Chandigarh, December 28
The unsavoury controversy generated by the Transport Minister Tej Parkash Singh case is refusing to die down with more and more dissidents threatening to quit their official positions in case no action was taken against top officials responsible for embarrassing the family of late Chief Minister Beant Singh.

The dissidents are also threatening to encash on the controversy generated by media revelations of alleged involvement of the Chief Minister’s son in overseas operations of an Intranet company. Some have demanded a CBI probe into the reports, while others want the Congress high command to intervene and seek a report from the government in the state.

The rebels feel that if the allegations are “frivolous and baseless” and the Chief Minister gets a clean chit from an agency like the CBI, it will give the party a handle to beat all criticism by the NDA partners. Otherwise, the Opposition, they feel, will whip up controversies following such reports, besides ridiculing the “anti-corruption drive of our own government.”

A stern action against the Vigilance officials, they say, also looks necessary failing which the Opposition would use the “unsavoury and baseless controversy” over allegations of corruption in the allotment of route permits by the Transport Department.

Mr Harnam Dass Johar, Minister for Higher Education and spokesman of the dissidents, said in Ferozepore today that he would “quit the Council of Ministers before Mr Tej Parkash Singh does so” in case action to the satisfaction of the Transport Minister was not taken against the Chief Director, Vigilance Bureau.

Similar views were expressed by Mr Malkiat Singh Dakha, a loyalist of the Beant Singh family, saying that not only members of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP), but also the party workers at the village, block and district levels were upset over the “unnecessary maligning and harassment of the family of Shaheed Beant Singh”.

“The resentment is so much that they have also threatened to boycott our own government by staying away from all official and public functions,” Mr Malkiat Singh added, holding that “all 35 dissident legislators would quit en masse in case action was not taken against the officials concerned immediately.”

The dissidents have reportedly lodged a strong protest with the party high command in general and two of the three members of the panel set up by party chief Sonia Gandhi to resolve the present tangle over the CLP leadership issue.

Last evening Mrs Rajinder Kaur Bhattal had reportedly met both Dr Manmohan Singh and Mr Ahmed Patel.

The feeling in the dissident camp has been that tremendous pressure was being built on them to review their demand of “save Amarinder or save Punjab Congress” for the time being as the general election was likely to be advanced. Certain senior leaders in the high command, they felt, were trying to convince or pressurise them to withdraw their demand till the Lok Sabha elections are held as immediate change would not help the party much in the state.

The dissidents have alleged that even senior bureaucrats were frequenting their residences to persuade them to give up the confrontational path.

“We have named some of the bureaucrats before the national leaders of the party and demanded that no outsider be allowed either to meddle or interfere in the internal affairs of the party,” said a senior dissident leader.