Punjab Health Minister Balbir Singh Sidhu on Sunday questioned the AAP government’s coronavirus strategy in Delhi while claiming that his state fared better in the fight against the pandemic. The minister in a statement said the Aam Aadmi Party is making a “laughing stock” of itself with “absurd” claims on the coronavirus management in Delhi.

Sidhu was responding to AAP MLA and Leader of Opposition Harpal Singh Cheema’s statement, expressing “dissatisfaction” over the Amarinder Singh government’s measures to tackle the pandemic. Describing Cheema’s claims as “ludicrous”, Sidhu termed the Delhi model as nothing more than a “desperate bid by the Arvind Kejriwal government to divert attention from its own failures”. The AAP MLA was “clearly oblivious” to the fact that Punjab continues to fare much better than many other states in the fight against coronavirus, which in fact had “totally exposed the inadequate Delhi health care infrastructure”, said Sidhu in the statement. He said the Centre had to step in and virtually take over the pandemic management to pull the city out of the “total and unprecedented mess” into which the AAP government had pushed it.

“The less said about the AAP government’s COVID management in Delhi the better,” said the minister. Even now, the Delhi High Court is continuously questioning and, in fact, “pulling up” the Kejriwal government over its pandemic strategy, he said. Just last week, the court had termed as “incomprehensible” the resistance shown by the Delhi government on its monitoring the progress made in ramping up the testing, he said. Given that the entire testing strategy of the Delhi government is under the court’s scanner, Cheema’s insistence on Punjab adopting the same is not “just laughable” but a clear indication that AAP is not interested in protecting the people of Punjab said, Sidhu.

All they have ever cared about is promoting their own interests, which the people of Punjab had seen through back in 2017 itself when they had shattered the party’s dreams of forming the government in the state, he added. Asking Cheema to verify his facts before shooting through his mouth, the minister further noted that the Kejriwal government’s “mismanagement” had caused Delhi to contribute 10 percent of the total deaths in the country. Punjab, on the other head, has accounted so far for one percent of the deaths, and those too mostly related to co-morbidity, he said.