Sukhbir shakes own candidate's plank

The Akali candidate's very basis of competing in the race for the local assembly seat were contested on Friday by his own party's president. Joginder Pal Jain had said that he had quit the Congress because a non-Akali constituency could not hope to have any development.

The Akali candidate's very basis of competing in the race for the local assembly seat were contested on Friday by his own party's president.

Joginder Pal Jain had said that he had quit the Congress because a non-Akali constituency could not hope to have any development, while in Jain's campiagn meeting on Friday, deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, who is also president of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), said Moga's only development was during the current regime.

"The SAD government built secretariat, flyover, focal point, road infrastructure, canals and inns in Moga," said Sukhbir. "The town's only the era of development was when we were in power."

When Jain quit the Congress, he said that since the Akalis had stayed in power for many years, he had thought that the city could see some development if he joined the party. In his public campaign addresses at Jhandewala, Kothe Patti Mohabbat, and Mehma Singh Wala villages near here on Friday, Sukhbir said the voters of Moga had to choose between a performer Akali Dal and a non-performer Congress.

He called upon the people of Moga to ask former chief minister Captain Amrinder Singh to spell any initiative he had taken for the development of Moga during his regime. "We have opened the ledger of performance and development in all fields and it is for the people of Moga to make a choice," he added.

Addressing members of the truck, trailer, tanker and rickshaw unions at Moga, Sukhbir asked them to compare the performance of the two main parties while voting. "You will not find even a single achievement in the Congress column," he said, "because the Congress has no answer to our development agenda."