Congress condemned the alleged police action against protesting youths inside the historic Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar recently.
Congress on Saturday condemned the alleged police action against protesting youths inside the historic Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar recently and said it reminded people of the "brutality by the police during the British rule".
"Do you know it is for the first time after 1919 that there has been a police action inside the sacred place," former chief minister and chairman of the Congress' election campaign committee, Amarinder Singh said.
Condemning the police action, he said "it speaks of the sick mindset of the Akalis".
Punjab police on Thursday lathicharged a group of students who were protesting against the modernisation work at the historic Jallianwala Bagh saying it amounted to tampering with the history of the place.
The protest by the students, including girls, turned violent when the police allegedly launched a cane-charge on the protestors and even chased them up to the Harmandar Sahib (Golden Temple), just a stone's throw from the bagh.
"The Akalis always raise a hue and cry on sacrilege of Harmandar Sahib (Operation Bluestar), but now they are doing it themselves," Amarinder claimed.
Some state Congress leaders have demanded that the deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal be summoned to the Akal Takht, the highest temporal seat of the Sikhs for the alleged act of sacrilege.
Hundreds of people including women and children had been massacred by the British at the Bagh in 1919.
Taking the incident seriously, the Government had rushed the DGP NPS Aulakh to Amritsar on Friday for holding an inquiry into the lathicharge on protestors at Jallianwala Bagh and subsequent claims that the police had entered the Golden Temple premises.
The action against the students came after the youths had dismantled one of the new structures being put up at the Jallianwala Bagh, claiming that the Bagh's history and records were being tampered with in the name of modernisation of the place.
Meanwhile, Amarinder Singh charged the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) with having "double standards".
"Now, to inflame the people's passion they are raising the bogey of Anadpur Sahib resolution," he claimed.
Immediately after his swearing-in last month, Sukhbir Singh Badal announced that the ruling SAD would continue to fight for the implementation of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution, including the transfer of Chandigarh and other left-out Punjabi speaking areas to Punjab, apart from a fair adjudication of inter-state river waters.
Sukhbir had also said that demands enshrined in the resolution would be part of their poll manifesto.
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