Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Tuesday said Congress knew it was going to lose all 13 seats in Punjab which is why the party has pushed its senior leaders to fight the parliamentary polls.
"That by itself is an admission that the people of the state did not favour the Congress party. But they (Cong) wanted to create an air of competition bringing their big leaders into the fight," the five-time Chief Minister said.
Congress has fielded its senior leaders into fray this time which include former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, the Patiala MLA, who is taking on BJP's Arun Jaitley from Amritsar Lok Sabha seat.
Former Information and Broadcasting Minister and senior Congress leader Ambika Soni is also contesting from Punjab's Anandpur Sahib from where she is taking on SAD's Prem Singh Chandumajra while Leader of Opposition in the Punjab Assembly Sunil Jakhar, who is MLA from Abohar, is contesting from Ferozepur seat.
Badal said, "In Punjab each one of the Congress leaders is fighting as much to reduce their own margins of defeat and to ensure that their other candidates lose heavily against SAD-BJP combine."
"Bajwa wants Amarinder Singh defeated. Amarinder wants everyone else including Bajwa and Jakhar defeated, and Jakhar is simply absent from the campaign," Badal said in a statement in Chandigarh.
"These leaders had already done serious and irreparable damage to themselves and to their party by openly admitting that they never wanted to contest and had been forced to fight these elections under coercion from Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
"How can you win a war with soldiers unwilling to fight because they believe that the battle had already been lost," Badal asked. Badal said the NDA was now targeting between 300 and 325 seats in the country to ensure five year of stable economy and administration in the country.
"Most independent surveys have already confirmed that it is a no-contest election, as the Congress party seems to be hovering between 75 to 100 seats and the Third front anywhere between 35 to 50 seats. That still leaves about 400 seats where the NDA is ahead of others and poised to win.
"Its is the kind of wave that we saw immediately after Indira Gandhi lifted the internal Emergency in 1977," said the Akali stalwart. The Chief Minister claimed that the people of the country were just waiting to push the button to show the door to the "confused and corrupt Congress regime".
"I am sorry to say but the Congress party today is completely leaderless, and there is complete disarray there," he claimed. "The Congress lost this election the moment they first projected Rahul Gandhi as their leader but later chickened out by refusing to name him as their Prime Ministerial candidate.
"Whatever they might say now, but the fact is that even the Congress party knows that Rahul is no match for Narendra Modi and the Congress is not willing to trust any other of their leaders to lead the show," he said.
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