Gurdaspur: SAD MP from Bathinda Harsimrat Kaur Badal challenged chief minister Bhagwant Mann to reveal which drug kingpins he had arrested over the past five years, even as she accused him of being directly responsible for the proliferation of the drug trade in Punjab.Addressing a gathering here on Thursday, the MP asked the chief minister to tell Punjabis which ‘chitta’ factory had been busted so far.“The very fact that the big drug lords and their factories remain untouched is clear proof that you have no intention of tackling this menace and are instead facilitating this trade,” she alleged.Asserting that an entire generation was being destroyed by drugs, Harsimrat claimed that drug-related deaths had crossed the 5-lakh mark. “Even if we take an average of five drug-related deaths in a single village over a year and calculate the total for 13,000 villages, the figure comes to 3.25 lakh. If we take into account deaths due to drug overdoses in towns and cities, this figure rises to between five and six lakh,” she said.She accused the AAP govt of allegedly concealing drug-death figures and registering such deaths under different categories.“The govt had gone to the extent of ‘abducting’ bodies, as in the case of Daljit Singh of Bhamme Kalan, and forcibly cremating another drug-overdose victim,” alleged Harsimrat.Stating that the women of Punjab understood the gravity of the situation, she said, “They are coming up to me and pleading with me to save their children from the scourge of drugs. They want nothing more. This is why we have formed the Mai Bhago Di Fauj to take on the drug mafia.”She added, “It is heartening to learn that women have organised themselves and formed ‘jathas’ in villages to keep drugs away from their homes.”
