Chandigarh, May 19 (IANS) Former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Thursday congratulated former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar for joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), saying that the "right man is in the right party".
He said more leaders are likely to desert the sinking ship of the Congress in the coming days.
In a statement issued here, Amarinder Singh said the exodus from the Congress will continue and the party is headed for an imminent doom.
"Honest and upright leaders like him (Sunil) cannot breathe in the Congress anymore," he said, adding, "That space (in the Congress) has become too stifling and too suffocating."
The former Chief Minister recalled how within the span of less than a year, the Congress has completely collapsed in Punjab due to one wrong decision.
"I was the Chief Minister, while Sunil was the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee President, and everything was going so well. We were headed for repeating the government just less than a year ago," he said, adding, "One wrong decision by the leadership proved suicidal for the party that is now staring at its own doom in Punjab and elsewhere in the country."
M Siddiq, one of the original litigants of the Ayodhya case, had assailed certain findings of the 1994 verdict in the case of M Ismail Faruqui holding that a mosque was not integral to the prayers offered by the followers of Islam.
Balwant Singh Rajoana, the death row convict in the then Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh assassination case, on Friday ended his hunger strike in the Patiala central jail following a meeting with the SGPC chief.
The local police on Wednesday arrested a 36-year-old pastor from the Delhi airport on a charge of raping a woman follower, making a video of the act and then blackmailing her by threatening to upload the video on social networking sites.
The Union Territory of Chandigarh—the joint capital of Haryana and Punjab—remains one of the most contentious and long-standing issues between the two neighbouring states.
The home minister also asserted that the government is committed to providing justice to the aggrieved Sikh community, which suffered the most during 1984 carnage.
