Sidhu sends resignation letter to Amarinder

PTI, Jul 15, 2019, 2:30 PM IST

Chandigarh: Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu Monday sent his resignation letter to Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, a day after he announced that he had resigned from the state cabinet.

“Today I have sent my resignation to the Chief Minister Punjab, has been delivered at his official residence…,” he tweeted.

Sidhu, who has been at loggerheads with Singh and was stripped off key portfolios in the cabinet reshuffle on June 6, had written a letter to then Congress President Rahul Gandhi on June 10.

He had met Gandhi in Delhi on June 9.

“I hereby resign as Minister from the Punjab Cabinet,” Sidhu had said in the letter, which he made public through Twitter on Sunday.

In another tweet, Sidhu had said he would be sending his resignation letter to the chief minister.

Singh had divested Sidhu of the Local Government and Tourism and Cultural Affairs departments and allotted him the Power and New and Renewable Energy portfolio.

Portfolios of several other ministers too had been changed in the reshuffle exercise.

Ever since the portfolio reshuffle exercise, the Punjab minister and his wife Navjot Kaur have been maintaining a distance from the media.

Sidhu, a former BJP leader who had joined the Congress just ahead of the 2017 Punjab assembly polls, has been having differences with Singh for sometime now.

The tension between Singh and his cabinet colleague had come to fore last month when the chief minister blamed Sidhu for the “inept handling” of the Local Government Department, claiming that it resulted in “poor performance” of the Congress in urban areas in the Lok Sabha polls.

The cricketer-turned-politician, however, had said that his department was being “singled out publicly” while asserting that he could not be taken for granted as he had been a “performer throughout”.