Farmers Movement Archive

Pb farmers not keeping bonded labourers: Capt

Chandigarh: Responding to the Union ministry of home affairs’ (MHA) statement that illegal human trafficking syndicates exploited migrant labourers and Punjabi farmers in border districts hook them to drugs, Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh has said all 58 cases alleged by the Centre have been investigated thoroughly and nothing as alleged has been found. Attacking the central government on Sunday for “spreading misinformation about state’s farmers indulging in bonded labourer system in their fields”, Capt Amarinder alleged it was yet another conspiracy to defame Punjab’s farmers, whom the Centre and the ruling BJP had been continuously trying to malign by dubbing them terrorists, urban naxals and goons with an aim to derail their agitation against contentious farm laws. He termed the MHA’s letter written on March 17 as a bundle of lies to undermine farmers’ protest and denigrating the Congress government in Punjab. The CM said after careful analysis of the whole episode, it came to fore that a highly sensitive information pertaining to the national security regarding the arrest of some suspicious persons by the Border Security Force (BSF) from close to the volatile Indo-Pak border has been “unscrupulously twisted on baseless conjectures to malign the farmer community”. “The MHA letter talks of Abohar also while the fact is that there is no case of Abohar or Fazilka districts,” said Amarinder, adding none of the conclusions of the Centre were borne out by facts in the MHA letter. The chief minister claimed none of the persons apprehended has made any allegation of being forcibly kept as farm labourers under inhuman conditions even before the courts. Nothing on record suggests that these persons were forcibly infused drugs to keep them working for long hours and it was incorrect to conclude that the intellectual disability of these persons was drug induced, he added. 16 detainees were mentally disabled Of the 58 persons detained by the BSF in 2019 and 2020, four belong to different areas of Punjab and were found near the Pakistan border. Amarinder said 16 of the 58 detainees were intellectually disabled, four since childhood. The investigation found that 14 persons had come to Punjab only a few days or weeks prior to their apprehension.

The Times of India

2021-04-05

Chandigarh