Punjab Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh will lead a delegation of party leaders from the state to meet President Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi on Thursday to seek his intervention to resolve the Sutlej-Yamuna Link (SYL) canal issue.
The party leadership, which has demanded that the President ignore the Supreme Court ruling on his reference on the SYL canal case in Punjab's interest, will submit a detailed memorandum at the meeting scheduled at 6.30 PM, a party spokesman said.
The apex court ignored several key aspects of the SYL issue because of "inadequate" information shared by the Sukhbir Singh Badal government, he said.
The party will appeal to the President to intervene in the matter. The delegation will draw his attention toward the "serious consequences" of the implementation of the apex court's order, the spokesman said.
The state is already reeling under acute water shortage, The water table is declining continuously. The state will be plunged into an unprecedented chaos and crisis if the President accepts the court's verdict and allows its implementation, he said.
The people of the state, especially the farmers in the Malwa belt, will be the worst affected by it. "The party leadership will request the President to ensure that there is no injustice meted out to the people of Punjab," he said.
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal has also written a letter to President Pranab Mukherjee and sought time to meet him along with his Council of Ministers on the issue.
To lodge their protest over the verdict, all 42 Congress legislators, including Leader of Opposition Charanjit Singh Channi, submitted their resignations to assembly secretary Shashi Lakhanpal Mishra on Friday.
Holding that the Punjab Termination of Agreement Act, 2004, was not in conformity with the provisions of the Constitution, the Supreme Court's constitution bench of Justice Anil R. Dave, Justice Shiva Kirti Singh, Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose, Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and Justice Amitava Roy on Thursday answered in the negative all the four questions referred to the top court in a Presidential reference.
While Justice Dave pronounced the opinion for the majority of the judges, Justice Singh, while agreeing with the majority view, gave his own observations.
At the initiative of the then Congress government headed by Amarinder Singh, the Punjab assembly had unanimously passed the law terminating all the agreements with Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Chandigarh and Delhi on the sharing of Sutlej-Yamuna river water.
This act was brought to tide over the January 15, 2002, apex court judgment and decree and subsequent judgment and order of June 4, 2004.
