Congress’s SC leader and former Punjab minister Joginder Singh Mann quits party

In an emotional letter to party chief Sonia Gandhi, the three-time MLA from Phagwara, who has been a minister in the cabinets of Beant Singh, H S Brar, Rajinder Kaur Bhattal and Captain Amarinder Singh, said, “I had a dream that when I will die, the Congress tricolour will be wrapped around my body but with the Congress patrons guilty of the post-matric scholarship scam, my conscience doesn’t allow me to stay here”.

He said Maharajas, landlords, moneybags and opportunists like Captain Amarinder Singh, Navjot Singh Sidhu and others came into the party for the sake of vested political interests due to which the party drifted from its core values and the focus shifted merely to contesting the polls and grabbing power.

He added that he has been battling sleepless nights over the last few months because he was haunted by thoughts of the millions of SC students whose careers were ruined due to the scam. Instead of punishing the guilty, the party has been sheltering them, he alleged, pointing at a recent Cabinet decision.

“It is not the same party whose leader, the late Indira Gandhi, rode atop an elephant, as no other vehicle was available in bad weather, to mourn the death of members of the SC community who were killed in Belchi (Bihar). Today, Congress leaders are soaked in the blood of SC students whose careers have been ruined due to the post-matric scholarship scam,” he added.

Mann said he had repeatedly sought district status for Phagwara before former chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh and current CM Charanjit Singh Channi as residents of the region are forced to travel around 40 km to the district headquarters in Kapurthala even for minor administrative works, but both chief ministers blatantly ignored the long-pending demand of the region’s residents. He said if the leaders are not interested in fulfilling the people’s demands, there is no logic in clinging on to the party.

The veteran leader also pointed out that over the last few years, the party has been according stepmotherly treatment to the Valmiki/Mazhbi Sikh community, using it just as a vote bank. He said the Amarinder Singh-led Congress government was probably first in the state’s history with no minister from the Valmiki/Mazhbi Sikh community despite the fact that a berth remained vacant for over two years after Sidhu’s resignation. Instead, the party insulted the community, he said, adding that it was in the 1990s that the community saw its last Rajya Sabha member from the Congress and that the last Lok Sabha ticket given to a person from the community was in 2004.

He said all these reasons have forced him to leave the party which he had served with his sweat, toil and blood over the last 50 years during which he lost eight family members to terrorism. “I had remained a loyal soldier of the party for five decades, but apparently the party doesn’t need us now, that is why our loyalty is considered as our weakness. But we are strong enough to safeguard the interests of Phagwara residents and weaker sections in particular even without the Congress,” he asserted.