Chandigarh, March 17 (IANS) The newly constituted legislative assembly, whose three-day session began here on Thursday, was different as most of the security guards did not recognise a few new faces who arrived for the session.
The first of the session commenced with Pro-tem Speaker Inderbir Singh Nijjar administering the oath of office and secrecy to Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann as Member of the Vidhan Sabha.
Breaking the convention, all women members were administered oath after the Chief Minister.
Thereafter, all other members were sworn in by the Speaker as members of the newly constituted Assembly district-wise in an alphabetical order.
The Chief Minister announced an anti-corruption helpline.
A day after resigning from the post of Punjab Congress chief, Navjot Singh Sidhu, who faced defeat from his stronghold Amritsar (East), supported Mann's crusade against corruption.
"The happiest man is the one from whom no one expects. Bhagwant Mann unfurls a new anti-mafia era in Punjab with a mountain of expectations, hope he rises to the occasion, brings back Punjab on the revival path with pro-people policies, best always," Sidhu said in a tweet.
Rising from the ashes like the phoenix, the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) last week, in a maiden emphatic win, crushed the traditional players that ruled the border state of Punjab for over seven decades with its stunning victory largely by its greenhorns on 92 of the 117 seats of the legislative assembly.
The previous ruling Congress, which won 77 seats in 2017, managed to win only 18 seats with most of its stalwarts like Chief Minister Charanjit Channi and state party chief Sidhu facing humiliating defeat from their respective strongholds.
Amarinder Singh said MP Pratap Bajwa had already demanded a district status for Batala, in his letter dated August 11 and had cited Batala's historic importance and its connection with Guru Nanak Dev, who had married Mata Sulakhni in Batala in 1487.
A source in the security set up said that Srinagar alone recorded 16 terror-related incidents, 21 per cent of the total of 75 incidents reported from across the Valley till so far this year, leaving behind the traditional hotbed of terrorism of Pulwama, Anantnag and Shopian.
Congress chief spokesperson, Randeep Surjewala said in a statement, "The Khattar government has lost the confidence and the mandate of the people and it should leave. When your party can talk to the Taliban, why not farmers."
Researchers from National Centre for Disease Control, Delhi, under the Ministry of Health; CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, and University of Cambridge in the UK examined how the Delta variant was able to evade the immune response.
Senior Superintendent of Police Swapan Sharma told the media that Babbi was in touch with the members of the Ajaib Khan gang lodged in a Sangrur jail with whom he had hatched a conspiracy to eliminate rival gangsters Mani Sheron and Feteh Nagri.
Prabhjot Singh Katri was found murdered early on Sunday morning near his residence in the city of Truro in Nova Scotia. The victim came to Canada from India in 2017 for higher studies. After finishing his studies, he was on a work visa and was driving a cab to earn his livelihood.
