Chandigarh: Amarinder Singh, who quit the Congress last year, is likely to join the BJP soon, sources said. The 89-year-old former Chief Minister is in London for back surgery. He is likely to merge his Punjab Lok Congress party with the BJP after his return next week.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Amarinder Singh after his surgery recently. Amarinder Singh, or “Captain”, quit the Congress, his party of five decades, after he was replaced as Chief Minister last year.
Singh, in a letter to party leader Sonia Gandhi, said he had been humiliated thrice by the leadership and couldn’t take it anymore. The 89-year-old also warned that he still had politics in him yet, and that he was not about to walk into the sunset.
The three-time Chief Minister had denied then that he was joining the BJP – a course taken by many disgruntled Congress leaders over the past few years – and launched his own party. He contested the April-May Punjab election in an alliance with the BJP.
The Captain lost the Patiala seat and even forfeited his deposit. Since the election, other senior Congress leaders have quit the party and joined the BJP in Punjab; former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar is among them. But Amarinder Singh’s wife Preneet Kaur remains a Congress MP from Patiala.
