Former Punjab chief minister and Congress candidate for Amritsar’s parliamentary seat Amarinder Singh (centre), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s step-brother Surjit Singh Kohli (left) and legislator Om Parkash Soni gesture during an election campaign in Amritsar yesterday. The prime minister’s family has literally got divided between the Congress and the opposition with another step-brother, Daljit Singh Kohli, joining the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday.


Agencies/New Delhi

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said yesterday he felt “very sad” at the decision of his half-brother Daljit Singh Kohli to join the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party.
“I feel very sad. But I have no control over what others do. They are adults,” Singh said here.
The prime minister’s family members on Friday expressed shock at Kohli’s “extremely wrong” and “shameful” decision to join the main opposition party.
His nephew Mandeep Singh told reporters in Amritsar on Friday: “The whole family is shocked to learn of Daljit ji’s decision. We have been associated with the Congress from the very beginning and will remain faithful to them always. What he has done is extremely wrong. This is shameful and should not have been done.”
Kohli joined the BJP on Friday during a rally held by the ruling Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)-BJP alliance in Amritsar in the presence of its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi.
But another step-brother of the prime minister yesterday took party in a Congress road show in Amrtisar taken out by former chief minister Amarinder Singh.
Surjit Singh Kohli, an entrepreneur, joined the road show with Amarinder, the party’s candidate for the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat who is standing against senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley.
The latest embarrassment for Singh comes on the heels of the release of a tell-all book by a former adviser describing him as a powerless dummy prime minister.
Sanjaya Baru’s book The Accidental Prime Minister, published earlier this month, portrays Singh as a stooge to ruling Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi who called the shots although she holds no official government position.
Daljit’s entry into the BJP was played up by the party, especially by Jaitley.
But the Congress said it did not go to town when former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s niece quit the BJP and joined its fold.
“I don’t think this is something you need to hawk politically. But since the BJP is trying to hawk it politically, let me say that we didn’t go to town when Vajpayee’s niece joined us,” Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi said in Kolkata.
“...Vajpayee’s niece was much more in active politics, and was a sitting legislator,” he added.
Singhvi was referring to Karuna Shukla who crossed over to the Congress two months back.
Shukla ended her 32-year association with the BJP last year and joined the Congress in February slamming Modi and alleging that a “special group” now occupied the BJP with the end of the Vajpayee era.
In a barb at the functioning of the prime minister’s office (PMO) when Vajpayee was the prime minister (1998-2004), Singhvi said Singh had always kept relatives at a “bargepole distance.”
“As far as we know, the prime minister of this country has been exemplary - and let me be very clear, totally unlike the previous PMO, that is the PMO of 1999-2004 - in keeping every relative at a bargepole distance,” he said.
In Hyderabad meanwhile, the prime minister said the statements of some BJP leaders show that dividing society is an inseparable part of the opposition party’s politics.
Addressing an election rally of the Congress at Bhongir town of Nalgonda district, about 50km from Hyderabad, Singh said the some BJP leaders through their statements openly tried to create a divide in the society.
“Though BJP later tried to distance away from these statements, I believe the attempt to divide the society is an inseparable part of BJP’s politics. The statements have come at a time when some states are going to the polls where the BJP thinks politics of division will benefit them,” the prime minister said at his first election meeting in Telangana.
He urged people to decide whether a party which divides the society should form the government and whether they will vote for a party which makes one community fight against the other.
Without naming Modi, Singh said the BJP’s election campaign centred around one man. “They are only talking big which has no basis and they are making promises which they can never fulfil,” the prime minister said.