Chandigarh: Newspaper deliveries were delayed at some places in Punjab on Sunday morning after police conducted vehicle checks, particularly commercial transports, during the intervening night of Saturday-Sunday.
Even though Punjab Police clarified that it undertook checking of vehicles carrying various items following specific intelligence inputs, Opposition parties hit out at the AAP government.
“Raids on newspaper delivery vans across Punjab are a chilling attack on press freedom,” Leader of Opposition and Congress veteran Partap Singh Bajwa alleged in a post on X.
Punjab BJP working president Ashwani Sharma termed it “undeclared Emergency by Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann in Punjab”, claiming that panicked by the Sheesh Mahal 2.0 news, the AAP government attacked the media.
Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) president Sukhbir Singh Badal claimed the government targeted vehicles carrying newspapers “because they do not want anyone writing against them”.
“People of Punjab are not going to tolerate this… We stand with the freedom of the press,” Badal said.
A Punjab Police statement quoting a police spokesperson said the vehicle checks were conducted under the supervision of gazetted officers at selected points in a streamlined and orderly manner without causing any inconvenience to the public.
The spokesperson said that Punjab, a sensitive border state, has been “facing the brunt of the designs of Pakistan’s ISI to bleed India by waging a proxy war” through smuggling of contraband, arms and explosives from across the international border using rogue drones and further transporting them using various types of vehicles.