The ruling Congress party in Punjab today unleashed a scathing attack on the principal Opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh said it was “ridiculous” that the “faceless“ AAP in Punjab was talking of having a “grand” CM face in the 2022 Assembly elections in the state.

“With just a year to go for the Assembly polls, AAP could not find a face from Punjab to campaign in the municipal elections and had to drag in non-entities from Delhi for electioneering. And now they claim they’ll find a CM face that will be the pride of Punjab,“ Capt said.

He charged that the AAP “neither knows nor cares what Punjabiyat is all about”.

Far from “learning from their mistakes” of the past five years, the AAP continues to “blunder” its way through Punjab, with “absolutely no understanding or concern” about the problems of its people, he said.

“All they see here is another state to rule, another seat of power. They do not see the pain and the problems of our people,” said the CM, adding that the AAP is an “outsider in Punjab and will remain so as long as it continues to be disconnected from the state’s ground realities”.

The “exodus” of AAP leaders and members from the party’s Punjab unit over the past two to three years is “just the tip of the iceberg” as “they have no roots here”, said the CM.

“Arvind Kejriwal’s party has no existence outside Delhi, and will soon be wiped out from there too, given their shameless collusion with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), at whose behest they have been trying to befool the lakhs of farmers camping outside their city for more than two months now,” Capt alleged.

Punjab “neither wants nor needs” such a party, he claimed, adding that “neither AAP nor its Delhi model of governance is welcome in Punjab, which is faring better than the national capital on almost every key index of development.”

Meanwhile, Punjab Congress president Sunil Jakhar said the AAP should clear its stand on the Centre’s controversial farm laws. In a statement, Jakhar charged that the “AAP keeps changing its stand on farmers laws time and again”. He said the Kejriwal-led party first supported the Bills brought by the Amarinder government against the central laws and then opposed them.

He claimed that the AAP government in Delhi similarly first issued notification to implement the Centre’s new farm laws and “then AAP members pretended to tear up copies of the same laws in the Delhi Assembly”.

The Punjab Congress chief said that despite the point that the vigilance department is under the jurisdiction of the Chief Minister of Delhi, it was not investigating the reasons behind the “torture” of farmers by some officers and employees of Delhi Police and was pretending to understand the plight of the farmers.