Chandigarh, Aug 5 (PTI) BJP national general secretary Tarun Chugh on Tuesday demanded the immediate scrapping of the AAP government’s land pooling scheme and also said his party would launch a statewide agitation against it to protect the interests of farmers.
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government has been facing flak from the opposition parties and various farmer bodies, which dubbed its land pooling policy a “looting” scheme to “rob” the farmers of their fertile land.
Chugh said the Narendra Modi government is committed to protecting farmers’ interests and lashed out at the AAP government over the land pooling policy.
He said an alleged “state-sponsored conspiracy to loot farmers’ land in the name of development to help realtors” would never be accepted.
“This is not a policy, it’s a betrayal. Farmers know exactly what this scheme is — an official tool to snatch their ancestral lands. Let the (Bhagwant) Mann government hear this loud and clear. We will not let them grab even an inch of Punjab’s farmland,” said Chugh in a statement.
He said the land of Punjab’s farmers is sacred — like a mother — and any attempt to forcibly acquire it without consent is nothing short of dacoity. This is not development. This is coercion under the garb of progress, he said.
“We will fight this battle on the streets, in the courts and among the people. Punjab will not be handed over to land sharks and political contractors,” Chugh said.
He accused the Mann government of acting like middlemen for real estate mafias, betraying the very farmers who voted for change but were delivered betrayal.
The Punjab cabinet gave its nod to the land pooling policy in June and asserted that not a single yard will be forcibly acquired from the land owners.
Under the land pooling policy, an owner will be given a 1,000 square yards of residential plot and a 200 square yards of commercial plot in fully developed land in lieu of one acre of land, the state government had said.
In another development, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal called an emergency joint meeting of the party’s core committee, working committee and district presidents to intensify the agitation against the land pooling policy.
The ruling AAP has hit out at the opposition parties, alleging that it was spreading misleading propaganda against the state government’s land pooling policy. AAP leaders describe the policy as “farmer-friendly”. PTI CHS KSS KSS
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