A day after Captain Amarinder Singh described the Punjab Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu as “an unstable individual” and “an acolyte of the Pakistani deep state”, the latter on Wednesday said the former Chief Minister is a “fraud, coward and spent cartridge”.

“The Captain is a spent cartridge. He is a fraud. Now he claims ministers were involved in illegal mining,  then why didn’t he act? He is a coward,”  Sidhu told reporters today. “Now he is saying that these guys robbed the treasury. Was he sleeping? He could see that loot was going on and he didn’t do anything? This is a sign of cowardice,” he added.

On Amarinder’s claim that many Congress leaders will soon join his new political outfit Punjab Jan Congress, Sidhu said not even a councillor had left the Congress, not even his wife Preneet Kaur. “Ask him if Preneet Kaur will quit the Congress,” he said, referring to the former Chief Minister’s wife, who is a Congress Lok Sabha MP and a former Union Minister.

Amarinder Singh was forced to quit as Chief Minister in September after months of acrimony and sparring with Sidhu. In July, Sidhu had been appointed Punjab Congress chief as part of the party’s attempts to broker peace between the feuding leaders. But any truce reached at the time was short-lived.

Announcing his decision to form a new party ‘Punjab Lok Congress’ ahead of early 2022 Assembly polls, Captain Amarinder Singh on Tuesday resigned from the Congress accusing party chief Sonia Gandhi and her children, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, of carrying out a “midnight conspiracy” in a bid to oust him from the Chief Minister’s post.

In a seven-page letter to Congress president,  Amarinder,78, described his bete noire Sidhu as “an unstable individual” and “an acolyte of the Pakistani deep state”, Amarinder accused Sonia Gandhi of patronising him. “.. You (Sonia) will one day regret this decision (to appoint Sidhu as Punjab Congress chief) and it would be too late by then. I am sure you must be regretting it now,” he said.

Amarinder also accused Sidhu of “using the filthiest and most vile language” against him and wrote: “Sidhu’s only claim to fame was that he would abuse me and my government on a regular basis. I am old enough to be his father but that did not stop him from using the filthiest and most vile language against me, both publicly and privately.”