CHANDIGARH: Punjab Chief Minister Parkash
Singh Badal has asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to name a
Central University to be allotted to Punjab after Shaheed-E-Azam
Bhagat Singh as India's gesture to the everlasting memory of the
great martyr. Interestingly, and ironically, Badal, who has built a
decades-long political career riding on panthic politics and whose
party has a brute majority in the premier Sikh body SGPC, gave a
call for observing the martyr's centenary as a mass movement to
reawaken the spirit of nationalism among the countrymen. Clearly,
the Akali Dal's decades old 'sankalp' of Panth Ki Jeet and Khalsa Ji
Ka Bol Bala seems to have been lost for the Akalis.
The Punjab Government, instead of using the
occasion to logically build a platform against those hell bent on
painting Bhagat Singh in colours of communism or trying to afix a
hat on the head of this Sikh martyr, contented itself with
organising a few marches. These marches would began from the places
associated with"national martyrs" in Punjab and converge at
Jallianwala Bagh on September 27. Meanwhile, an All Party Committee
has also been set up under the chairmanship of Deputy Speaker Lok
Sabha Charanjit Singh Attwal. In view of the fact that Pakistan is
alsoobserving the centenary of the martyr, a contingent would also
start from Wagha Border carrying a flame towards JallianwalaBagh,
Amritsar.
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