Preneet Kaur: ‘In Punjab, it is farmers versus BJP… They don’t allow us to campaign… don’t confront other parties’

Former Union minister Preneet Kaur, 79, is again contesting the Lok Sabha elections from her home turf Patiala –this time on the BJP’s ticket. Preneet, the wife of former Punjab chief minister and Congress heavyweight Captain Amarinder Singh, had won the Patiala seat four times earlier as the Congress candidate. She formally joined the BJP in March this year, one-and-a-half years after Amarinder merged his fledgling outfit Punjab Lok Congress with the BJP. Amarinder quit the Congress after the party leadership replaced him with Charanjit Singh Channi ahead of the February 2022 Punjab Assembly polls.

Now, as the BJP finds itself at thereceiving end of farmers’ protests across Punjab over their various issues, Preneet has also faced their ire during her campaigning. In an interview with The Indian Express, she speaks on a range of issues related to the polls and her campaign. Excerpts:

I don’t have any regrets about joining the BJP. The circumstances happened that our cherished relationship with Congress top leadership came to an end on a bitter note. We could not have done anything.

It is a forgotten story now. It is over and done with. There is a way to do things. You cannot humiliate a person (Amarinder) who made your party stand in the region. He is a leader, who has a national appeal. He helped in building Congress image nationally too. When the party was at the lowest ebb, and won only 52 seats in Lok Sabha (in 2019 polls), eight MPs were from Punjab while the entire northern region did not have enough MPs. It was only Punjab, under the then CM Amarinder Singh, which gave Congress legitimacy in India. And is this what you (Congress) do to him?

Captain Sahib (Amarinder) has always done so much for the farmers. They should