A day after With the Aam Aadmi Party’s Haryana in-charge Sushil Gupta promised Satluj Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water to…
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A day after With the Aam Aadmi Party’s Haryana in-charge Sushil Gupta promised Satluj Yamuna Link (SYL) canal water to every village in Haryana after AAP forms government in the state in 2025, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal on Wednesday asked the party ‘not to play politics’ on the issue.
Speaking to reporters at Gurdwara Rakabganj in Delhi, Badal said AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal should not play politics on the sensitive issue of SYL canal.
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He asked the Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann to urge the AAP convener to withdraw the guarantee given on this issue to the people of Haryana.
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The SAD leader said AAP had again started befooling Punjabis in its age-old tradition. He said the Punjab finance minister had now announced that the state’s river waters would not flow into Haryana, even as a Rajya Sabha member Gupta had given a guarantee on behalf of Kejriwal in Haryana that water from the SYL canal would irrigate each and every field in the state.
Asserting that this insidious conduct of AAP had the potential to inflame sentiments in the entire region, Badal said the continued silence of Punjab CM on this issue was being read as a weakness by Punjabis.
“It seems Mann knows the real intentions of Kejriwal which the latter has made public earlier also by filing an affidavit in the Supreme Court demanding water be released to Haryana and Delhi through the SYL,” he said.
“If Mann does not step in and ask Kejriwal to withdraw the guarantee given by his party to the people of Haryana, he should be prepared to face the angst of Punjabis who will not allow one drop of water to flow into Haryana from the SYL canal,” the SAD leader added.
Badal said as far as the SAD was concerned, the issue of SYL had been closed forever in 2016 when then CM, Parkash Singh Badal, denotified all land acquired to build the canal and handed it back to farmers.
“Now there is no land available for construction of the canal. Thinking of taking water from the canal to Haryana amounts to day dreaming,” he said.
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