Captain Amarinder Singh
Chandigarh, July 1, 2016: Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Capt Amarinder Singh today rejected the Justice Zora Singh Commission report on the Bargadi sacrilege and the subsequent police firing on the unarmed protestors that led to death of two people.
“The commission has defeated the very purpose it was constituted for”, he said, adding, “It appears to have worked overtime to hide the what actually was needed to be revealed”.
Capt Amarinder pointed out, “its mandate was not to fix the compensation for those killed or injured, but to arrive at an unambiguous conclusion as who was responsible for the sacrilege and who was responsible for the killing of the protestors”.
“Surprisingly, the Justice Zora Singh has not even touched those topics”, he quoted newspaper reports, adding, “it has only vindicated our apprehensions from day one that the commission was merely an attempt at cover up rather than arriving at the truth”.
“Not that we had expected much from the commission, but we did not expect the report to be so tame that it will not even touch real issues involved”, the former Chief Minister observed, adding, awarding compensation to the victims is an administrative matter which can be handled by the government even without any recommendation.
Meanwhile, Capt Amarinder demanded that the compensation should be same for those killed and those handicapped for life. He said, two persons who had suffered spinal injuries and have been restricted to bed for whole life, should get the same amount of compensation as those killed.
He said, the intentions of the government in arriving at the truth on the matter were exposed the way it treated Justice Zora Singh when he had come to submit his report. “This is an insult to the man who was assigned such an important duty”, he said, while adding, “irrespective of whether we agree with his findings or not, Justice Zora Singh deserved a better deal”.