Chandigarh:

A Pakistani journalist known to be Captain Amarinder Singh’s friend should be investigated for her alleged links with the ISI, a Punjab minister has said in the row between the Congress and the former Chief Minister.

Punjab Home Minister Sukhjinder Randhawa has called for a probe into whether Amarinder Singh’s friend Aroosa Alam has links with Pakistan’s ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence.

“The Captain is saying that Punjab faces a threat from the ISI. So we will also probe the relation of Aroosa Alam with ISI,” Mr Randhawa told NDTV, asked about widely shared videos and images of Aroosa Alam, a defence journalist, with Pakistani military officers.

He said he had asked the Punjab police chief to investigate the allegations.

“Captain Amarinder Singh kept raising the issue of drones coming over from Pakistan for the last four-and-a-half years. So Captain (sahab) first raised this issue and later got BSF deployed in Punjab. So it seems a big plot which needs to be probed,” said the minister.

This is the Punjab Congress’s sharpest attack yet on Amarinder Singh, who has announced plans to launch his own party and tie up with the BJP for the Punjab election early next year after he was forced to quit as Chief Minister last month.

In an acrimonious exchange with the Congress, his party of four decades, Amarinder Singh yesterday alleged double standards in the party’s criticism of his plans for an alliance with the BJP.

The Congress, he said, had no business talking of secularism when it had partnered with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and had taken on board multiple leaders from the BJP, including current Punjab Congress chief Navjot Singh Sidhu.

The outburst was seen to be aimed at Congress’s Punjab in-charge Harish Rawat, who called Mr Singh’s announcement “shocking” and said it appeared that he had “killed the secular Amarinder within him”.

Aroosa Alam’s name has cropped up even earlier when Mr Singh targeted Navjot Sidhu for attending Imran Khan’s oath in 2018 and hugging the Pakistani army chief.

The journalist, who met Amarinder Singh during his Pakistan visit in 2004, is reportedly a regular visitor to his home and had also attended his oath ceremony.