A day after BJP leaders accused the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of using the police to stall a bhajan sandhya, political sparring between the two sides continued on Friday.
BJP leaders, including ex-MLAs Sheetal Angural, KD Bhandari and Sarabjit Makkar and district president of the party Sushil Sharma, held a media interaction. The party leaders said AAP general secretary Deepak Bali and minister Mohinder Bhagat had failed to intervene in time and later tried to shift the blame.
Bhandari said, “Organisers of the event who were members of Kasht Niwaran Bala Ji Mandir, Sheikhan Bazaar, here, had taken due permission from seven departments, including the SHO and the Assistant Commissioner of Police of the area. From the police side, only the consent of Commissioner of Police Dhanpreet Kaur was required.
The AAP leaders were aware of the face-off between the police and the organisers. “Was it not their responsibility to intervene in such a sensitive religious matter and resolve it in time? We had no intention of staging a dharna over a religious issue, but our repeated appeals went unheard, leaving us with no other option,” the BJP leaders said.
Angural said, “Rather than accepting that they did not act in time, the AAP leaders have been blaming us for trying to politicise the issue. This is not acceptable. We demand action against those who tore the posters of Balaji. We had protested overnight. The next morning, we sat on a dharna in scorching heat, just to get police permission for the religious event. Hours after all permissions were secured, the AAP leaders got into action".
This morning, several AAP leaders posted their videos of attending the bhajan sandhya and also being honoured by the temple committee. Deepak Bali blamed the BJP for giving it a political colour without any reason. “I was not in the city at the time and would have intervened had I been present", he had told the media before attending the event.
In the evening today, the AAP leaders took to streets to take on the BJP-led Centre over inflation. They stood at Guru Nanak Mission Chowk, holding placards with messages against the Centre. Among those who led the protest were Ashwani Aggarwal, Bahri Salmani, Rubal Sandhu, Mangal Bassi, Shobha Bhagat and others.
