15 JULY 2019 STATE OBSERVER NEWS JAMMU
Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh confirmed on Monday noon that he had received Navjot Singh Sidhu’s resignation letter. He, however, said he will only decide on it once he reads the letter.Sidhu had sent a letter to Rahul Gandhi on July 10 in which he said he is resigning from the Punjab Cabinet. He had made the letter public on Sunday morning. Amarinder Singh, however, only received the letter a day later. “I have received the resignation letter and will decide on it once I go through it,” he said while hinting that a final call on it would only be his because he is the chief minister.There have been numerous reports of an internal rift between Sidhu and Amarinder with sources also saying that the rifts are because of personal ambitions of the cricketer-turned-politician to be named CM. That Sidhu opted to send the resignation to Rahul and only sent it to Amarinder after five days also points to the discord between the two leaders.Sidhi has been an enormously controversial figure and Amarinder has had to fight fire on his behalf on several occasions. The biggest controversy perhaps was when Sidhu was invited for the swearing-in ceremony of Imran Khan in Pakistan in August of 2018. At the time, Amarinder had said going to Pakistan was Sidhu’s personal decision. Sidhu also went to Pakistan for the ceremony for the foundation stone of Kartarpur Corridor. He had advocated talks with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pulwama attacks. He has even held Railways accountable after the Amritsar train tragedy. In each of these instances, the Punjab government had had to face a lot of questions as well as embarrassment.While the reason for Sidhu’s resignation letter is not known yet, he had recently been stripped of the Local Government and Tourism and Cultural Affairs portfolios in a Cabinet reshuffle and given Power, and New and Renewable Energy departments.
