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Akali Dal cancels
Karnal Rally after meeting with PM
WSN Bureau
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Influencing
Company: A WSN File Photo |
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Chandigarh: In a
significant development indicating cooling off of temperatures,
Punjab’s Akali Dal has pulled back from an eyeball-to-eyeball
confrontation on the issue of Haryana’s efforts to set up a separate
SGPC and has cancelled its proposed August 30 rally at Karnal.
The Karnal rally was being projected as a power show where
Akali Dal was planning to bring huge hordes to prove the point that
the Sikhs did not want a separate SGPC and that the Congress was trying to interfere in Sikh religious affairs.
Shiromani Akali Dal President Sukhbir Singh Badal said on
Saturday that Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh had assured his
party that the issue of a separate Gurdwara Panel for Haryana would
be settled amicably.
“The assurance had come during the meeting of the Akali
delegation with the Prime Minister in
New Delhi,” a press
note issued by the Akali Dal, said, adding the party “always stood
for peaceful and amicable resolution of all issues.”
“Accordingly, the High Command has decided to postpone the
proposed rally at Karnal scheduled for August 30,” the press note
said, without explaining what does the phrase “High Command” denote
and how come the Akali Dal has subsumed the idiom of the Congress
which often uses “High Command” to refer to 10, Janpath.
Akali Dal and particularly CM Parkash Singh Badal had been
toying with the idea to make it a key issue in the run up to the
Parliamentary elections, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seems to
have convinced the Akalis that the issue of separate SGPC was not of
significant importance for the Congress.
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Badal warned PM
of Kashmir style situation in Punjab |
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The demand for a separate SGPC initially was voiced by some
SGPC members from Haryana, and was later backed by Haryana’s
Congress politicians who probably saw a meaty issue in it. A
confrontationist issue with Punjab’s Akalis helps Congress
politicians in Haryana to flag themselves as better watchers of the
state’s interests vis-à-vis Punjab, particularly because the two
states have been at loggerheads on the issue of river waters, claims
on Chandigarh and territorial linguistic issues.
The cancellation of the August 30 rally will remind many of
the last minute cancellation of the Ratia rally in July, call for
which was given from the temporal seat of Akal Takht. That rally was
also cancelled after an intervention from PM Manmohan Singh.
The tone changes
Just a day earlier, the tone and tenor of Akali Dal was very
belligerent and not only had Akali Dal accused the Congress of
“attempts to break up the supreme and elected Sikh religious
institution, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee” but also
warned it of far more dire consequences.
“We are a peace loving community and we are hoping that the
attempts to open a fresh festering wound in the country in
Punjab would be
dropped. The whole of the country is already up in flames and it can
easily do without another trouble spot in Punjab along the lines of
Jammu and Kashmir,” CM Badal was quoted in official release as
saying.
He had asked the Prime Minister to “intervene effectively and
immediately to save Punjab from being turned into another Kashmir
by the Congress party’s highly ill-advised and ill-conceived move of
setting up a separate Gurdwara panel” in Haryana.
Badal was part of the delegation led by Sukhbir to meet the
Prime Minister in the latter’s South Block office in New Delhi on
August 22 morning. The delegation comprised, apart from the CM,
senior Akali leaders Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa and Captain Kanwaljit
Singh.
Badal had said that the PM had assured the delegation that he
would direct the Union Home Minister Shiv Raj Patil to take up the
matter with the Haryana government. “The Prime Minister informed us
that he could understand the seriousness of the problem and the
sensitivities of the Sikh masses on the issue as his own father had
courted arrest in the struggle for the formation of the SGPC before
Independence
of the country,” said the Chief Minister.
“We have already paid a very heavy price for similar
misadventures of the Congress in trying to divide the Sikhs. We are
hoping that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi would draw correct lessons from
Punjab’s and
country’s traumatic experience of the eighties and not persist with
her party’s dangerous adventurism in Haryana and
Punjab,” Badal had said.
Sukhbir went to the extent of quoting the fires stoked in
Jammu and
Kashmir. “Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and the Government of India must realize
that even a small issue like the transfer of a few acres of land to
a religious shrine could blow into a major national calamity, as it
had done in Jammu and Kashmir. The enormity of the blunder being
committed by the Congress with regard to the SGPC is many times more
dangerous and that party must not be allowed to play havoc with
national interests for its petty political gains,” he said.
The memorandum
submitted by the Akali Dal to the Prime Minister warned that “the
situation in the country in general and in Punjab in particular
could take a serious and explosive turn if the PM did not intervene
both with Sonia Gandhi and the Haryana government to stop the
Haryana government from its dangerous move.”
23 August, 2008
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