on the file personally the same day and sent it to the principal
secretary as the file’s movement was entered into the Chief
Minister’s office log the next day. Despite the Chief Minister’s
approval, the then principal secretary again noted his objection on
the file and the minister sent the
file back to the
trust with the instruction that a fresh resolution on the issue be
passed. The trust led by Sharma and including Rajiv Bhagat, Mahesh
Khana, Baljit Singh, Ashwani Kale Shah, Rajinder Sharma and
Parminder Tung cleared the request for exemption. The final approval
for exemption was granted to the coloniser in 2006 by the minister
and the CM.
11 February 2009
|
Read Also