Jalandhar, May 8 – Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Jasbir Singh Garhi today said the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) should tell why it had discriminated against Dalits by denying them jobs and not allocating funds for scheduled caste welfare under the SC Sub Plan instead of trying to fool the community with false allegations.
Terming the allegations levelled by finance minister Harpal Cheema against senior SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia as a figment of lies, the BSP chief said the truth was that AAP had tried to stage manage a protest against the minister at Dayalpura village yesterday which had failed. “Now an attempt is being made to give it another colour which will not succeed because Dalits are asking for justice from the AAP government and not from the opposition”.
Mr Jasbir Garhi said it was a fact that the AAP had consistently opposed caste based reservations in all its agitations. “This is a matter of record. It is probably because of this that despite an agitation by the BSP after the government did not reserve seats for SC candidates while recruiting 178 Law Officers that the AAP government submitted in writing to the high court that it had done this because scheduled caste candidates were inefficient”.
Mr Garhi said the AAP government was also discriminating against the scheduled castes vis a vis the SC Sub Plan. He said against an Rs 2 lakh crore budget only Rs 16,000 crore had been kept for the SC community amounting to seven per cent of the budget while it should be at least forty per cent of the budget in keeping with the population of Dalits in the State.
Asking the finance minister to take decisions in favour of the scheduled caste community, SAD-BSP candidate Dr Sukhwinder Sukhi, who was also present on the occasion, said the AAP is the last party which can talk about morality. “This is the same party which had beat up government employees, including women on the roads when they were agitating for their just rights. This government jailed a television journalist solely because the latter had exposed the Rs 44 crore renovation done to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s residence in Delhi”.
Asking the AAP finance minister to give the Dalits their due first before seeking their votes, Dr Sukhi said “all allegations being made by Mr Harpal Cheema are borne out of frustration as he realizes that the SC community will shun the AAP candidate on polling day”. He also asked the Election Commission to take action vis a vis the Dayalpura incident involving Mr Bikram Majithia as per the complaint filed by the SAD yesterday.