New Delhi, September 16:
Former Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, the chief of Punjab Lok Congress (PLC), will join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) next week, a party spokesperson has said.
Additionally, Singh would combine his newly-created party with the BJP. The 80-year-old politician left the Congress after his abrupt resignation as chief minister and formed the PLC in 2021. In Delhi, he will formally join the BJP in the presence of JP Nadda and other top figures.
The veteran politician recently met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah amid rumours that he was likely to receive a major position in the BJP after joining it. He is expected to depart for New Delhi on September 18.
Capt. Amarinder Singh launched the PLC after leaving the Congress after being unexpectedly ousted as chief minister by the party’s top leadership in September 2021. Charanjit Singh Channi succeeded him as the Punjab chief minister up to the elections in February 2022. Both Capt. Amarinder and Channi lost the elections that the Aam Aadmi Party swept.
Singh previously emphasised the need of determining a community’s minority status at the federal level rather than the state level.
The PLC chief said, “The main contention of the petitioner is that Sikhs are not a minority in Punjab and therefore, these institutions cannot be accorded the minority status.”
“It implies that the minority status of a community should be decided statewise and not at the national level,” he said in the letter, while adding that at present, the minority status of various communities is decided nationally and rightly so.
He said, in an earnest request to PM Modi, it was strongly believed that the current mechanism of deciding the minority status of various communities in the country at the national level should continue.
