Charanjit Singh Channi met Amit Shah at his residence in Delhi. (File)
New Delhi:
Punjab Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi met Union Home Minister Amit Shah at his home in Delhi on Tuesday to discuss the violence in Uttar Pradesh and the farm laws.
“I met Union Home Minister Amit Shah and urged him to repeal the three farm laws. I also asked him to seal the international border with Punjab to curb trafficking of drugs & weapons,” Mr Channi said after the meeting.
“I also told him that we’ll not tolerate barbaric killings in UP. This system of arresting our leaders should stop. I requested him to open the Kartarpur Corridor at the earliest. He ensured me that government will take a decision very soon,” he added.
Earlier, before leaving for Delhi, the Chief Minister had said in Chandigarh, “These three farm laws should be repealed at the earliest and incidents like this (Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri) need to be scrapped. I will discuss this issue with Union Home Minister Amit Shah in today’s meeting.”
As many as eight people were killed in the Lakhimpur Kheri incident on Sunday, said Uttar Pradesh police. Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella body of several farmer unions, had alleged four farmers lost their lives in the incident.
Mr Channi’s meeting with the Union Home Minister came a day after he was denied permission to visit Lakhimpur Kheri while his deputy Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa and some Congress MLAs were “detained” after they were stopped at the Haryana-UP border.
The Punjab Chief Minister urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to impress upon the UP government for taking firm steps in ensuring justice to the victim families of the Lakhimpur Kheri incident and also reiterated the need to repeal the Centre’s three contentious farm laws.
He had also met had his first meeting with PM Modi on Friday after becoming Punjab Chief Minister in which he asked the centre to withdraw the three controversial laws, against which thousands of farmers – mostly from Punjab and Haryana – have been protesting for nearly a year.
Eight people were killed on Sunday as violence erupted during a farmers’ protest in Lakhimpur Kheri, claiming the lives of both farmers and BJP workers ahead of a visit by UP Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya.
Four of the dead were people in the cars, apparently part of a convoy of BJP workers who had come to welcome the UP minister while the others were protesters.
