Chandigarh, March 11
BJP National General Secretary Tarun Chugh today said that the arrest of an AAP sarpanch with 18 kg of heroin in Tarn Taran district has exposed the sham the Bhagwant Mann government has been playing on the people of Punjab in the name of fighting the drug menace.
Terming the incident extremely shocking and disgraceful, Chugh said that since the arrest has been carried out by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), it has also exposed the hollowness of the Punjab Police’s “Yudh Nashian Virudh” campaign, under which the state government has been making deceptive and misleading claims about tackling drugs.
Chugh recalled that recently a police personnel’s son died due to drug abuse in Jalandhar, an incident that glaringly exposed the cracks in the state police’s sincerity and effectiveness in combating the drug menace.
Chugh said that during the 2022 Punjab Assembly elections, Arvind Kejriwal had promised the people of the state that the drug menace would be eliminated within fifteen days of the formation of the government. However, four years later the situation has become so alarming that even elected representatives at the village level are being caught in narcotics cases. This clearly exposes the hollow promises made by the Aam Aadmi Party to the people of Punjab.
Chugh further said that in last year’s budget, the Punjab government had allocated around Rs. 150 crore for a so-called “Drug Census” to assess the actual scale of drug abuse in the state and formulate a policy response. However, till date the government has failed to disclose what happened to that exercise, where the data is, and how the allocated funds were utilised.
