Has the Congress party leadership decided to “discipline” Mr Arjun Singh by other means by denying him a platform and disrupting meetings he is to address? The question arises after the disgraceful incident at Ludhiana on Sunday. Apparently taking their cue from the action taken by the high command on the previous day against four Congress dissidents, 200 Punjab Congress workers took over a university hall hours before the Union Minister was 10 arrive, shouted hostile slogans and ultimately prevented him from all ending a seminar he was to preside over, They were led by a party legislator, Mr Darshan Singh Brar, a political secretary to the Chief Minister and the district Congress president, Mr Brar, it should be noted, Is no ordinary MLA. He clearly has the confidence of the Chief Minister, Mr Beant Singh, who appointed him recently as chairman of the Punjab Agro Industries Corporation, a body which is envisaged as leading the State’s agro industrial revolution. Mr Beant Singh himself could not have been in the dark about what was going on for several hours in the university hall because he was present him in the city that morning. And since the Punjab Chief Minister has made no secret of which side he takes in the conflict between the party president and Prime Minister, Mr P. VY. Narasimha Rao, and the Union Human Resource Development Minister, the obvious conclusion will be that the Congress party’s top leaders support the grossly of the kind witnessed a Ludhiana. i.e. Curiously, Mr Arjun Singh’s: convocation address, earlier on the same day, at 4 girls school in Ludhiana where he made a strong attack on communal forces was not scuttled by those in the party who arc out to muffle dissenting vowes. Butwhatever Mr Beant Singh’s misgivings about the seminar on the “Punjab problem’, there was no call for hooliganism. The Punjab Chief Minister has already displayed blatant intolerance of the political Opposition by highhandedly preventing the Akali Dal (Badal) from holding a rally in Jalandhar, He is now carrying his intolerance to even greater lengths, al his own initiative or otherwise. This utterly reprehensible tendency is reminiscent of the days when the late Sanjay Gandhi unleashed his rowdies on all dissenters inside and outside the party.
The disgraceful events in Ludhiana have come in the wake of the stifling of dissent at the recent AICC session at Surajkund and other manifestations of growing authoritarianism in the party which is in danger of becoming a one man organization, There seems to be in Operation one set of standards for the Congress president’s public meetings and a different one for Opposition meetings or those addressed by Congressmen who have legitimate differences with the leadership. This is dangerous, for not only the Congress but the country.
Article extracted from this publication >> May 14, 1993
