CHANDIGARH, July 13: Lashing out at the Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal for blaming the bureaucrats for his own failures, former Punjab Chief Minister and the Congress Deputy Leader Capt Amarinder Singh today asked him to set his own house in order rather than finding faults with the bureaucracy.
In a hard hitting statement issued here today, Capt Amarinder remarked, this was quite strange that such desperate rumblings were coming from someone whose only claim to fame was having become Chief Minister of Punjab for a record fifth time.
“If during the five terms as the Chief Minister you could not learn the art of working with the bureaucrats then you really don’t deserve to be the Chief Minister anymore”, he told Mr Badal, while reminding him, “don’t forget that you are the head of a government of which bureaucracy is part and parcel and when you blame the bureaucracy the blame eventually stops at you”.
The former Chief Minister told Mr Badal, “there is a saying in the army that you don’t have bad soldiers, you only have bad commanders and you have proved to be a worst commander by trying to put the entire blame on the bureaucracy holding it responsible for your own failures.”
The senior Congress leader told Mr Badal, good that he had realised that people of Punjab were angry with him and his government. “Yes they are angry not because they believe, unlike you, that bureaucrats are corrupt, only because they have a firm belief that you and the most of the leaders and the ministers in your government are maliciously greedy and compulsively corrupt and are patronising the criminals and drug pedlars, resorting to wanton loot by grabbing each and every business while rendering the state bankrupt”, he told Mr Badal.
Speaking from his own experience, Capt Amarinder said, during his tenure as the Chief Minister between 2002 and 2007 he never had any problem with any of the bureaucrats from the junior to the senior most level. “Unlike you I delegated them the authority they deserved and I trusted them and eventually they delivered and if you would have done the same you would not be cribbing like a poor workman trying to blame his tools”, he told Mr Badal.