‘Patiala with us for 400 years’: Amarinder Singh announces to fight Punjab election 2022 from stronghold

Patiala has been a stronghold of Singh's family, he has won the seat four times and his wife Preneet Kaur represented it for three years from 2014 to 2017.

Team Newsable

Chandigarh, First Published Nov 21, 2021, 6:13 PM IST | Last Updated Nov 21, 2021, 6:13 PM IST

Former Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Sunday announced that he would contest the upcoming 2022 Assembly elections from his family stronghold of Patiala. “I will contest from Patiala. Patiala has been with us for 400 years and I am not going to leave it due to Sidhu,” Singh announced on his Facebook page, as he targeted his rival and Congress’ Punjab unit president Navjot Singh Sidhu.

By “400 years”, Singh invoked the legacy of his royal family, which ruled the erstwhile princely state of Patiala. Patiala has been a stronghold of Singh's family, he has won the seat four times and his wife Preneet Kaur represented it for three years from 2014 to 2017. The former Chief Minister's father Maharaja Sir Yadavinder Singh was the last Maharaja of the princely state of Patiala.

Also read: Punjab Elections 2022: Capt Amarinder Singh may play spoilsport for Congress while hinting at BJP alliance

The announcement from Singh comes around three weeks after he formally resigned from the Congress, ending his two decades old association with the party. He had announced his own political party called Punjab Lok Congress earlier this month and said it'll contest all 117 assembly seats in the state.

The 80-year-old political veteran, who led the Congress to a two-third majority victory in the 2017 polls, had resigned as the Chief Minister in September following a bitter intra-party feud between him and Sidhu that snowballed into a full-fledged crisis in the state unit of the party and led to his unceremonious exit.

In the last assembly elections, the Assembly seat was won by the Captain defeating BJP's General (retd) JJ Singh by a margin of over 60,000 votes and with just 11.1 per cent of the votes and forfeited his security deposit as a result.

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