Amarinder holds meeting with Rahul Gandhi

Former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh today met Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and held another round of discussions over restructuring of the state unit amid indications that he might lead the party's fight in the 2017 assembly elections.
According to sources, Amarinder is learnt to have discussed the restructured Punjab team with Rahul and the role to be assigned to each of the leaders in the state. Today's meeting lasted around half an hour.
If approved, Amarinder will replace Bajwa, who had earlier replaced him after the last assembly poll debacle.
Amarinder has been seeking Bajwa's ouster saying he has failed to take along the various sections of the party together and senior leaders have indulged in an open spat.

Congress is keen to restructure its Punjab unit ahead of 2017 assembly elections and put up a united face in the state after it lost at the hands of the Akali-BJP combine twice in a row.
Sources said the Congress leadership is in the process of giving final touches to the new restructured Punjab unit which will have a role for every senior leader and representation to all sections of society.

The Congress high command will soon declare its new set up in Punjab and modalities of the organisation are being worked out.
The role of Bajwa is also being ascertained, sources say.

"First of all there were no such incidents between 2002
and 2007 when I was the Chief Minister as it was the most peaceful period in Punjab in the recent history," he asserted.
He, however, asked "presuming for the sake of argument that such incidents took place, why did it take someone more than ten years to file a complaint and that too when I was planning to visit the country and why were these complaints not made when I came here in 2004 as the Chief Minister of Punjab?"
Referring to promotions of some police officials accused of torture between 2002 and 2007, he said those officers are governed by the Indian Police Service rules over which the state governments do not have any control.

"Besides, we have a strong, transparent and powerful judicial system already in place in our country which takes care of everything," he said, adding, many such officers have already been prosecuted and punished by the courts back home in India, while others are facing prosecution.
However, he added, these officials were prosecuted for the allegations of torture allegedly committed by them in 1980s and 1990s, decades before he became the Chief Minister.
He also sought to know if the SFJ had ever lodged any complaint against visiting leaders from Pakistan, where a Sikh parliamentarian was gunned down just because of his religious persuasion.

He also asked to why the SFJ did not object to Aam Aadmi Party leader H S Phoolka when he addressed public functions in Canada with a clear political message?
"Will the SFJ raise similar objections when Arvind Kejriwal will visit Canada by invoking the Canadian policy that prevented me from addressing public functions?" he asked.