Chandigarh, April 30
Asserting that the Aam Aadmi Party government in Punjab was not sincere to anybody including the labourers, Punjab Congress president Amarinder Singh Raja Warring today said that the special session of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha to mark the ‘Labour Day’ was a “characteristic theatrical diversionary tactic” of the ruling party as it was faced with an existential threat after defection of seven MPs. “Besides, it is too little and too late”, he remarked.
The PCC president asked what purpose will the “special session” serve for the labourers, when the government is on the last leg of its tenure and that too crippled. “When the government is not sure of its own survival and existence, what can it do for the labourers?” he asked, while noting that the AAP has been holding “special sessions” so frequently to divert the attention and shrug off its responsibility that such sessions have lost their “specialty” of being special. “You don’t hold special sessions more frequently than the regular sessions”, he remarked.
Warring asked the government what has it done for the labourers during the last four years. The fact is that Punjab under the AAP government was the worst performing state on MGNREGA, he said, while disclosing that not even fifty percent registered labourers had been covered under the scheme during the last four years and not even one percent of them had got 100 days mandatory work.
He said that it is obvious that the AAP’s purpose in holding the session was not to deliberate or pass any special law for the welfare of labourers, but to dodge and divert the public attention from the existential crisis it is faced with after the defection of its seven Rajya Sabha members, six of whom are from Punjab.
Maintaining that this ‘special session’ will also end up as a damp squib like the previous ones, the PCC president said, he did not expect anything from it, except a token expression of concern for the welfare of the labour without any substance or time bound roadmap. “Don’t think you can mislead the workers with that”, he told the AAP, while adding, “you may fool some people some times, but you can’t fool all the people all the time”.
