Former Punjab chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Sunday announced that he will contest the upcoming assembly elections from the Patiala assembly constituency.
“I will contest from Patiala. Patiala is with us for 400 years,” a post on his official Facebook page said, quoting him. The two-time former chief minister quit the Congress earlier this month and floated his outfit, the Punjab Lok Congress.
Punjab will pick a new assembly in elections early next year.
“I am not going to leave it (Patiala) due to Sidhu,” the Facebook post said, in a reference to his spat with Punjab Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu. The veteran leader, in April, challenged Sidhu to contest against him from the seat months before the feud between the two leaders snowballed into a crisis in the party’s state unit and led to the unceremonious exit of Singh as chief minister.
The Patiala assembly constituency has been a stronghold of Singh’s family. He has won the seat four times in the past, while his wife, Preneet Kaur, represented it between 2014 and 2017. Singh’s father, Yadavinder Singh, was the last ruler of the princely state of Patiala.