Congress candidate for Gurdaspur bypoll, Sunil Jakhar on Monday accused Narendra Modi led government for rising inflation over commodities. Addressing a public meeting in Gurdaspur, he accused the Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi led government for increasing the rates of cooking gas (LGP) from Rs 400 under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime to Rs 744 presently. He also ridiculed his counterpart, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate, Swaran Salaria, over his comment that if someone purchases a car worth Rs 10 lakh Rs 100 per litre of fuel would make no difference.

Jakhar said a majority of the people in this country were poor and could not afford to buy a car for Rs 10 lakh. Even the youth buy motorbikes on installments, he said, adding that Salaria’s statement suggested the price of petrol would go up further. Jakhar accused SAD to sell off Punjab’s interests for their personal gains. He also referred to the Rs 32,000 Crore food grain scam during the SAD regime and vowed to bring back every penny of it.

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Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament (MP), Pratap Singh Bajwa, who was lobbying for Congress ticket for his wife from the same parliamentary seat, also joined the campaign and sought votes for Jakhar. Bajwa said he would be supporting Jakhar’s campaign in all the nine assembly segments that fall under the Gurdaspur parliamentary constituency. He termed the Sucha Singh Langah episode as extremely shameful and demanded stringent action against the former Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) minister.

Referring to atrocities against Dalits during the SAD regime, Jakhar recalled that he had raised his voice against such incidents all through. He referred to the 2015 attack in which a Dalit youth’s limbs were chopped off and he had later died in hospital. Jakhar pointed out that he had raised his voice over the incident. This was not an isolated instance of such kind, Jakhar added.

Jakhar claimed the Punjab chief minister (CM) Captain Amarinder Singh led government was ensuring that every elderly person gets his old age pension and every family eligible for blue cards  gets their due irrespective of their political allegiance.