senior leader and former minister Joginder Mann joined the Aam Aadmi Party on Saturday. This comes a day after Joginder Mann handed in his resignation to the Congress, thereby severing his 50-year-old ties with the party barely weeks ahead of the Punjab Assembly elections.
Welcoming Mann into the party fold, AAP leader and Punjab co-in-charge Raghav Chadha said the veteran politician’s induction will give a huge boost to the party in the state.
“Inspired by Arvind Ji’s vision, Punjab’s former cabinet minister and three-time MLA Joginder Singh Mann Ji join AAP ending his 50-year-old association with Congress. He was presently chairman of Punjab Agro Industries Corp,” said Raghav Chadha in a tweet.
A leader of the Scheduled Caste (SC) community, Mann was angry with the Congress government in Punjab for not taking any action against the perpetrators of the alleged multi-crore post-matric SC scholarship scam. He was also resentful of the ruling dispensation ignoring repeated demands to grant district status to Phagwara, his constituency.
Mann had resigned from the post of chairman of Punjab Agro Industries Corporation on Friday.
In a letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi, the three-time MLA from Phagwara, who served as a minister in the Cabinets including those of Beant Singh, Rajinder Kaur Bhattal and Capt Amarinder Singh, said he had a dream that he would die as a Congressman.
“But with Congress patronising the guilty of the post-matric scholarship scheme, my conscience doesn’t allow me to stay here,” he had said.
Voting for Punjab’s 117 assembly seats will be held in a single phase on February 14. Poll results will be declared on March 10.
