Chandigarh: After its attempts to bribe the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators in a few other states in lieu of breaking AAP, the BJP is now trying to topple the AAP government in Punjab, alleged the state finance minister Harpal Cheema here Tuesday.
Briefing newspersons, Cheema, who was accompanied by about five MLAs, alleged that aside from using central agencies such as CBI and ED against the party MLAs, the BJP in Punjab had approached AAP MLAs with offers of up to Rs 25 crore in lieu of breaking away from AAP.
Besides, these MLAs have also been offered big posts, he said and added that the AAP MLAs have also been told that they would be given up to Rs 75 crore if they would get more MLAs along.
He further alleged that the BJP leaders told AAP MLAs that they needed only 35 MLAs to topple the government, as they were also in touch with some of the Congress MLAs.
Cheema, however, refused to disclose the names of MLAs approached by the BJP or the ones who called them despite a volley of questions in this regard.
BJP TRASHES CHARGES
The state BJP’s chief spokesperson Anil Sareen, however, trashed Cheema’s allegations as baseless and a bundle of lies.
Sareen told FPJ that the AAP leader should immediately make public from where their MLAs received the calls and who had called them. Sareen held that if any MLA was contacted even through landline-phone, even that could also be traced.
He held that it had become a habit of the AAP leaders to divert the attention of the public from their failures by raising such false and concocted stories.
Demanding Cheema to immediately make such phone numbers public or quit his post, Sareen alleged that AAP in Punjab was plagued with corruption as one of its Delhi ministers was in jail and another was about to leave. Many scams have started coming to the fore in the AAP government in Punjab during a short time of its coming to power about six months.
The scam of several hundred crores of rupees committed by the excise department at the time of distribution of liquor contracts in Punjab is also not hidden from anyone, he further alleged.
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