The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today while cautioning the people to beware of political conspiracies aimed at politicising and dividing the people of Punjab following the string of desecrations of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji, asked Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi why he had failed to beg forgiveness for the destruction of Sri Akal Takth during Operation Bluestar as well as the 1984 anti Sikh genocide during his ongoing trip to Punjab. In a statement here senior SAD leaders including mps Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa and Balwinder Singh Bhundur said it was condemnable that Rahul Gandhi was playing politics over two tragic deaths even as he failed to atone for the sins of his party and his family which was responsible for sending tanks into the Darbar Sahab and engineering the worst human genocide of the modern world in 1984 in Delhi. The senior leaders said it was known that successive generations of the Gandhi family had never left an opportunity to denigrate Sikh institutions and their principles. "Now another Gandhi scion has come to divide and damage Punjab and Punjabis by using the issue of unfortunate desecrations of the holy book to revive his party in Punjab. It is just another attempt at trying to unite the Congress by dividing Punjab", they added. Asking Rahul why he had failed to ever visit the widows in Delhi whose husbands had been killed during the genocide in 1984, the leaders said if the Congress leader had even a twinge of regret over the killing of more than 30,000 Sikhs in Delhi and Punjab in 1984 he would have apologised for the actions of his family. "However the manner in which he tried to convert a tragic incident into a political show of strength is inhuman and reprehensible", the leaders said while terming it as a knee jerk reaction taken in frustration due to the falling graph of the Punjab Congress as well as failure to counter the development agenda of the SAD-BJP combine. Mr Dhindsa and Mr Bhundur said the truth of the matter was that the entire country had been in crisis during UPA rule. "This is why the people overwhelmingly rejected the Congress overwhelmingly". They said in case of Punjab, the SAD-BJP government had been elected to office twice in a row because of its track record of maintaining peace and communal harmony at all costs. "We have succeeded in maintaining this harmony despite the grave provocations and it does not behove Rahul Gandhi to incite passions by playing divisive politics", they added. The mps said the SAD-BJP government was presently fighting agencies who wanted to take Punjab back to the turbulent days as well as anti national elements who wanted to harm India. They said the Punjab government had achieved success in solving most of the incidents of desecration and had even ordered a judicial inquiry by a retired high court judge to look into the incident of desecration in its entirety. They said besides this the government had also recommended a CBI inquiry into the desecration incident besides forming a SIT. "Now Rahul Gandhi is making more demands to score brownie points instead of waiting for the competent agencies and the judicial commission to come out with their reports", they leaders added. Terming Rahul Gandhi as a person who was secretly willing evil even as he pretended to do good, the mps said Rahul's intentions could be gauged from the manner he had used his trips to Punjab to incite people and cause divisions. They said earlier the Congress scion had during a visit termed 70 per cent proud Punjabis as drug addicts. "Rahul deliberately misused a sample survey of a University professor which had highlighted the incidence of drug addicts among youth to defame Punjabis world wide". They said similarly Rahul was now using his present trip to Punjab to project himself as a crusader even while the truth was that he had never taken any interest in any problems of the State including those faced by farmers. Condemning this hit and run tactic, the leaders asked Rahul to develop sincerity and atone for the sins of his party as well as his family before talking about the problems of Punjab.
