Why didn’t Khattar use official channels or call on my mobile?: Capt Amarinder

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, November 29

Trashing the call records released by Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar as complete fraud, Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, on Sunday, flaunting a page of his own office register, has said he cannot condone Khattar’s lies, and if he really wanted to connect, he could easily have used official channels or called up on the mobile phone.

Dismissing it as a “pathetic attempt” by Khattar to prove his claims, the Punjab Chief Minister stated that by releasing the call record copies, purporting to be of his office’s attempt to get in touch with him, the Haryana Chief Minister had, in fact, exposed his deception even more sharply.

“If at all someone from his office called my residence, why were the calls made to an attendant? Why were official channels not used to get in touch with me?” asked the Punjab Chief Minister.

“Top officials of the Punjab government, at Principal Secretary and the DGP levels among others, have been in touch with each other on the farmers’ issue for the past several days, yet none of these officials conveyed Khattar’s desire to talk to me at any point in time,” the Chief Minister pointed out, adding that his Haryana counterpart’s attempt to seize high moral ground on the farmers’ Dilli Challo march was pathetic.

“How many times in the past has Khattar used the attendant channel to get in touch with me,” he asked, asking the Haryana Chief Minister to stop lying.

Captain Amarinder said the fact of the matter was that his Haryana counterpart was out to suppress farmers and had no serious intent of discussing their protests with him.

“If I can talk to a whole lot of central leaders, right from the Prime Minister, on the issue of the farmers’ protest, why would I try to wriggle out of talking to Khattar on the same?” he quipped, assailing his counterpart in the neighbouring state for politicising the genuine demands of the farmers and their very real on-ground fight for survival.

The Chief Minister also lashed out at Khattar over his remarks that “Amarinder would be responsible if COVID-19 spreads now due to the farmers’ protest.”

On Khattar’s remark that farmers should not block Haryana’s borders, Captain Amarinder pointed out that it was Khattar’s government and police that had been blocking the borders for the past three days by forcibly stopping the farmers from proceeding.

Captain Amarinder noted that Khattar’s lies on the issue had been totally exposed by the Haryana farmers themselves, as they had not only rejected their Chief Minister’s claims that no farmer from his state had joined the march but had shown their ID cards, duly issued by the Haryana government.

“A man who can disown his own farmers, and even go so far as to call them Khalistanis, instead of standing by them in this hour or crisis clearly has no moral scruples about spreading lies,” he said, adding that Khattar clearly could not be trusted.