‘Amending SGPC Act regressive’

Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee president Capt. Amarinder Singh Monday termed the amendment to the SGPC Act barring the Sehajdhari Sikhs from casting votes in the SGPC elections as most unfortunate, regressive and retrograde.

“This will simply mean slamming your door on hundreds and thousands of Sikhs and dividing the community”, he said in a statement while reacting to the passage of the Act in the Parliament on Monday.

Capt. Amarinder equated this move by the Akalis with their demand for Punjabi Suba which ended in fragmenting Punjab into small pieces.

“Like for the narrow sectarian and partisan interests they slashed Punjab into pieces so that they could form the government of their own, which still they never could, they have now repeated the formula to retain their control over the SGPC by virtually throwing out a majority of the Sikhs and virtually dividing the community”, he said.

The PCC president maintained that the SGPC, which is running under the direct control of chief minister Parkash Singh Badal, should better have spent its energy and resources on reforms and educating the youth of the community than taking the easy way out. The former CM reiterated that every Sikh, who believes in the tenets of Sikhism, must have the right to vote in the SGPC elections. “It is an irony that the very democratic legislative procedure has been misused to disenfranchise a large section of the society from exercising their democratic right to vote”, he observed.

Asserting that this was a monumental mistake that was being committed at the behest of Mr Badal and which can have dangerous and disastrous consequences, Capt. Amarinder pointed out that all the religions in the world like to propagate their ideology and win over more followers and here Mr Badal has engineered a move that will virtually shut its doors on the millions of followers, who despite being Sikhs will not be recognised as such in the SGPC elections.