Badal appoints senior BJP leader as state planning board chief

Former BJP state president Rajinder Bhandari has been appointed chairman of the Punjab State Planning Board with cabinet rank, official sources said today.

The move follows yesterday's appointment of senior BJP leader and former minister Tikshen Sud as the Chief Minister's Political Advisor with cabinet rank, which came hours after BJP MP Navjot Singh Sidhu's outbursts against the state government, where he claimed he felt like an "opposition MP".

Yesterday, Badal had termed Sidhu's outbursts as an internal matter of BJP.

Meanwhile, the Chief Minister is likely to take up the issue of eviction of Sikh farmers from the Kutch region with his Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi during his proposed visit to Gandhinagar on September 9, official sources said.

Badal is one of the key guests in the inaugural ceremony of 'Vibrant Gujarat Global Agricultural Summit'.

Though the issue was earlier taken by with Modi by Badal, the SAD was left red-faced by the Gujarat government's decision to pursue the case in Supreme Court.

The Sikh farmers had settled in Kutch in 1965 and had won their case in the Gujarat High Court against Gujarat government's eviction orders.