SAD slams govt’s move to hand over heritage memorials to pvt parties

In a statement, former minister Daljit Singh Cheema said he was shocked to see the government equate its circuit houses with heritage memorials while deciding to hand them over to private agencies to avoid the maintenance cost

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Thursday condemned the Congress government for deciding to hand over heritage memorials, including the Baba Banda Singh Bahadur memorial and the Chhota and Vadda Ghallugharna monuments, to private players under public-private partnership model.

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In a statement, former minister Daljit Singh Cheema said he was shocked to see the government equate its circuit houses with heritage memorials while deciding to hand them over to private agencies to avoid the maintenance cost. “You can commercialise circuit houses but not heritage memorials. This decision is against the sentiments of the Sikh community and should be withdrawn immediately,” he said.

The Akali leader said hundreds of crores had been spent to establish these memorials which came up during the SAD-BJP tenure. It is shocking that the Congress government is not even ready to maintain them now and is handing them over to private parties for exploitation at will. The SAD will not allow this to happen under any cost. The sanctity of the memorials, which are associated with events of particular historic significance for Sikhs worldwide, should be respected. I urged chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh to intervene and ensure this decision is reversed at the earliest”.

Cheema said this was not the first time that the Congress government had tried to forsake its responsibility towards heritage memorials. He said former tourism minister Navjot Singh Sidhu had referred to the Virasat-e-Khalsa museum as a white elephant. The government should understand that it had a social and moral obligation to maintain the heritage memorials for future generations, he added.