NEW DELHI: Punjab chief minister Bhagwant Mann on Friday courted controversy after the opposition accused him of arriving “drunk” at the legislative assembly.Leader of opposition in the Punjab Assembly, Partap Singh Bajwa, demanded an immediate alco-meter and dope test of the chief minister and all MLAs during the ongoing session of the assembly.BJP MP Swati Maliwal, who recently left the Aam Aadmi Party, also shared a clip of Mann addressing the assembly and said that he should undergo an “alcohol test” and, if found guilty, be removed from the post of chief minister.“Today again, Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann arrived at the ‘temple of democracy,’ the Punjab Assembly, allegedly under the influence of alcohol. This man goes to gurdwaras drunk, goes to temples drunk, used to come to the Lok Sabha drunk, attends government meetings drunk, and even drank so much abroad that he was deboarded from a plane,” Maliwal said.“Before the elections, he had placed his hand on his mother’s head and promised that he would never drink again. The CM of a sensitive border state like Punjab is allegedly intoxicated all the time… signing files while drunk. What a shame,” she added.This comes days after Swati Maliwal, along with Raghav Chadha and five other Rajya Sabha members from the Aam Aadmi Party, quit and decided to merge their faction with the Bharatiya Janata Party.Elected an RS MP in January 2024, Maliwal’s fallout with the party began just a few months later, in May, when she alleged that she was physically assaulted by a close aide of AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal at the latter’s house—a claim she has repeated after her exit.This is not the first time Mann has courted controversy. In 2022, the opposition targeted the Punjab chief minister and alleged that he was deplaned from a Delhi-bound flight at Frankfurt airport as he was “drunk,” a charge denied by the ruling AAP as baseless.
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