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Akali Dal cancels Karnal Rally
after meeting with PM
WSN Bureau
 Chandigarh: In a
significant development indicating cooling off of temperatures,
Punjab’s Akali Dal has pulled back from an eyeball-to-eyeball
confrontation on the issue of Haryana’s efforts to set up a separate
SGPC and has cancelled its proposed August 30 rally at Karnal.
The Karnal rally
was being projected as a power show where Akali Dal was planning to
bring huge hordes to prove the point that the Sikhs did not want a
separate SGPC and that the Congress was trying to interfere in Sikh
religious affairs.
Shiromani Akali
Dal President Sukhbir Singh Badal said on Saturday that Prime
Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh had assured his party that the issue of
a separate Gurdwara Panel for Haryana would be settled amicably.
“The assurance
had come during the meeting of the Akali delegation with the Prime
Minister in
New Delhi,” a
press note issued by the Akali Dal, said, adding the party “always
stood for peaceful and amicable resolution of all issues.”
“Accordingly,
the High Command has decided to postpone the proposed rally at
Karnal scheduled for August 30,” the press note said, without
explaining what does the phrase “High Command” denote and how come
the Akali Dal has subsumed the idiom of the Congress which often
uses “High Command” to refer to 10, Janpath.
Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh seems to have convinced the Akalis that the issue of
separate SGPC was not of significant importance for the Congress.
The demand for a
separate SGPC initially was voiced by some SGPC members from Haryana,
and was later backed by Haryana’s Congress politicians who probably
saw a meaty issue in it. The cancellation of the August 30 rally
will remind many of the last minute cancellation of the Ratia rally
in July, call for which was given from the temporal seat of Akal
Takht. That rally was also cancelled after an intervention from PM
Manmohan Singh.
The tone changes
Just a day
earlier, the tone and tenor of Akali Dal was very belligerent and
not only had Akali Dal accused the Congress of “attempts to break up
the supreme and elected Sikh religious institution, the Shiromani
Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee” but also warned it of far more dire
consequences.
“We are a peace
loving community and we are hoping that the attempts to open a fresh
festering wound in the country in
Punjab would be
dropped. The whole of the country is already up in flames and it can
easily do without another trouble spot in Punjab along the lines of
Jammu and Kashmir,” CM Badal was quoted in official release as
saying.
He had asked the
Prime Minister to “intervene effectively and immediately to save
Punjab from being turned into another Kashmir by the Congress
party’s highly ill-advised and ill-conceived move of setting up a
separate Gurdwara panel” in Haryana.
Badal was part
of the delegation led by Sukhbir to meet the Prime Minister in the
latter’s South Block office in New Delhi on August 22 morning. The
delegation comprised, apart from the CM, senior Akali leaders
Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa and Captain Kanwaljit Singh.
Badal had said
that the PM had assured the delegation that he would direct the
Union Home Minister Shiv Raj Patil to take up the matter with the
Haryana government. “The Prime Minister informed us that he could
understand the seriousness of the problem and the sensitivities of
the Sikh masses on the issue as his own father had courted arrest in
the struggle for the formation of the SGPC before
Independence of
the country,” said the Chief Minister.
“We have already
paid a very heavy price for similar misadventures of the Congress in
trying to divide the Sikhs. We are hoping that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi
would draw correct lessons from
Punjab’s and
country’s traumatic experience of the eighties and not persist with
her party’s dangerous adventurism in Haryana and
Punjab,”
Badal had said.
Sukhbir went to
the extent of quoting the fires stoked in
Jammu and
Kashmir. “Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and the Government of India must realize
that even a small issue like the transfer of a few acres of land to
a religious shrine could blow into a major national calamity, as it
had done in
Jammu and
Kashmir.
The enormity of the blunder being committed by the Congress with
regard to the SGPC is many times more dangerous and that party must
not be allowed to play havoc with national interests for its petty
political gains,” he said.
The memorandum
submitted by the Akali Dal to the Prime Minister warned that “the
situation in the country in general and in
Punjab in
particular could take a serious and explosive turn if the PM did not
intervene both with Sonia Gandhi and the Haryana government to stop
the Haryana government from its dangerous move.”
27 August, 2008
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