Elections to coop bank chairman postponed

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, January 17

After the intervention of the Chief Minister, the elections to the post of chairman of Bathinda Central Cooperative Bank were postponed on Friday. The elections were postponed after infighting in the Congress came to the fore with one faction of the party opposing the candidature of Harmanvir Singh Kangar for the post. Harmanvir is the son of Cabinet Minister Gurpreet Singh Kangar. The faction wants a senior leader should be elected as the chairman.

Tehal Singh Sandhu, zonal director, Bathinda Central Cooperative Bank, said, “The elections have been postponed to avoid the repeat of a sequence of events that took place during the Zila Parishad elections.”

“Ignoring senior leaders is totally injustice to them. There was a bid to elect a young leader as the chairman. Even the city leadership is in favour of a senior leader,” Sandhu added.

The Congress leader said he had talked to Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh and the elections had been postponed. He accused the Cabinet minister of pressurising the zonal directors for electing his son as the chairman of the bank.

The Congress leader added that he had been a loyal worker of the party for a long time. He threatened to quit the party if a senior leader was not elected as chairman. At present, he is a PPCC delegate member and secretary.

On Friday morning, a large number of police personnel were deployed outside the cooperative bank.

On December 24, former Bathinda Zila Parishad chairman Gurpreet Singh Maluka, along with other SAD workers, had staged a protest outside the bank accusing the Congress government of wrongdoing in the nomination for the elections to the board of directors of the bank.