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Punjab FM should be booked: SAD

Accusing Punjab Finance Minister (FM) Manpreet Singh Badal for making a 'bogus' farm loan waiver promise, the Shiromani Akali Dal…

Punjab FM should be booked: SAD

Manpreet Singh Badal (Photo: Facebook)

Accusing Punjab Finance Minister (FM) Manpreet Singh Badal for making a 'bogus' farm loan waiver promise, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Thursday said that the minister should be booked for abetting farmer suicides by back-stabbing the peasantry.

In a statement, the former minister and SAD general secretary Bikram Singh Majithia said the election manifesto was Manpreet Badal’s baby. “He was not only Chairman of the Manifesto drafting committee, but also claimed he had spent six months to finalise its contents. It can be surmised that Manpreet Badal included the complete farm loan waiver clause in the manifesto after due thought. Now therefore he cannot escape responsibility for the death of 120 farmers who committed suicide after realising he had no intention to honour the promise made to them,” he said.

Majithia said the Finance Minister had promised a complete loan waiver of nationalised and co-operative banks as well as arhatiyas and knew that this amounted to a waiver of Rs 90,000 Crore. “Manpreet Badal also knew about the financial condition of the state due to his earlier stint as finance minister. That means he deliberately led farmers to commit suicide by befooling them through various tactics, including getting them to fill forms to give the impression that he would honour his promise,” he said.

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The SAD leader said Manpreet Badal started doing a flip flop immediately after the election. He started saying he would implement his promise, but that there was no money to do so. “The Congress kept buying time by instituting a Committee to ‘study’ its promise and eventually came out with a fraudulent waiver which has also not been executed till now," he said.

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