Chandigarh, Jul 9 (PTI) BJP leader Tarun Chugh on Wednesday lashed out at the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Punjab over its land pooling scheme and said it will oppose tooth and nail the policy of "grabbing farmers' land to hand it over to real estate mafia".

Interacting with a delegation of farmers in Amritsar, BJP national general secretary Chugh said the Narendra Modi government is committed to protecting the interest of farmers and the party will not allow the AAP government to "run the rights of farmers down".

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Strongly condemning the land pooling policy to "favour" real estate dealers, Chugh said Punjab farmers' land is a food bowl for the nation and it is criminal to deprive them of their land for favouring developers allegedly supported by AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal.

He alleged that the land pooling scheme proposes to acquire around 75,000 acres of fertile agricultural land across Punjab under the guise of creating new urban centres and industrial regions.

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In Amritsar alone, 4,464 acres are proposed to be pooled, a move that has triggered unrest and anxiety among local farmers, he claimed.

Questioning the necessity and justification of the scheme, he said Punjab's "annadatas" were neither consulted nor considered during its formulation. "When farmers, the very backbone of Punjab, are not part of the conversation, it becomes clear that the scheme's intentions are either deliberately hidden or meant to favour land mafias and Kejriwal's close associates," he alleged in a statement.

Chugh described the scheme as a "draconian, unconstitutional land-grabbing Ponzi scheme orchestrated by the puppet Mann government".

"This has nothing to do with development. It's a plan to loot the land of innocent farmers and hand it over to land mafias and Kejriwal's cronies," Chugh alleged.

He said the BJP would challenge the scheme in a court, take it to every village in Punjab and launch statewide protests to stop this. "This is not land pooling, it's 'loot pooling'. We will not let this tyrannical government take even an inch of our farmers' land.

"If needed, we'll go on a fast unto death. But we will not let three crore Punjabis be betrayed," he said.

On July 4, a delegation of the Punjab BJP met Governor Gulab Chand Kataria here demanding cancellation of the land pooling policy.

The Punjab cabinet last month gave its nod to the land pooling policy and asserted that not even a single yard will be forcibly acquired from land owners.

Under the land pooling policy, a land owner will be given a 1,000 square yards of residential plot and a 200 square yards of commercial plot in fully developed land in lieu of one acre of land, the state government had said earlier.

It had also said the land pooling policy was designed to foster transparent and planned urban development across the state.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)