SAD says Rahul forcibly asking Punjabis to admit they are drug addicts

Chandigarh – The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today said it was a matter of shame for Rahul Gandhi to first dub 70 per cent of Punjabis as drug addicts and now heap insult on injury by insisting they accept this false claim to be true.Stating that Rahul Gandhi was becoming a party to maligning Punjabis as drug addicts in the same manner in which his grand mother Indira Gandhi had tagged them as terrorists, the SAD asked Rahul to explain why he had insisted during his speech in Jalandhar today that Punjabis should accept that they were drug addicts. In a statement here, SAD spokesman Dr Daljit Cheema said “I can understand that your father Rajiv Gandhi encouraged the 1984 anti- Sikh genocide with his utterances and even protected the perpetrators. But you should not have followed in his footsteps by appointing a 1984 accused – Kamal Nath as the party incharge of Punjab. It is clear you have no love lost for Punjabis or their sentiments so please stop shedding crocodile tears over drugs in Punjab”.The SAD leader said the truth of the matter was that the drug trade flourished during Congress rule in Punjab. “Rahul Baba should ask his mother about the letter written by the PCC president Capt Amarinder Singh in which he detailed how a senior Congress leader and his family was involved in selling drugs and patronising smugglers. Your government was in power at the centre also for ten years but did not do anything about the matter. It was only when the SAD- BJP government started taking sweeping steps to end this menace that you woke up about the problem and tried to score brownie points by wrongly quoting a survey report”, Dr Cheema added.The SAD leader said Rahul baba was fond of reading verbatim from scripts handed over to him. “He did so when he claimed 70 per cent Punjabis were drug addicts four years back. He did so today when he said police officers were sent to khudda ki line by the Punjab government. The manner in which you quote local idioms is indicative of the fact that you do not even understand what you are being made to read”, he added.