Within just a matter of 24 Hours, Punjab CM faced double blows as two of, his close aides in the government lost jobs, one bowing to the law of the land and the second one being forcibly sacrificed at the political altar.
The exit of senior bureaucrat Suresh Kumar, a close aide and confidant of Amarinder Singh in the 10-month-old Congress government in the state, as the Chief Principal Secretary after the Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday held his appointment to a cadre post as void, being in violation of the Constitution, has definitely affected the Chief Minister and his high profile office.
Kumar, a 1983 batch IAS officer was seen as an honest, bold, impeccable, outspoken leader. He didn’t lose a second after the court asked him to leave his position.
Even though Amarinder put up a bold face to ask state Advocate, General Atul Nanda, to examine the Court order and initiate legal recourse.
There have been murmurs in government circles that a powerful lobby of people in the government and the Congress could be secretly behind the petition filed in the high court against Kumar’s appointment. Perhaps, they could not see the upright officer virtually call all shots in the functioning of the state government.
The second blow to Amarinder came on Thursday after the Congress High Command, meaning Congress president Rahul Gandhi, forced Amarinder to accept the resignation of Punjab’s powerful cabinet minister Rana Gurjit Singh.
Rana, who was embroiled in controversies in the past few months related to the multi-crore rupee benami sand mining auctions in the state and conflicts of interest in his role as a minister and his family’s business interests, was forced to put in his papers earlier this month but Amarinder kept delaying its acceptance.
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